Tim Cook Describes Fake News as 'One of Today's Chief Problems'

[magicschoolbus]

Sounds like Apple is taking checks and influence from Media Matters and David Brock.

Controlling the narrative and correcting the record to force propaganda down everyone's throats.

 

[Admiral]

The chief problem is that people aren't educated enough in critical thinking to be able to discern which news is fake.

Those horrible Republicans really should give more money to the people who have failed to educate in critical thinking skills!

 

[Rogifan]

Sounds like Apple is taking checks and influence from Media Matters and David Brock.

Controlling the narrative and correcting the record to force propaganda down everyone's throats.

As if Fox News, Breitbart and Drudge don't do the same?

 

[magicschoolbus]

As if Fox News, Breitbart and Drudge don't do the same?

They do. But not to the extent of the left.

 

[Soni Sanjay]

They do. But not to the extent of the left.

Don't like it? Don't buy Apple's products, then. As simple as that.

 

[magicschoolbus]

Don't like it? Don't buy Apple's products, then. As simple as that.

Haven't in years. Probably won't either as you can't upgrade or plug anything in to most of their line up.

 

[dan110]

Is the News app not part of Apple's "services"?

If the populous starts believing all news is "fake", then that would destroy credibility and usefulness of the News app. That is an issue a CEO would/should care about. Especially, since services have become such a big part of the company's bottom line.

So, this one instance where he's talking about the News App, negates all of the other political and social grandstanding he's been doing for the last 2-3 years? Yeah, ...ok. \:-/

 

[Soni Sanjay]

Haven't in years. Probably won't either as you can't upgrade or plug anything in to most of their line up.

Awesome, don't buy Microsoft or Google, as well. You aren't an hypocrite, are you?

 

[Solomani]

South Korean scientists have recently succeeded in resurrecting Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, using well-established cloning techniques by extracting DNA from a sample of hair and crossing it with the DNA of the Tibetan goat-llama.

 

[magicschoolbus]

Awesome, don't buy Microsoft or Google, as well. You aren't an hypocrite, are you?

Well I have to have some sort of computer so I will stick with MS who doesn't shove leftist propaganda down my throat through an app and allows me to open up their products.

Maybe if Apple would stop parading social issues and politics and make a computer I actually wanted to buy I'd consider purchasing their products again.

 

[0098386]

I remember Facebook experimented with a tag that would appear next to fake news. The problem? It was predominantly right wing news sites that were perpetrators. And with, gosh I forgot his name now, but that very right wing Christian chap on the board at Facebook of course it never made it into the hands of people who need it.

Fake news is awful. For example, 3 times that insane GOP woman, Kellyanne Conway, claimed terrorists caused a massacre that never existed.

What's happening is they're creating disinformation. It's hard to tell what's real and what's not. And when the rabble get involved it doesn't matter if it's real or not… they just lash out. It's textbook manipulation and it's ultimately very sad people fall for it.
[doublepost=1486786495][/doublepost]

Dear Tim;
Please focus on running your company to the best of your ability and spend less time on politics and being a social justice warrior.
Thank you.

P.S., if you can find the time could you please update your desktop computers sometime this decade?

When people use the term "social justice warrior" it auto translates to "I just want to be an arse without consequence". That's passed around the internet and I tell you what, it always turns out to be true.

 

[sudo1996]

From a company that spins as much as they do? Can't have been said with a straight face.

Fake news isn't news with spin. It's news with lies. For example, MSNBC tells the truth but not the whole truth, and they add a spin. Alex Jones lies.
[doublepost=1486788727][/doublepost]This election season really brought out what each news source's agenda is. I really don't like having Trump in the White House, but it was sad to see a lot of supposedly neutral sources blatantly attacking him. And I don't know if it's the news sources' fault or Apple's fault, but my feed on Apple News is pretty Democrat-biased.

 

[jdillings]

So does this mean when Apple releases laptops with only one port, we can call them "fake laptops"?

 

[glindon]

Ok I get that fake news is basically an evolution of political propaganda, but is it "one of today's chief problems"? Seriously? What about global conflict, population growth, food security, pollution, habitat destruction and species loss, disease, global warming, inequality between and within nations, the plight of Africa...?

And just what does Apple expect to do? I don't use Apple's News app (deleted it) because I disdain anything that tries to track my activity and preferences. I'm smart enough to get my news from quality sources when I feel so inclined and to read critically even from those. The onus is predominantly on the individual here.

Fake news has developed because of a tendency for certain people to believe what they want to believe regardless of truth, which has always existed (case in point: religion!) and the chief combat for this is education.

Seriously, this is just another fluff piece and useless musing from Tim Cook to try and make him sound socially progressive when really he's just the head of a major global corporation.

Came here to say this. With so much **** going on in the world, fake news is the last thing I'd be worrying about. How about people just educate themselves. Study both sides and form their own opinion and not let tech companies dictate what we should and shouldn't see.

 

[canadianreader]

I completely lost trust i news media outlets especially those who belong to big corporations and the future doesnt seem bright for them

 

[MH01]

I'm not disappointed in you Tim, I'm disappointed in the media that gives you attention. Says everything that is wrong with news and media

 

[MrNomNoms]

The chief problem is that people aren't educated enough in critical thinking to be able to discern which news is fake.

The thing is that the fake news works so well because it feeds into preconceived biases and people making the automatic conclusion that because the news article makes them feel good, that there is this guttural "yeah, this my team! go team" then the net result is believing the news. Personally I'd bring philosophy classes into school - teaching kids not what to think but how to think, how to fine due to their BS detector so when anyone, be they right or left, offer a simplistic solution to complex problem that the siren goes off.

 

[StonewallBrown]

So, this one instance where he's talking about the News App, negates all of the other political and social grandstanding he's been doing for the last 2-3 years? Yeah, ...ok. \:-/

Political grandstanding? He's gay. So he spoke about gay rights. Apple promotes itself as a company that believes in privacy. So he spoke out about net neutrality and against backdoors. Not sure how that's considered political(except for gay rights), seems to me those are business decisions. Same for immigration.

 

[theluggage]

Ok I get that fake news is basically an evolution of political propaganda, but is it "one of today's chief problems"? Seriously? What about global conflict, population growth, food security, pollution, habitat destruction and species loss, disease, global warming, inequality between and within nations, the plight of Africa...?

...but haven't you heard that, for example, the potential extinction of certain species is a lie propagated by Big Pharma as part of their campaign to suppress the real medical evidence for the efficacy of traditional medicines like rhino horn...?

For the avoidance of doubt: the above is total nonsense that I just made up - but its the sort of nonsense that anybody trying to campaign seriously on any sort of important subject will now find themselves wasting time fire-fighting.

How you solve the problem of nonsense being posted on the internet - without throwing the baby of free expression out with the bathwater is difficult. However, I think part of the problem is the way that "respectable" media outlets are treating what happens on social media or obscure choir-preaching blogs as news. If you're a prominent person then making a controversial tweet doesn't just address your followers - it gives you a very good chance of a soundbite in the national and international "mainstream media". Even "Hey, look at the terrible lies being promoted by this fake news site"-type headlines actually drive clicks to the fake news - and for conspiracy theory-type fake news, being denounced by the mainstream is vindication!

So part of the problem is driven by the traditional "respectable" news sites desperately trying to embrace the internet and social media for fear of becoming irrelevant.

 

[SactoGuy18]

There's a reason why Apple better be VERY careful going down this road. Why? Let me explain.

On February 17, 2011, President Obama--with his most trusted adviser Valerie Jarrett in attendance--held a private dinner in San Francisco, as this photo released by the White House press office on February 18, 2011 shows:

In that picture, you see then-CEO's of eight companies: Apple, Cisco Systems, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Oracle Systems, Twitter and Yahoo!. Today, these eight companies represent a huge fraction of the activity on the Internet in the USA.

We don't know what was said at that dinner, but one really wonders was a gentleman's agreement discussed and agreed upon to censor the political Right by tweaking the search and discovery algorithms using a combination of software and maybe some hardware? If such a agreement was made with the effective blessing of President Obama, then the eight companies I mentioned could be legally culpable for violating the First Amendment right of free speech, since the censorship was done with the blessing of the US government. Legal authorities could start asking since February 2011, was the searches (in Apple's case) in the iTunes Store and Siri searches on the iPhone since the release of the iPhone 4S biased in this manner?

 

[LizKat]

I completely lost trust i news media outlets especially those who belong to big corporations and the future doesnt seem bright for them

I used to wonder whether, when cries of "fake news" arose, people meant everything in a newspaper or just political reporting. Then I began to realize that somehow we've managed to politicize almost everything, including stuff like whether variant recipes for chicken soup represent cultural appropriation, so that my original query might seem almost moot.

Still, I sometimes wonder if people who consider mainstream media as a source of "fake news" actually read many of the pieces from media outlets they seem willing to condemn as "fake news" publishers en masse. I was musing just now over what "fake news" objectors would think of the piece cited below. It's hard for me to believe that "fake news" complainants would think ISIS is never involved from abroad on attempts to recruit --and to stage attacks-- in places as far flung as India and the USA.

Not ‘Lone Wolves’ After All: How ISIS Guides World’s Terror Plots From Afar​

But perhaps I've not been paying attention and maybe people who consider mainstream media as just purveyors of disinformation have come around to thinking ISIS is inconsequential. I'd find that fairly astounding.

Or maybe some people are just categorizing media outlets too broadly. In my view, "fake news" is a critique best served up piece by piece.

 

[Snoopy4]

Was going to post the same thing. I removed the news app because of all the lib garbage it spams updates for.

I completely ran down my focus to cycling and the NFL and still couldn't make it stop feeding liberal slanted news about things completely unrelated to sports. Tim is a hypocrite and a fraud.

 

[magicschoolbus]

There's a reason why Apple better be VERY careful going down this road. Why? Let me explain.

On February 17, 2011, President Obama--with his most trusted adviser Valerie Jarrett in attendance--held a private dinner in San Francisco, as this photo released by the White House press office on February 18, 2011 shows:

In that picture, you see then-CEO's of eight companies: Apple, Cisco Systems, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Oracle Systems, Twitter and Yahoo!. Today, these eight companies represent a huge fraction of the activity on the Internet in the USA.

We don't know what was said at that dinner, but one really wonders was a gentleman's agreement discussed and agreed upon to censor the political Right by tweaking the search and discovery algorithms using a combination of software and maybe some hardware? If such a agreement was made with the effective blessing of President Obama, then the eight companies I mentioned could be legally culpable for violating the First Amendment right of free speech, since the censorship was done with the blessing of the US government. Legal authorities could start asking since February 2011, was the searches (in Apple's case) in the iTunes Store and Siri searches on the iPhone since the release of the iPhone 4S biased in this manner?

It's already happening.

I can't write I hope the wall is built on my local news website without it being taken down.

People even fail to see my point of view because it quickly gets deleted.

This censorship has caused the great divide and only allowed voices on both sides to get louder instead of listening to find a solution.

People must listen to each other instead of pushing and controlling a narrative to keep people in power.

 

[LizKat]

I completely ran down my focus to cycling and the NFL and still couldn't make it stop feeding liberal slanted news about things completely unrelated to sports. Tim is a hypocrite and a fraud.

Mr. Cook is the CEO of a corporation. If you don't like his company's news aggregation app --for whatever reason-- then it's easy enough to round up some other way to fetch "news you personally can use".

My point here: Your view of Cook's company's app's views are not necessarily an objective assessment.

Since I dare say so, I'll say this: it's also possible that Cook doesn't have a lot to do with whatever shows up in that app's offerings. Honestly the man likely has better things to do than micromanage content of a news aggregator. For instance I'd like to think he's had a hand in shoving an upgrade of the Mini to a higher place on Apple's to-do list...

For news: what I do in picking my own "window on the world" is subscribe to assorted briefings, with whose authors I may find myself either rarely or often in agreement. I choose those briefings because they in turn highlight assorted events or reportage that they find significant, and provide links so I can read them and decide for myself what I think.

For instance I like Politico's labor briefing, Morning Shift. And, I like the Financial Times' myFT mailing, that briefs me on categories of topics I can tell the FT I like to follow just by reading assorted pieces in the paper itself. And, I take an email from a Massachusetts congressman (I'm not from his state) because he details votes taken in the House.

And, I subscribe to a variety of publications that inform me from the right, left and what I call "irrelevant lean", i.e. a few magazines I take because I just happen to enjoy some of their long reads, like those in The New Yorker, i.e. articles that may or may not be of a political nature. I do confess to liking some of the ones that end up on the political side...

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/copy-editing-trump-the-black-history-month-speech​

lol and sometime even though i haven't a Facebook account, I check in to The New Yorker on FB for a video now and then. Here's a video of the guy actually doing the copy editing that my link above had resulted in.

https://www.facebook.com/newyorker/videos/vb.9258148868/10154454355748869
​

Sorry for the slight drift there but I really did want to point out that if you don't like the Apple news app, you can find stuff much more to your own liking, and have a lot of it funnelled to you through social media picks or email briefing preferences. Personally I try to take news from a variety of sources so I know I'm not choosing to ignore the world at large.

 

[Snoopy4]

Mr. Cook is the CEO of a corporation. If you don't like his company's news aggregation app --for whatever reason-- then it's easy enough to round up some other way to fetch "news you personally can use".

My point here: Your view of Cook's company's app's views are not necessarily an objective assessment.

Since I dare say so, I'll say this: it's also possible that Cook doesn't have a lot to do with whatever shows up in that app's offerings. Honestly the man likely has better things to do than micromanage content of a news aggregator. For instance I'd like to think he's had a hand in shoving an upgrade of the Mini to a higher place on Apple's to-do list...

For news: what I do in picking my own "window on the world" is subscribe to assorted briefings, with whose authors I may find myself either rarely or often in agreement. I choose those briefings because they in turn highlight assorted events or reportage that they find significant, and provide links so I can read them and decide for myself what I think.

For instance I like Politico's labor briefing, Morning Shift. And, I like the Financial Times' myFT mailing, that briefs me on categories of topics I can tell the FT I like to follow just by reading assorted pieces in the paper itself. And, I take an email from a Massachusetts congressman (I'm not from his state) because he details votes taken in the House.

And, I subscribe to a variety of publications that inform me from the right, left and what I call "irrelevant lean", i.e. a few magazines I take because I just happen to enjoy some of their long reads, like those in The New Yorker, i.e. articles that may or may not be of a political nature. I do confess to liking some of the ones that end up on the political side...

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/copy-editing-trump-the-black-history-month-speech​

lol and sometime even though i haven't a Facebook account, I check in to The New Yorker on FB for a video now and then. Here's a video of the guy actually doing the copy editing that my link above had resulted in.

https://www.facebook.com/newyorker/videos/vb.9258148868/10154454355748869
​

Sorry for the slight drift there but I really did want to point out that if you don't like the Apple news app, you can find stuff much more to your own liking, and have a lot of it funnelled to you through social media picks or email briefing preferences. Personally I try to take news from a variety of sources so I know I'm not choosing to ignore the world at large.

You're right. He's the CEO. The buck stops at his feet.

I choose not to be a lemming.