The problem is not "fake news". The problem is people are treating the news like a product in the capitalist paradigm.
If you don't like the way your local bakery makes their bread you go somewhere else. Now if the media reports on something you don't like someone else will tell you what you want to hear.
This issue happens on both sides of the political spectrum BUT it does seem to be a lot worse on the conservative side of things. All the "liberal" news sources like the NYT and The WashPo seem to be doing lots of reporting on Trump supporters, discussing their fears and hopes, concerns and motivations. Even more conservative sources like the WSJ, not including their editorial page, are trying to take a bigger view of the world.
On the other hand my Apple News feed seems to perpetually have a FOX News story. The one this morning was "Is Trump Bashing the new Celeb nude selfie?"
All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories also believe global warming is a hoax and Obama was not born in this country. A significant portion of the electorate has been drinking from the well and cannot be reached.
> The problem is not "fake news". The problem is people are treating the news like a product in the capitalist paradigm.
I would say a huge part of the problem is that news is no longer news. It's all commentary. News organizations are not only incentivized to to sensationalize stories to make money but they are also ran by people who have extreme political views and want to essentially mind control the population. They don't want to report the facts of a story. They want to make you accept their interpretation of the facts.
A great example is how different news organizations cover the recent executive order on immigration. Depending on where you get your news you were told there was a Muslim ban, a ban from 7 Muslim majority countries, only accepting Christian refugees from the Middle East, 7 countries that harbor terrorists were banned, etc.
Wherever you fall on that issue there is a news org trying to force you into a certain viewpoint one way or the other.
> They want to make you accept their interpretation of the facts.
Please, describe to me how someone can convey pure unadulterated facts in language, without imposing an "interpretation" on them.
It's an absurd fantasy. There's no possibility for a disembodied, perfectly objective voice conveying facts. So yes, in a sense, every news org favors a certain interpretation of the facts. But these subtle variations used to be accepted as par for the course.
The root cause of the widespread distrust of media is the turn on the right towards a form of Orwellian doublespeak in their media outlets, beginning in the 90s and ramping up heavily in the Bush years. You see it's most virulent expression in the way Trump speaks: he accuses the interim AG of "betrayal" for acting on her conscious. Or the way he talks about returning government "to the people" while staffing his cabinet with billionaires. It badly subverts the ability of people on the left and the right to meaningfully speak to one another, because our words no longer signify the same thing.
I'm personally opposed to almost everything Trump is trying to do, but don't act like it's only a problem on the right. Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago that the left wing newspapers were reporting wild unsubstantiated rumors of a full-on Moscow piss orgy?
> Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago that the left wing newspapers were reporting wild unsubstantiated rumors of a full-on Moscow piss orgy?
Well, that's actually a pretty interesting example to look at. For one, the dossier concerned contained a lot of accusations to do with members of Trump's team travelling to Eastern Europe to meet with Russian contacts, suspect financial transactions and the like - you yourself are doing it a disservice by describing it only as rumours of a "piss orgy".
But irrespective of that, the dossier had been known about for months. But the media organisations didn't report on it, specifically because they couldn't verify the information contained within it. But then Buzzfeed decided to publish it anyway, and at that point any responsible news organisation is left in a pretty impossible position - either don't report on the thing everyone is talking about, or report unsubstantiated accusations.
If any story includes a presidential piss-orgy everything else is filler. The journalists who ran that story did a lot of damage by running it the way they did.
I think it is at least more complicated than you are painting it. If it's something that is widely known in media circles as well as political ones (at least one Democratic senator alluded to it on one of the many occasions Hillary's e-mails were brought up), the media holding it back from the public isn't really a fantastic look either.
Sometimes it feels like the media is damned if it does, and damned if it doesn't. Report unsubstantiated rumour? You're biased! Hold back information because it isn't verified? You're biased!
If you apply the same standard you have displayed here to fake news on the other side of the political spectrum, then almost none of it would be fake news either.
That's not true. The dossier exists. It was prepared by a respected former intelligence officer. It was ordered by Jeb Bush's campaign. None of these facts are in disrepute. And the vast majority of news reports accurately stated that the contents of the dossier cannot be verified. It's miles more credible than the stories found on fake news sites.
> It's miles more credible than the stories found on fake news sites.
1000 * 0 is still 0.
If the Trump campaign had ordered a dossier of dirt on Hillary Clinton, and paid a respected former intelligence officer to provide it, would the claims made in it be credible?
Let's take one of the big 'fake news' items from the recent election, the one regarding Hillary's health. What do you make of this article by a former secret service agent on Hillary Clinton's health:
The definition of fake news is getting stretched to include controversial news.
"Fake news" is fiction being sold as news on websites that look credible.
Flat out making stuff up, and polluting the media stream with it in order to manipulate people.
This is the easy case to solve. As people actually try to grapple with this, "fake news" will evolve, it will add parts of the truth to it dodge this 0th level definition.
A dossier actually compiled but unverified is still not fake news - it's a shady bad practice circa 1990. Unfortunately we're dealing with much worse problems today.
Ok, so if I compile a dossier of unverified stories regarding Hillary, and package them up then it suddenly makes otherwise fake claims not fake news?
I mean that's the whole sub-prime mortgage problem all over again. Take a shitty product and wrap it in layers of respectability until people don't know any better.
When there is also evidence to suggest much of the contents of the dossier came from a 4-chan prank, it's hard to see where the difference is.
I think you need to clarify 2 concepts/definitions, agnostic of real world events.
1) fake news: a recent phenomenon where fraudulent/fictional/completely made up literature is peddled as legitimate news. This is then distributed on steroids via social media. It uses unsuspecting people to transmit this.
Bias in news. This is an older problem and involves how news is presented and what spin is put. In the worst case it is deliberate in order to support an agenda.
For the second one, he was not mocking the reporter's disability. He was mocking the reporter for pulling a story and the impersonation he did is Trump's standard impersonation for a flustered, bumbling person. There is multiple video of him doing the exact same action to able bodied people - from Ted Cruz to military generals, and all sorts of others.
Not only that, but the reporter's disability is nothing like the action Trump did. The reporter actually has frozen/locked up joints e.g. almost the exact opposite of what Trump did.
So, either Trump knew of the reporter's disability and wasn't mocking it (completely different actions), or he didn't know of the reporter's disability (and therefore couldn't have been mocking it).
In either situation, Trump wasn't mocking the reporter's disability.
Unfortunately a freeze frame from the video of Trump's movement matches a still photo of the journalist, hence the belief that he was mocking the reporter's disability.
And this is why people say the media has a well known Trump bias.
I wouldn't describe this as fake news at all, but I'd say that one person's view on a video they have watched isn't comparable to that dossier, which was (apparently) compiled from numerous in-person visits and interviews. Not to mention, reporting on the dossier always clarified that it was not verified, while this opinion piece is making broader conclusions.
I agree with you broadly, though. To me, fake news has absolutely no mooring in reality whatsoever and is pure clickbait - usually without political motive beyond getting angry people to click.
> Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago that the left wing newspapers were reporting wild unsubstantiated rumors of a full-on Moscow piss orgy?
You mean the ones contained in a dossier which accurately predicted several Trump related events that were not publicly known to be in planning at the time it was written, but were verifiable to have occurred as predicted before it was published?
Seems to me that it was plenty newsworthy.
BTW, it also reported that part of the carrot side of the carrot-and-stick blackmail and bribery by Russia was that Trump was promised a bribe of a share of Rosneft coincidentally the same size that was just sold off, on credit, to buyers concealed by various cutouts.
If I was Putin and I was trying to interfere in US politics, then after seeing that dossier I would have done this anyway just to mess with people, setting up a bunch of shell companies and essentially selling a 19% share of the company to itself.
Gonna need more hard evidence before being concerned about this.
This fails ~~occasion~~ occam's razor. By that logic, Putin could also dress up as an orange ballerina while announcing a 15% sale of the company, just to screw with people.
Occam's razor, but I'm guessing that was autocorrect.
Anyway, no, because there is no incentive for him to do what you are suggesting.
If however you believe his goal is to destabilise U.S. politics, then there is large incentive and zero downside for him to fake a sale of 19% of the company.
I saw that story as being similar to the "Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer" meme going around. It was less that people thought it was true and more that it was funny.
Many, and I mean MANY, of the people relaying/pushing the story did it with the caveat 1) it's completely unsubstantiated and 2) this is EXACTLY what the right did to the Clintons for 2 decades.
When did the people pushing the N Clinton conspiracies every say "this may or not be true..."???
I'm not arguing to remove all interpretation from the facts. That's impossible with our language. But what we are experiencing from the news every single day is a far cry from objective journalism. We are almost only getting the interpretation without many facts (or facts that are taken out of context or edited to fit a narrative).
Yes you can convey information much more objective than today. For example, on the more recent migration ban story:
"The White House has announced today at 7h30, through speaker ..., a piece of legislation that, quote: ~first paragraph summary of the legislation~.
You can read the full text here.
On the opinion of Bla bla, this legislation is innefective etc etc.
Disclaimer: Bla bla is not related to any of the mentioned organizations, though he declares he tends to agree with the opinion of former president Obama on most issues. You can read more about this commenter here."
Leading with a verbatim reproduction of the text describing the purpose of a bill (almost invariably a statement carefully crafted to make a political point) and adding a disclaimer to any points made in opposition is anything but an objective approach to news reporting.
I'm not arguing for or against the executive order. It's just a very recent and big example of news organizations shaping how the population thinks. Every news organization is spinning this to fit their narrative.
There is no spin as far as I can tell. I read New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate and Salon. They are simply reporting the facts, along with how the EO is affecting travelers.
> A significant portion of the electorate has been drinking from the well and cannot be reached.
How is that any different than people in the Bible Belt who believe the earth was made in 7 days ? Or elderly people who become vulnerable and fall prey to exploitation (because they believe phone scams, or sob stories from strangers, etc) ? (Edit: or young people who think they're going to grow up and be an astronaut or NBA star). There will always be a sizable proportion of the population who believes wacky stories.
I know you weren't implying this, but NYT and WaPo's hands aren't clean either. I really didn't appreciate how they pushed the "Russia HACKED the election" narrative. That's predatory on the same level: take advantage of the nebulous word "hacking" and misapply it to something that doesn't even rely on computers, do some hand-waiving, and voila, there's some "fake news" to dish up to the masses [which is ironic when your other stories are about the spread of "fake news"].
The point is that "election hacking" is an intentionally misleading phrase. A Pew poll found that, after this media circus, half of Hillary voters believed that Russia had tampered with vote tallies.
The NYT and WaPo (among others) are incredibly biased, and much of the problem is that their support base is too sheltered to understand how. I've said more on this in previous comments.
I found the Pew poll regarding Russian involvement in the email hack but not one involving direct hacking of tallies. Do you have a link?
I followed the election from a variety of sources (WaPo and NYT included) and never got that impression. But I agree that it was a circus from all angles.
It looks like it was from The Economist and YouGov - I falsely remembered it being Pew. Here's a WaPo article with a summary and a link to the raw data:
Misleading mainstream media, IMO. I'm conservative and the headlines about "election hacking" actually duped me until I had the time to read a thorough article about it.
I totally agree with you there. Most online news articles use those annoying click-bait titles and try to make the story seem bigger than it is (in a misleading way). Even weather.com does that crap with weather stories.
> I see no difference there but I'm not sure that I get the point.
my point is that there have always legions of people who believe ridiculous things. They've been around for every single previous election. So we shouldn't be surprised when the scientific community says "civilization has changed the climate" but people still don't believe it (even when the claim is supported by evidence).
I agree with the parent but I began reading the New York Times every morning at the age of 12, wondering to myself "why is there so much speculation going on around Iraq and WMDs? We haven't found anything so why does everybody want to invade?"
I still like the Times to an extent, but they like many other papers get it wrong from time to time. Doesn't mean I should leave and never look back, but instead I have taken to critically thinking about every story I read from every source to come to a conclusion about an issue.
I don't think fake news or poor journalism is a problem. The problem is people and their lack of critical thinking, often substituted for blind acceptance of a narrative that fits their preferred reality.
The difference is that when NYTimes gets something wrong, it is not out of sheer malice and desire to mislead people. It's because their sources were wrong and the journalists didn't do a good enough job verifying the information.
Fake news on the other hand are literally made up lies. The overwhelming majority of fake news articles have no basis in reality, period. They tend to be written by people who want nothing other than to get page views.
You're getting downvoted for this and I don't think you should be. The recent flood of fake news is very different to honest reporting that fails, and even very different to opinion-led reporting that presents a side. It is deliberately factually incorrect news, created and promoted simply to get clicks and profit from advertising. There is absolutely no journalistic merit to it.
I didn't downvote, but one can agree that the two approaches are very different, without accepting the presumption of the intentions behind the NYT approach. Are they more honest, or do they just happen to serve a different audience?
After all, telling outright lies is just amateurish; the NYT has been shaping society's perspective on facts for over a century.
> The difference is that when NYTimes gets something wrong, it is not out of sheer malice and desire to mislead people
That's right, because when Wikileaks revealed high levels of collusion between media outlets and the DNC/Clinton campaign, placing and pulling articles/stories to present a specific narrative, it wasn't out of desire to mislead, rather it was only a desire to 'correct the record'. /s
Which is still business as usual and has solutions elsewhere.
America and the world have a situation where advertisers need to prey on the Id and emotions of users in order to sell widgets. The advent of the internet crushed the ability of media firms to stay afloat and replaced the ecosystem with many upstarts who also faced the same pressure.
In short there's an overheating attention grabbing system when it comes to the media, which is its own issue that needs to be solved.
Unfortunately there's a new hitherto unbelievable problem, where people fabricate complete and utter lies/fiction and can sail it down the streams of social media.
This is different from the older issue in that these are not major news agencies, but websites masquerading/camouflaging themselves as a news outlet and fabricating stories designed to directly press emotional buttons without having to deal with facts.
If you really want to know how it works, please take a look at a recent a paper co-authored by Alessandro Bessi. It came out a week ago. It should be accessible for most people on HN.
I don't know if I'd class that as a capitalism-paradigm problem. If the press is free, choices exist and you can find news that tells you what you want to hear.
I think if we compare today's new to a decade ago's, the change is not more capitalism (ie, for-profit, corporate, quarterly-report focused...). The change is more choice, more information, more volume and the chaotic, many-to-many distribution systems of the social internet.
The clickbait imperative has got a quasi-capitalist single mindedness to it, but I think we'll be chasing down the wrong culprit by characterising the problem as a capitalist one.
In fact, I think it's best if we try not to jump to conclusions at all. We're hitting some problems with the way our democracies work and I haven't really heard a narrative yet that feels satisfying. Lets not jump to conclusions. We need to be right about it.
> Lets not jump to conclusions. We need to be right about it.
Is a great justification for doing nothing, ever.
It feels like we are entering a very much unprecedented era in America, where the President freezes out news organisations that do not report on him favorably, and is actively attacking the media with the aim of establishing the official government narrative as the only one voters should listen to.
This is extremely dangerous. I'm not saying that we should rush to judgement, but we shouldn't just sit back and wait to see how it all unfolds either. This is an issue to be investigated and worked on, urgently.
Forgive me if I exercise a brand new buzzword but this project might better be classified as an exercise in "computational journalism" ?
A fake news detector isn't going to do anything by itself to solve the problem. Fake news consumers are going to guzzle the junk regardless of warning tags, scores, or nutritional labeling.
In the hands of a skilled journalist/activist/thought-leader whose abilities are "augmented" by this tool, however, it could really be a powerful antidote.
> On the other hand my Apple News feed seems to perpetually have a FOX News story. The one this morning was "Is Trump Bashing the new Celeb nude selfie?"
> All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories
It goes both ways I think. Consider the possibility that there are more people that believe that other 'stupid' people believe these stories than there are 'stupid' people who actually believe these stories.
Interesting that his propaganda model [1] actually breaks a bit with the age of internet. Social media, news aggregators, small independent bloggers and small independent news outlets don't have the described biases. Algorithmic filters are somehow unbiased. Independent person/outlet can question the government, capitalism, doesn't have to trust government's spokesmen, doesn't have to publish them, doesn't even have to make money. In a way all those "news bubbles" and "fake news" are actually anti-bubbles and make "democracy" more "democratic".
No it doesn't work that way. It's a nice theory, but I've been a mod on a national sub for a while, and I've been on forums since around/before slashdot.
You can very easily overwhelm the signal with noise. The plethora of independents means nothing if only a few of them get heard.
Matter of fact, with some pushing, you can have one "independent" dominate a large portion of the channel. At some juncture the network effect takes over and the process becomes self sustaining, you just need to play on people's/your target markets biases well.
This is a people problem, and people are getting way too good and understanding and manipulating the biases of other people.
> All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories also believe global warming is a hoax and Obama was not born in this country
Really, because not more than a few weeks ago I remember a whole bunch of people believing the "we can't verify, but we're going to press anyway" stories about Trump and golden showers in Russia, not to mention a whole bunch of other similar fake news regarding Trump and Trump supporters.
I think you (and many others) are selectively applying a bias to what is and isn't fake news and the type of people who believe it based on your own political preferences.
There's a marked difference between those statements
1) media agencies on all sides had the dossier and didn't publish it since t was unverifiable
2) when buzfeed or whomever linked the dossier, it forced other firms to do so as well or lose out on a critical story.
3) the adaptation to deal with this is to not report the dossier as fact, but as claims. And of course, it spiraled downhill from there,
In this scenario it's important to note that media firms avoided reporting on this issue because it was crap.
For global warming, ah man where do we start.
Firstly, it's unfair to lambast people for believing it's a hoax.
Since the 80s and before, a long, intelligent and concerted effort to spread FUD has been active in America. It is today successful enough to spread around the world.
If people were old enough, they would remember that initially scientists would not give the time of day to global warming conspiracist/deniers.
It was correctly believed that doing so actually gave cranks and loons the patina of credibility, when they should be allowed to die out.
Unfortunately, these cranks and loons were cultivated and nurtured, and given airtime. In particular there is one news network that I recall had a more active role in this and it was not CNN.
Eventually scientists were forced to engage, and by engaging they lost.
Scientists, (and people on HN) are constantly making the error that this is about facts.
It's about entertainment and playing with human emotions.
Scientists walked in expecting a debate, when it was about showmanship, with one side reporting things unevenly.
As a result there are people today who will be anti global warming because they are being manipulated.
Global warming wasn't part of my argument. That was just me quoting the parent who appears to believe only one side of the political spectrum is susceptible to fake news.
Personally I trust the science, and think that even if you don't there are enough other compelling reasons to move on to renewable energy sources that we'd be stupid not to anyway.
There was plenty of science going against 'smoking causes cancer'. Fake news has been around for quite some time, just not in its current more virulent form.
That doesn't really work very well. News as a product means you give the customers what they ask for, not what they need. If they ask for lies, it's not fraud.
However, news as a public service has standards of liability to the public in general, not just to your own customers. It is an obligation to society, not to the buyer.
Most consumers don't sign an agreement to receive fake news that fits their beliefs when they purchase cable -- if that was the case, then it would be fine (it can also be fraud to have something hidden in the fine print, although it usually requires a class action).
Classification is still very needed. I'm interested to see what comes out of this. Especially with regard to eliminating biases of a classification system.
Capitalism isn't going anywhere obviously and shouldn't. On the other end is state-run media, e.g. North Korea. We wouldn't want things to swing in that direction or even toward RT or many other examples.
I think we should be looking to replicate whatever magic is and has been in PBS, early BBC, ITN, and other earlier UK and French programming.
If you don't pay for the news, who does the news agency have a responsibility to? Certainly not you.
You can see this right now. The mainstream media falsifies or omits the truth on behalf of their backers or the organizations they fear: major political parties, subsidiaries of their parent companies, major investors, etc. I would argue that they do this because the public is not their customer, it's their target demographic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r_6hBIX71Y&t=111s
I saw an interesting talk the other day (talks at google); Often there is a problem with misrepresentation of facts; (i think the general standard of journalism is quite low); amazing how a subtle editorial slant can twist things... Will Moy is speaking for an organization that does some fact checking and is giving some examples in the talk.
I think people start to notice these old editorial tricks more these days so that there is an impression that all news are fake - at least to some extent.
Apple News does try to increase visibility of sources/topic you read a lot. If you swipe the story tile to the left, you can see more actions for that source.
Now if the media reports on something you don't like someone else will tell you what you want to hear.
I don't see the problem. I don't want to hear lies, therefore I create a demand for true news. I don't need a nanny facebook/google/state telling me what news I like, and neither does the rest of the population.
You'll notice so many posts here that deny the existence of fake news, or attempt to redefine it as "bias."
Frankly, I find it disturbing that so many well educated people aren't able to objectively think about an actually objective problem.
The fake news that started the concept of "fake news" is not a subjective problem. The problem is literal invention of facts not even related to reality, combined with the mass distribution of those invented facts. It is a problem of mass deception.
The classic example: Millions of people shared a post saying the Pope endorsed Donald Trump.
This is objectively false. It's not about liberal vs. conservative. It's not about whether it fits your worldview or not. It simply isn't true.
During the election there were so many literally false stories that got a very large amount of attention.
That is the problem. And yet, so many people seem to think it is a political issue.
It's a sad world we live in where even objective facts no longer matter.
I think that is why so many people are terrified of the direction things are headed.
> You'll notice so many posts here that deny the existence of fake news, or attempt to redefine it as "bias."
That's a hyperbole -- most of the dissidents here do not deny that completely fake stories occur, but express valid concerns about what kind of things will be labeled as facts or not. Based on what we've already seen (the WaPo list, for example), there are publications they would like to censor with very good track records, including the "Ron Paul Liberty Report." Production budget aside, that's often the first source that reports on interesting new bills submitted to the House, such as the recent pre-authorization for invasion of Iran bill. This is not a fake fact -- you can see it on the House website. And there aren't supporting examples of fakeness provided by WaPo for their list, even though I could find numerous factual errors by WaPo or NYT, like the power grid hacking or Aleppo (usually fixed within a few days, but still).
And of course, there's the fact that powerful propaganda does not need to stem from provably false facts -- it uses selection/omission of stories and crafting heavily-opinionated narratives to 'mislead.' That is just as concerning as fake facts, and a poor attempt to stem the latter would most likely end up stifling unpopular opinions and further empower the propaganda you see on major sources like WaPo/FoxNews.
I think the issue is a lot of the complaints about fake news are not of the objectively false stuff, but of the kind where you report what some crackpot analyst says. It's objectively true that "PERSON X THINKS THIS" but it used to be journalists wouldn't print that because it was nonsense. For an example of this consider the Trump intelligence report or the Pizzagate analysis. In the internet age a lot of these analysts are getting a voice and people with agendas are listening/promoting those voices.
It is true that when the average crackpot thinks something, it is not newsworthy. However, when the POTUS thinks (and especially when he tweets) something crazy/abnormal, it is newsworthy. If the leader of the US believes something crazy, the citizens should hear about it. Unfortunately, Trump doesn't like to be made fun of by the media so he just lies and says it's fake news when someone reports on his abnormal tweets and comments.
A non-trump example. Millions of people shared a post saying that the police were using facebook check-ins to "track" protesters at Standing Rock, and encouraging people to check in at that location in order to "help". Of course, this makes no sense at all when you think about it and was indeed totally made up.
Millions of people have branded Trump as a "homophobe", where in reality he's the most pro-gay president of all time at the start of his term. Not just republican, any US president, period. Obama was against gay marriage before he was (reluctantly) for it. Trump sees no problem with it.
Same with xenophobia: a xenophobe doesn't marry an immigrant.
Same with misogyny: a misogynist does not appoint a woman to run his campaign.
Same with antisemitism: his daughter converted to Judaism to marry a Jew, who also had a hand in running his campaign.
Same with racism: he wasn't in any way called "racist" by anybody until he ran for president, and there are numerous photos of him with prominent members of the black community dating back decades.
Much of the slander we've seen about the guy is totally fake. It seems HRC had very little of substance other than the pussy grab tape (note that there's no evidence it was anything other than talk), so they just made shit up and told CNN to air it 24x7. And CNN gladly obliged.
When the same people that manufactured and spread fake news start lecturing us about the harm of fake news, I just facepalm.
> When the same people that manufactured and spread fake news start lecturing us about the harm of fake news, I just facepalm.
This is exactly what I'm talking about.
The reason we're talking about fake news is NOT because of the traditional mainstream media. It's not because of left wing websites such as Alternet or extreme websites such as Breitbart.
The reason we're talking about fake news –– and the real problem that absolutely has to be addressed –– has nothing to do with those websites, or with nearly any media organization that has an easily identifiable group of people running it.
Sure, those websites might post factually incorrect information on occasion. But that's not why we're talking about fake news.
We're talking about fake news because there were –– and are –– websites that repeatedly posted blatantly false "news", during the election, and got massive distribution on social media networks such as Facebook.
That is a problem that has nothing to do with your opinion of Donald Trump. It is not clear why you brought him up, except to distract from the issue.
Breitbart is less insidious imo. If you go there, chances are pretty good you know it's mostly horseshit. When it comes to e.g. CNN, way too many people take it at face value.
I'm just pointing out that the "legitimate" news sources aren't that much better than Breitbart these days, except a lot of people treat them as though they are.
Just because you didn't hear people call him racist for years doesn't mean it didn't happen.
I am willing to be that people called him racist when the Justice Department filed a housing discrimination lawsuit against his company in 1973. Or when his company settled that suit but in 1978 the government filed another complaint claiming his company didn't meet the terms of the settlement. https://www.salon.com/2011/04/28/donald_trump_discrimination...
This comment also shows another problem that is harder to solve than "fake news," which is the interpretation of facts. What you call just talking, I call bragging about sexual assault and even if it didn't happen is something that I would call someone a misogynist for bragging about in the first place. Other people don't.
Say the company your work for or have shares in discriminates on the basis of race. Does this make _you_ a racist? Is there any evidence that he was in fact the decision maker when it comes to these policies? FWIW, the very same article you linked to (in a despicable fake news rag, BTW) says "Donald testified repeatedly that he had nothing to do with renting apartments". :-)
Once again, you are showing why it is so hard to talk about the actual problem. You've managed to distract from the issue by bringing up inflammatory statements about Donald Trump. You go on to accuse Salon.com to be a fake news site, which it is most definitely not, at least not in terms of the problem that lead to the issue of Fake News in the first place.
This, in a sense, is Donald Trump's fault. He is so good at controlling the conversation; his bombastic style demands a response; this is the same style you're using in your posts, and it has successfully redirected the discussion. It doesn't matter whether you're right; the topic has now changed.
I read general_ai's comments. I don't think your summary's fair and submit that your tone's a little aggressive.
This doesn't get things back on topic. Though, it took minimal effort to find instances of Salon running ridiculous reports. [0]
Here the real problem: these companies can't get their hands on content fast enough. WaPo produces 500 articles/day and 1200 items/day. AFAIK, because there's no real punishment for quasi-spurious claims, there's no incentive to spend marginal time vetting sources. Today, the story can be shared 100K times in the time a retraction takes place. But by then, the damage has been done, and again, the punishment isn't material. I don't think a retraction fully undoes the damage of spurious reporting.
The issue is not whether or not he had anything to do with it. You stated, "he wasn't in any way called "racist" by anybody until he ran for president."
I gave evidence from a 2011 article that has a number of links describing how he was involved in things in the 70s that would make someone call him a racist.
"Would", if he ran for president against a democrat back then. As things stand, the article you linked to doesn't directly call him anything of the sort.
You don't really understand how racism, misogyny, etc. works.
It's prejudice against a class, and it's extraordinarily common for otherwise small-minded people to befriend or get close to (and defend!) individual members of that class. That does not actually make them less racist, misogynistic, homophobic, etc. It just makes them a hypocrite.
"I can't be racist I have a black friend" is basically what you're saying, writ large.
But that's the problem with those labels, isn't it? There is no possible way for anyone to prove they aren't a racist/sexist/whatever. And yet it's very easy to accuse people of them. And the accusations are never about what they actually do or say. They are accusations that they have secret beliefs they don't talk about, as if anyone could possibly know that.
> Same with racism: he wasn't in any way called "racist" by anybody until he ran for president
Pretty sure people were calling him a racist when he was running around promoting the Birther hoax - I know I was - or even before that when he called for the death penalty for the falsely accused Central Park 5 in 1989.
Trump has stated several times that he supports traditional marriage and is not comfortable with gay marriage (http://www.politifact.com/new-york/statements/2016/aug/14/se...). These comments show he has a problem with gay marriage. Just because Trump married an immigrant from one country doesn't mean he can't be a Xenophobe. It is pretty clear based on his comments that he intensely dislikes and fears immigrants from Mexico and from Muslim countries. As far as misogyny, he has made several disparaging comments about women. These comments show that he has a lack of respect for women, and that does not change regardless of whether he has hired women or is married to a women. Simply put, you cannot go around speaking about women as if their only value is their body and then claim you are a feminist. I have not seen outright evidence of antisemitism so I can't comment on that. In fact he is too pro-settlement in Isreal for my liking. For racism, there have been documented cases where his businesses have shown discriminatory and racist behavior. He also speaks of (and likely treats) hispanic people very poorly and claimed Obama was from Kenya for several years. That is not fake news. That is just taking examples of Trump's comments and behavior and applying appropriate descriptors to them.
> Same with racism: he wasn't in any way called "racist" by anybody until he ran for president,
Trump was first sued by the government for racial discrimination something like 40 years ago; he's been being called a racist for a long time before he ran for President.
Of course, a lot more people paid attention to him and talked about him at all, and a lot more people paid attention to what was said about him, once he became a Presidential candidate.
Not "Trump", but "one of Trump's companies". There's a difference. Trump would only be really at fault here if he was the author of the discriminatory policies in question, and there's no evidence that he was. Moreover, he testified under oath that he wasn't.
Whether he was at fault or not isn't the issue I was addressing, people were calling him a racist in connection with that, and in connection with many other things in the time between then and his run for President.
Obviously, the national attention on people doing so was less before he ran for President, but the idea that he only was accused of racism due to his Presidential run is false.
That's a funny put-down, but inappropriate and stifles real debate. I think there is a lot of evidence Trump is not many of things people claim him to be. And there's evidence for the alternative. It depends on the evidence you find more believable.
Here's an excellent article making a compelling argument that Trump is not a racist/homophobe/etc, or at least that calling him such things prematurely undermines the whole argument if he actually does terrible things. Once you call someone racist, it's hard to call them something worse and people tune out.
The initial post contained defenses which could very easily be broken down by much stronger opposing points for each. I think that is why it was assumed to be a joke.
A much stronger defense could be made as well, but could not be contained in a brief HN comment. I recommend reading the article I linked. Whether or not you agree with its conclusion, it's certainly food for thought.
It makes me sad to see yet another tech team go down the road of "machines will help us filter the truth"
They will not, and the reason has to do with language. Ludwig Wittgenstein tackled this 100 years ago. The best that machines will do for you is to label something as true or not as if you had consumed the article and decided on your own
That is a completely different thing from identifying fake news or truth
There's some value here. There are also some hard stops. You'll find them :) Best of luck, guys!
As an example, the fake news about the guy that found the warehouse full of fake ballot boxes for Clinton:
A Google Image Search of the picture in the fake article would have found the picture is much older, and isn't what the caption described.
If I'm tech-savvy and skeptical, I might have done that when consuming the article, and decided on my own it was fake. Machines can do that automatically for people that aren't tech-savvy, or that don't start reading it with a skeptical mindset.
I don't think it has to do with language (unless by "language" you mean what I mean, in which case sorry for duplicating). I think it has to do with that a lot of what people call "truth" is a product of their opinions, feelings, hopes, desires, etc.
There are facts of course - like such and such event happened or not, such and such statistical data is showing this number of not. But it is never served raw, it is always garnished with opinion. E.g. the fact is that Trump signed certain executive order. But you can say it's "Muslim ban" or "temporary restriction on admittance of nationals from terror-ridden countries". Not the same.
And various "factchecking" sites are fully complicit in this and inject opinion as often as not - to the point exactly the same thing said by two different people can be deemed "mostly true" or "mostly false", moreover, exactly the same thing said by the same person can be "mostly true" and "false".
You can't hope to have robots make sense of it if we can't. You can, of course, build a neural network and train it, but it would just put "robot approved" stamp on biases of whoever trained it.
How about a challenge to try and educate people better, to get them "immunized" against propaganda and fake news?
We need more cynical takes on things.
It's utterly appalling that on one side we have right-wing extremists yelling "FAKE NEWS" about CNN because CNN might get something wrong one time in ten, implying it's no different than Breitbart or Fox News which are wrong nine times in ten, and on the other we have left-leaning people beating up CNN for making mistakes and suggesting their trust is completely eroded.
News organizations offer a view. You should be prepared to vet everything you read from anyone. We need to give people a toolkit to help verify stories, to develop their bullshit instinct.
Say what you want about Breitbart, it's highly biased in what it chooses to report and the opinions it injects into its stories, but it usually cites and links to its sources. Something I can't say for CNN or Fox News.
An anecdote on language that happened to me earlier today: I wrote an email and said I would re-transmit something. I made a typo and wrote re-re-transmit.
"re-transmit" sounds neutral but "re-re-transmit" sounds passive aggressive. This would be very hard for a machine to interpret
Wittgenstein wasn't around when a president used Twitter to both control the media and get elected.
Maybe news could rely on first principles approach. Quantify things like political stability, information availability, cultural problems, etc. and maybe apply a first principles approach and maybe an algorithm could tell use what the hell is going on at any given moment and maybe give us some insight into what may go on in the future as well.
I would assume intelligence agencies have something similar to the above. The problem is things happen in realtime and if a regime falls or a state fails or whatever, we have to adjust our models immediately.
Throwing out hands up and saying Wittgenstein solved it seems lazy but idk.
> Quantify things like political stability, information availability, cultural problems, etc
Good luck. It's a worthy goal, but we are very far away from being able to do this in a rigorous fashion. There is a reason academia has the distinctions of "hard science", "soft science", and "not science". Cultural and political dynamics, by their inherent nature, might never be objectively quantified.
How about a 'subjectiveness' ranking instead, with notations for "unable to find link to a source of factual claims"? That's the best we could ever safely do, and we would likely find interesting results (WaPo might be labeled more subjective than Fox News, for example, even though both would generally have low numbers of notations for 'unable to find link to source of factual claim').
As I said in another post: The only thing you can possibly check for with any reliability is the validity of the base, source event, if there is one. Any higher derivation in the wrong hands (Facebook, for example) is systemic censorship. How can we safely do that? Recursive link tracking, perhaps, to a "primary source," which relies on the AI matching the factual claim to an appropriate source, either a video, image, or text that can be considered the legitimate source based on context (for example, an article about Apple's earnings could link to a primary source of their press release).
Regardless, the most dangerous form of "fake news" is by the selection/omission of stories, and that seems pretty impossible to quantify with today's technology (and of course the most prevalent on all of our 'real news' sources).
It's even worse, selection of stories is the whole point of news, they exist for the sole purpose of influencing people's opinions. And the fight against "fake news" looks nothing more than the fight for censorship in the space those in power not yet control.
Your arguments are strong, however have you considered an algorithm based on the laziness and cheapness of humans? Consider that a lot of propaganda is heavily coordinated and not creative in the sense of being centrally created and issued.
An algorithm could watch, say, 50 sources and see if they simultaneously start using identical phrases, given access to a thesaurus aren't those odds a little unusual? This happened a couple times in the last election. You'd have a much simpler task of quote analysis of course, to exclude directly quoted content.
Then factor in something to detect press releases and video news releases where the verbiage of large sections is identical, this strategy is almost too easy.
Another factor is "large known propaganda sources" simultaneously releasing the story but small propaganda sources don't operate at all because fundamentally there is a size cutoff. The Wash Post will be in every propaganda operation because they are huge, but the "nowheresville register" certainly will not. Real news would of course be covered by both, so it should be very easy to detect organic self organizing behavior vs small scale conspiratorial behavior.
Now algo-proof propaganda could emerge much like handwritten letters to your congressional representative, before being inevitably ignored, are considered more impressive than mere form letters or signing a list. But it would detect at least some fake news based on fake news being part of a coordinated centralized mass produced campaign rather than trying to detect fake news based on its inherent fake-ness itself. Sorta like swatting bugs that bite you or try to, rather than identifying each individual bug then swatting only the mosquitos. Its very difficult to detect if something is a Walmart product, but its easy to detect if its mass produced, if the quality is very low, if it was made in China, if it contains chemicals banned in the USA for safety reasons, and in the long run works just as well.
> How about a 'subjectiveness' ranking instead, with notations for "unable to find link to a source of factual claims"?
What would that mean? Let's say I write an article where I claim White House is controlled by reptiloids from planet Nibiru. Would it check that I have any links in my article at all? Or that the links actually prove my claims? Or that these proofs can be trusted (I may just link to my own website or one created by my friend)? I could insert a hundred links to a most respectable austronomy sites to prove that planet Nibiru exists, but how would you know whether these links actually prove it? I could refer to a lot of actual news content as the proof White House occupants can't actually be human. How you evaluate if these links actually support my claim?
At the source, you do need some form of verification, similar to "trusted certificates." For example, there could be a database of known mappings, such that apple.com and subdomains are authorized to make statements cited as press releases about Apple, Inc. A link would have to be intelligently interpreted as a citation, perhaps involving a search for similar stories (or it just results in 'unable to find link to primary source' even when it's legitimate, i.e. false positives). Subjectiveness is another area that's quite difficult, but would likely result in percentage of 'unique claims' that the AI was not able to derive from the source material.
It's more difficult than just blindly blocking any stories that aren't covered on 'major, trusted sources', and probably only a couple of organizations could implement anything close to this right now, but it's the best we can strive for. All the other 'solutions' I've heard involve censorship of unpopular opinions.
Edit: But yes, to the point, my envisioned implementation would not find any referenced sources in your article or through a search, and if it did, those sources would not be authorized to make the claims about the Whitehouse reptiles, so it would get the notation that indicates 'could not verify.'
At first, most real news stories would be unable to be verified, but over the time, there would be fewer false negatives. The important thing to recognize, though, is that the notation just means the reader has to make his own judgment; it does not state whether or not it's fake.
And "real stories" should also probably have a notation with a direct link to what the algorithm thinks is the base source.
Have to admit, something like this could be useful as a simple way to improve journalism in general. Yeah, it wouldn't exactly 'detect fake news', but it would help by:
1. Encouraging journalists to actually link to a source at all. Because at the moment, a depressing number of them don't even bother sourcing anything. So you end up just having to 'trust' the organisation that the story has been checked out beforehand.
It's an especially big problem with web versions of printed newspaper articles, and is a general problem with print newspapers as a whole (since due to space limits, they don't publically source/cite anything).
2. Getting journalists to link to the original source. Because at the moment, you'll see news sites sourcing other news sites which then source other news like a lengthy game of Chinese Whispers or Telephone. It's how a lot of 'fake news' makes its way in the media food chain.
So yeah, something like this would be useful just to get publications to cite their sources better. Or to make them look for the real source rather than one of a million middlemen.
Just encountered an article from AP, which purports to "fact check" some Trump statements. The whole article did not contain even a single link. Not even to the statements they are checking. I went back to look at another "fact checks" from AP - yep, not a single link to the source at any of them. Sigh. And these people probably think Wikipedia is unreliable and poorly sourced.
>It should be possible to build a prototype post-facto “truth labeling” system [...] Such a system would tentatively label a claim or story as true/false based on the stances taken by various news organizations on the topic, weighted by their credibility.
And of course nobody would love this technology more than the Chinese and Russian governments. Is a system aimed at quickly identifying obscure blogs that disagree with "high-credibility" sources supposed to help democracy?
Machine Learning technology is immensely powerful and will absolutely be used to both the detriment and benefit of the people at large. This is something we as technologists need to understand.
It's one of the reasons why our employment choices and our decisions around who to work with must be taken in the context the impact it will cause on the world around us. As we begin to automate more and more of traditionally human jobs, we're going to find our work inextricable from the political landscape our systems are creating.
Their headline is a bit hyperbolic (oh, the irony, given stance detection!) but the FAQ [1] covers what's really going on:
Q: Why did you choose the stance detection task rather than the task of labeling a claim, headline or story True/False, which seems to be what the fake news problem is all about?
A: (...) Our extensive discussions with journalists and fact checkers made it clear both how difficult "truth labeling" of claims really is, and how they'd rather have reliable semi-automated tool to help them in do their job better rather than fully-automated system whose performance will inevitably fall far short of 100% accuracy. (...)
Q: OK, but what does stance detection have to do with detecting fake news?
A: (...) From our discussions with real-life fact checkers, we realized that gathering the relevant background information about a claim or news story, including all sides of the issue, is a critical initial step in a human fact checker's job. One goal of the Fake News Challenge is to push the state-of-the-art in assisting human fact checkers, by helping them quickly gather the information they need to make their assessment.
In particular, a good Stance Detection solution would allow a human fact checker to enter a claim or headline and instantly retrieve the top articles that agree, disagree or discuss the claim/headline in question. They could then look at the arguments for and against the claim, and use their human judgment and reasoning skills to assess the validity of the claim in question. Such a tool would enable human fact checkers to be fast and effective. (...)
This means they're very much aware that 'solving the fake news issue' in a fully-automated way is a folly, so they are instead looking for tools to classify and retrieve corroborating or dissenting reports about the same topic. I feel this approach demonstrates an awareness of the problem, addresses some of the criticisms raised in this thread, and could lead to useful tools and datasets down the road.
Mainstream media and their corporate backers have already lost this battle. This whole fake news attempt to remain relevant has backfired already, since it's much easier to prove that the peddlers of fake news are those who uncritically backed and still excuse the Iraq war, Libya catastrophe, attempted overthrow of the Syrian government just to name a few recent adventures.
They've been beaten at their own game by an opponent better at using modern/popular methods of disseminating information.
>Such a system would tentatively label a claim or story as true/false based on the stances taken by various news organizations on the topic, weighted by their credibility.
Oh right, because we can all agree on which news organizations are credible. /s
Obviously the ones that run a news program at 6:30 pm with a heavy introductory drumbeat and lots of fanfare playing while a camera zooms in to a concerned-looking anchor person.
Also somehow CNN shows in the front page of result for "fake news" image search on Google. It wouldn't be totally wrong, depending on how the term is defined.
Probably because the trump subreddit does that super annoying "Upvote this post so that people see CNN when they search for fake news!" thing every few weeks.
I agree. The problem is the only thing Democrats or Republicans hate more that each other nowadays is people who are nonpartisan. Very few sane voices can be heard over the screaming of partisan hacks lately.
"Media Matters has already secured access to raw data from Facebook, Twitter...
Predictive Technology
Bringing this data analysis to scale will also allow Media Matters to identify which individuals and outlets are the most destructive forces driving fake news, misinformation and harrasment.
Cutting-edge advances in cloud computing and machine learning will enable us to identify patterns and connections that would otherwise go under the radar.
...
Media Matters' core budget for 2017 is $13.4 millions which covers a staff of 81. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
This budget allows us to create a 34 person research deparment engaged in media monitoring, research, deep dive analysis and rapid response...
this budget also alows us to invest in technological innovations like the creation of an early warning system to identify in the profilerationof fake nws more efficiently and to create cutting-edge predictive technology that allows us to identify patterns and connections in order to asses how misinformation will move and how we can neutralise it. "
Not to sound cliche but I believe the bigger problem in this country is education, which apparently has failed many in this country on both sides of the political spectrum, if the past couple of years are any indication. I guarantee you fix people's problems with English, Math, and History in the classroom, you will have no need for machines or algorithms to filter junk that influences people online.
Russia and China absolutely kick our butts in all these education categories, yet each in its own way is halfway down the road to a being a benighted, ignorant post-modern totalitarian state. Making us better at reading graphs and interpreting data about climate change is a nice goal, but the great strength of the United States is being an open, liberal republic with institutions (like the press) that people trust, not an illiberal democracy as Russia and others are trying to promote with their cunning use of the Internet and social media. That is exactly what is under attack. We need to make some tools that build our muscles to discover, consume and evaluate views that are different than ours, not just map reduce all the news articles.
Exactly what I was thinking today. Our laziness to read (longer articles, books, etc) and think has caused this problem. Educate the people and this will go away on its own.
This is not something you can make people do through education though. Even among people i know that are highly educated and have achieved top marks and went to the best companies, there are those who just don't give a shot about politics. They are not interested enough to look or dig further.
I am I missing something or is this challenge to produce a system which determines if the headline agrees with a body of text? Many so called "fake news" sites would pass this test with flying colors as their fake headlines are supported by equally fake stories. This seems more like a test against clickbait.
It seems like Wikipedia would be familiar with a lot of the same challenges that come with identifying fake news articles. Anyone more familiar than I am with Wikipedia care to comment?
Wikipedia has a policy to only accept reliable secondary sources on controversial political articles. What comprises a "reliable source" is loosely defined, and what sources are considered reliable is ultimately decided by the editors in a somewhat per-article basis, with some global definitions which are not centrally listed anywhere but are enforced by senior editors and their admin friends. Because of the systematic bias that Wikipedia suffers from there is strong partisan bias in this selection, which resulted in a number of wiki clones with their own bias (e.g. Conservapedia), forums dedicated to show how bad this is (e.g. /r/wikiinaction) and has - among other things - been leading to a steady decline in the number of editors in the last couple years - everyone eventually gets bullied away from that place by a clique of editors + admins.
Quoting Wikipedia policy itself:
>If Wikipedia had been available around the sixth century B.C., it would have reported the view that the Earth is flat as a fact and without qualification. And it would have reported the views of Eratosthenes (who correctly determined the earth's circumference in 240BC) either as controversial, or a fringe view. Similarly if available in Galileo's time, it would have reported the view that the sun goes round the earth as a fact, and if Galileo had been a Vicipaedia editor, his view would have been rejected as 'originale investigationis'.
My personal rule is Wikipedia is very reliable in non-controversial topics, and should be trusted only as much as source of links and search keywords and information about some of the existing opinions for controversial topics. Which is something, but definitely not a full solution of a problem.
I've been following this and somewhat involved on the Slack channel since late last year.
A few comments based on what I've seen here so far:
"Fake News" might not be "the problem", but it is a problem. There is a real set of completely fake stories with no supporting evidence. Taking this away from politics for a minute, the archetype of this is "celebrities XX is moving to town YY"[1]
Comments around "this is just mainstream news attempting to justify its role" absolutely and completely have a point. There is plenty of room for new players to fix this problem (and hopefully be rewarded for it), on both sides of the political spectrum.
Comments around "The NYT does fake news - see their Iraq war advocacy" are somewhat misguided IMHO. The NYT has a number of problems, but no one should make the mistake of confusing opinion, analysis and forecasts for news. In the NYT Iraq War case, their analysis and forecasts were completely wrong and their opinion was misguided because of that. It is completely fair to make the point that their reputation suffered because of this, but we need to separate that from news reporting. This is something that news organizations don't do very well at the moment, IMHO.
As has been pointed out, this won't fix the whole problem. Most of the "Yes, but..." discussions here have been had when trying to come up with a reasonable but helpful task. I think stance detection is a reasonable subset of the problem.
This is not solvable by humans or machine learning.
For example "leonardo dicaprio charity linked to 3 bil money laundering scandal", "raport says trump spent night with hookers in Russia", "angelina jolie divorcig brad pitt", "terrorist attack in Paris, 200 dead" etc. Some of those headlines seems like clickbait and false news but they are not, good luck with classifying those and similar.
#fakenews formula, sensation+celebrity+cause=fakenews Use twitter to label all #fakenews (a code hashtag that isn't visible to viewers by changing the twitter foundation. The articles are then required to be vetted following rules from a panel that provides clear check lists to be considered fake news. Anytime news Is to be broadcast it must include standardized format, citations, rules for ad revenue and a list of all contributors to prevent a conflict of interest. Articles are not allowed to be written about companies who contribute to an outlet. There also needs to be a limit on how many ads can be displayed as well as how many a company can buy across platforms. Do not allow them to perform any "news broadcasting" unless followed and if it is violated, fine the culprit. The party identifying the "#codeword" would get paid the fines minus an administrative fee paid to the ethics committee as a commission. It's a system that ensures checks and balances in the journalism world. This would have a political component basically requiring places like twitter to follow these rules and guidelines. Otherwise they will not do it because this solution takes away a major source of their income and then they will actually have to compete for your subscriptions instead of just pumping out continuously overwhelming sensationalism
I applaud this initiative. I am sure something good will come out of it, even though it does not completely resolve the problem. At least acknowledging and stepping in that direction is more than doing nothing.
That said, I think the other part of this problem is how the news is consumed. Our lazy minds are trained to read the shorter version if there is one available. Every day more people are liking the 140 character version of news. The more you read (from more people), the more you're reinforced in that belief. So while we train the models on news articles, we should also attempt to train on tweets. Just my two cents.
I don't think they're going about this the right way.
The first step to identifying 'fake news' (even in NYT or WSJ!) is to be able to pull out attributions from the source text.
This would give you some idea of where the information in an article actually came from. "Fake news" will tend to be either unattributed or misrepresent the thing it's quoting.
But a good first step toward better media literacy would just be giving people a representation of who actually said the the things in an article, and that seems much easier.
I would like to see a test/quiz that shows you headlines or how they would be shared on facebook news feed and asks you to identify which you think are real/fake.
> It should be possible to build a prototype post-facto “truth labeling” system from a “stance detection” system. Such a system would tentatively label a claim or story as true/false based on the stances taken by various news organizations on the topic, weighted by their credibility.
So who decides what organisations are credible? Or orders them by their credibility? Someone has to create the list. Someone with obvious human biases towards one view or another.
Fake news is a meta problem, and it's solve by funding news agencies and removing them from the advertising loop, as well as laws which make news vs opinion different discussions.
Tech cannot solve it without also creating tools which will be used against us.
The magic tech solution to solve fake news is essentially an assessment of the intent of the author.
Any tool which even gets close to ascertaining this will be badly misused.
function isFakeNews(news_piece){
var list_of_legit_sources = _get_current_approved_sources(); // makes synchronous http request to illuminati.com/api
if list_of_legit_sources.inArray(getSource(news_piece)) return false; else return true;
}
^---- Sadly this is the reality for how fake news is going to play out
I think The goal shouldn't be to detect fake news. The goal should be to detect whether a specific claim is true or false. For that, you simply need a site, like a crowd sourced fact checking sites, where people are required to source their arguments precisely, unlike fake news which doesn't. Then you have a resource to turn to, similarly to how fact checkers are used in the face of fake news.
After that, you can build an engine to crawl news articles or have them submitted, and detect the claims being made. Those claims can be either auto-matched to existing ones or create new ones (deduplication) and then the site has a fresh new stream of claims to fact check.
StackOverflow could build this site on their existing engine. If someone here knows them, can you reply and put me in touch?
From my observation the majority of news media manipulate much of what they report in significant ways. When they're reporting on politicians they're generally slanting something already manipulated.
Where the facts lie in many subjects is not immediately obvious.
Algorithms like this are a good idea provided that they're used wisely. I expect them to detect conflicts between treatments (with false + and false -), which would be useful to humans making their own judgements. Inflicting their results, without a chance of additional vetting, would not be a good idea.
Get money out of news. Sure money doesn't corrupt news as badly as politics but it does bias what, how news is delivered.
And I'm not suggesting all news agencies [whatever this means in 2017] should transform into NPR or PBS clones. I like MSNBC, FOX, CNN , ABC... news but they all exist within media empires. Let's figure out how to spin them out into entities not funded from media business models. Hard problem, sure. So what. We have to figure this out.
So we're going to create bots to trust what is true/not true so when Skynet goes live it will have an easier time defeating us?
I see what you did there ;)
In all seriousness, though, if people do not learn to read the news and media critically then an AI system isn't going to make things better. I remember back in high school, here in Canada, being taught media literacy. I think it was because of our close proximity to the US, and how influential US media can be.
As long as Google still puts Russia Today and plenty of other sites of questionable plumage on display this is a futile effort. It only works if the big names in news aggregation start by culling the worst offenders.
Is anyone else put off by this obsession with "solving" fake news? As if we can simply throw technology at such a contentious and controversial issue and then trust the results. It reads to me like the goal is censorship, where only "approved" articles/authors are allowed, all in the name of "fact checking". Never mind that it's incredibly easy to cherry-pick facts or exaggerations to target "offensive" articles (by both/all sides).
> Never mind that it's incredibly easy to cherry-pick facts or exaggerations to target "offensive" articles (by both/all sides).
Exactly. I'd argue that disingenuous news from mainstream news organisations is worse than dedicated "fake news" websites because they exploit legitimacy and reader-trust to peddle falsehoods. They are our port in a storm of bullsh*t, and they're failing us.
Engineers often operate under the false belief that they can solve social problems with technology. And the systems they build rely on participants being rational actors that subscribe to a shared system of values. They end up devolving into censorship of opposing viewpoints.
In fact, I would go as far as saying that the internet, itself, was designed and built in the naive belief that humans would better themselves by instant access to knowledge. This past decade and a half has completely shattered our 1980s and '90s vision of the promise of the internet.
We have few means of combating propaganda that threatens our values, reclaiming our privacy, or maintaining our remaining sanity. When a shared objective reality no longer exists, we're all loons.
Consider the sensationalist headline "Trump Facing Impeachment for Muslim Ban".
Okay, a lot of people (including politicians) are saying "yeah we should maybe impeach that guy", and a lot of Muslims are affected by the order. But there's no impeachment trial and it's not a direct ban on all Muslims.
I don't think it's appropriate to shift all the blame to the publishers but, when people just read the title, nod approvingly, and close their browser, it's the same effect.
As far as I can tell, this is a serious project that's likely to have sincere community interest. They define the problem in concrete terms and have created a framework to objectively measure the success of submitted solutions.
When we start with something substantive like this and take it straight up to generic ideological soundbites, we cheat ourselves of the kind of intellectually interesting discussion that we might've had instead.
99% of the time when I see "fascist" being thrown around its name calling. Now days I just read it as "something a left winger doesn't like". Antifa movements make a lot more sense in that context too.
That's definitely something that needs to be said. I've seen way too many instances where people immediately label someone a fascist for giving even an inkling of support for something Trump did. I wish people could calm down just long enough to have something resembling useful discourse.
How do you debate a person that denies objective reality, and embraces their very own alternative reality?
I don't think you can. For the same reason you can't negotiate with terrorists. They aren't playing by the same rule book. You hold out a hand to shake, they stab you in the face with a knife.
Unfortunately, it's how most people, on both sides, define it.
Far too many people are unwilling to recognize that news that confirms their world view might be fact. They cannot or will not challenge it, and simply accept it as fact.
The right believes Obama is from Kenya, the left believes Trump just signed an order that banned Muslims. Both claims upon inspection fall apart immediately. The fact that both of these are so widely believed shows you how little critical thinking and research the average person does. They really just want "their team" to win, it's really a instinctual reaction more than a intellectual one.
> prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual's country of nationality.
You're right. It's not an order that bans Muslims, explicitly. It's an order that bans them implicitly. The NPR annotation:
> If you CTRL+F this document, you won’t find the words “Christian” or “Muslim.” But if you read closely, this is the section that indicates prioritizing Christians. How so? Because the seven countries affected by this order are all Muslim-majority countries. Also note that Trump himself indicated a preference for prioritizing Christians in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network. And former Trump campaign surrogate Rudy Giuliani told Fox that Trump first called it a “Muslim ban” but asked him to come up with a legal framework for it. Giuliani said he did, one based on “danger,” not religion.
He did bomb Muslims BUT not because they were Muslims. Get the difference? Trump has said many times he wants to ban Muslims from the USA, even that Muslim with a MIT PHD.
Only on Google cache since he removed it:
"December 07, 2015 -
Donald J. Trump Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration
(New York, NY) December 7th, 2015, -- Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on. According to Pew Research, among others, there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population. Most recently, a poll from the Center for Security Policy released data showing "25% of those polled agreed that violence against Americans here in the United States is justified as a part of the global jihad" and 51% of those polled, "agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah." Shariah authorizes such atrocities as murder against non-believers who won't convert, beheadings and more unthinkable acts that pose great harm to Americans, especially women.
Mr. Trump stated, "Without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life. If I win the election for President, we are going to Make America Great Again." - Donald J. Trump"
"December 07, 2015 - Donald J. Trump Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration
(New York, NY) December 7th, 2015, -- Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on. According to Pew Research, among others, there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population."
It may be gone from the location you were looking at, as happens with all kinds of stuff on the web. I believe this is the same document, available from the DJT campaign site.
It seems you care more about intent than outcome. I'm more pragmatic and concerned about what someone does not why they did it.
The reason I don't believe the "concern" coming from Democrats is if they actually cared about the Syrian people they would have been protesting in capitol hill while Obama was dropping bombs on their villages and hospitals. I was there, the Quakers were there, even some Republicans were there. Sadly the Democrats were not to be found in any significant number any of the dozen or so times I visted.
"Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete, and they regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties. Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society. Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature, and views political violence, war, and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation. Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the principal goal of achieving autarky through protectionist and interventionist economic policies."
When I read that I see elements of fascism in many governments around the world, with very few of them coming close to the definition.
Even so, you could fairly easily set up a number of points to check off on and score a government (and by extension) it's supporters on a scale from 'definitely not fascist' to 'definitely fascist'.
The question then becomes at what point on that scale it becomes reasonable to call a government fascist and to call a support of that government a fascist. I'm pretty sure we're not there yet but I am also pretty sure that we are slowly but surely sliding in that direction.
Using the term fascism is like a shot in the arm, it tries to wake up the organism that it is directed at that it is getting ill and needs to fend off some viral element. Unfortunately usually the opposite happens and instead the recipient will wall themselves off from the provider of the message. Even so, I guess that even fascism light is dangerous and ugly enough that plenty of people would not be caught dead being labeled a fascist, especially not when there is some hard evidence that it is so.
Fake news is generally identified by the reputation of its author (New York Times vs Alt-Right Patriot Freedom Observer). Nothing published by the Times or Wall Street Journal (despite any editorial bias) is fake, simply because we know (except in the rare circumstance) that they apply journalistic integrity in sourcing and writing articles. Much of what's published on "fringe" sites, especially if no mainstream outlets cover it, is likely fake (i.e. if it's making a factual claim about the world, not just expressing an opinion).
Obviously followers of these sites will fight back against any "fake" labels, by arguing there is a "cover-up" by organized opposition, that their truth is being suppressed, that any fake news classifier intrinsically has a liberal bias, and so on. The difficulty for me is not identifying what's fake, but convincing anyone else that it is.
It's not clear to me which is more of a problem. With obviously fake news you can at least use well-researched facts to argue against it. When CNN keeps pushing the narrative (i.e. relentlessly talking about Hillary "winning" the debates when in hindsight she obviously didn't) it's a much more subversive, subtle kind of fake.
CNN winning is merely them echoing the majority sentiment of the polls, maybe with a dash of hope thrown in.
Ironically this may have done Clinton in with people thinking well, if she's won already then I don't need to go and vote.
Hindsight is always 20/20, it is very easy to see Clinton winning as a 'narrative' pushed with an agenda whereas based on the data available to them that simply made good sense.
See also: Trump expecting fully to lose (in his own words at some point).
A dash? From CNN all the way to FOX it was 23x7 schilling for the global government faction. Usually it's not so difficult because both candidates are in it. Trump ruined that technique and two parasitic political dynasties with it. Polls of AZ with a ~+15% Dem sample (when R turnout and D crossover was already off the charts) were used to run stories about how Clinton could win AZ... and TX! Attributing it to incompetence ignores the other obvious and well tested reason.
Using "reputation" alone is a dangerous and naive standard -- the most powerful form of "fake news" is the selection/omission of stories and crafting of narratives around those stories, which is just as prevalent on "real news" sources like WaPo/CBS/CNN/NYT as it is on Fox/Breitbart and even 'fringe' sources.
With the issue of opinions derived from factual events, which fit the bill of being 'misleading' (to some groups, at least) -- how do you draw the line? The NYT is certainly not exempt from that (see: half of Paul Krugman's articles).
The only thing you can possibly check for with any reliability is the validity of the base, source event, if there is one. Any higher derivation in the wrong hands (Facebook, for example) is systemic censorship. How can we safely do that? Recursive link tracking, perhaps, to a "primary source," which relies on the AI matching the factual claim to an appropriate source, either a video, image, or text that can be considered the legitimate source based on context (for example, an article about Apple's earnings could link to a primary source of their press release).
Just to nitpick: Krugman is on the opinion page, this is what he is supposed to be doing. David Brooks does the same thing, but usually on the conservative side of the arguments.
Yep very fair, but it would have to be assumed the AI could differentiate, which is not necessarily trivial.
All of this would be much easier if there was some "standard" for writing news, sectioning off opinions that derive 'non-obvious' conclusions, linking primary sources, etc. But there isn't, and you would have to censor those who did not conform if there was one, which is not a good solution.
No I think he means... Articles that are not sourced (citations, reports, interviews, journals).... etc have a higher likelihood of being false, than those that do.
Mainstream news orgs tend to be better about including citations, and sources. They are also better about publishing retractions, when they are caught saying something factually wrong.
I put it in another comment on this subthread, but Friedman is an opinion writer, on the opinion page, not the news page. He's supposed to make controversial statements.
If you don't like the way your local bakery makes their bread you go somewhere else. Now if the media reports on something you don't like someone else will tell you what you want to hear.
This issue happens on both sides of the political spectrum BUT it does seem to be a lot worse on the conservative side of things. All the "liberal" news sources like the NYT and The WashPo seem to be doing lots of reporting on Trump supporters, discussing their fears and hopes, concerns and motivations. Even more conservative sources like the WSJ, not including their editorial page, are trying to take a bigger view of the world.
On the other hand my Apple News feed seems to perpetually have a FOX News story. The one this morning was "Is Trump Bashing the new Celeb nude selfie?"
All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories also believe global warming is a hoax and Obama was not born in this country. A significant portion of the electorate has been drinking from the well and cannot be reached.