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Terry Pratchett predicted rise of fake news in 1995, says biographer

Marc Burrows discovered Bill Gates interview in which the writer warned of ‘parity of esteem’ given to stories published on the net

In 1995, the internet was a world of dial-up connections and Usenet newsgroups, but according to his biographer, Terry Pratchett had already “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news”.

Marc Burrows was digging through old cuttings about the late Discworld author for his forthcoming biography when he came across an interview Pratchett had done with Microsoft founder Bill Gates in July 1995, for GQ. “Let’s say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the second world war and the Holocaust didn’t happen,” said Pratchett, almost 25 years ago. “And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research which has undergone peer review and so on. There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net. It’s all there: there’s no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.”

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from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2IdGkFc
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