9 ms·

There is no need to create a Grand Unified Theory of misinformation, here. This problem isn't that hard. You filter this stuff and rank it by its SOURCE, not b

by Bud 10y ago

There is no need to create a Grand Unified Theory of misinformation, here. This problem isn't that hard. You filter this stuff and rank it by its SOURCE, not by the content of individual articles. It's not hard to figure out which online sources are pushing out most of the abjectly-bad propaganda, and de-rank them.

LoSboccacc 10y ago
this assumes their interest is in being fair, but I suspect their goal will gravitate mostly toward 'not being sued/investigated' which may very well create a selection bias.
cpr 10y ago
Sorry. Most of the official sources in this recent campaign were dead wrong on a lot of issues, mostly because of their own massive biases.
- kbenson 10y ago
  Are you referring to wrong when they described what they thought was going on, which contains a large amount of opinion, or wrong on the facts as they exist? Facts can be presented in a biases way (generally through omission of other contextual facts), but if what is said is factual, at least that bit of information is still correct. If combining multiple sources to generate a grouping of facts, that presentation bias way well disappear. If system weeds out people that present opinion as fact, all the better.
  - bmj 10y ago
    Or opinions can be presented as facts, or at least presented in a way that makes it hard to tell if it is reporting or analysis.
  - hueving 10y ago
    Frankly papers that lie through crafted contexts are much more dangerous because they give a false sense of authority due to their correctness at the micro level but incorrectness at the macro level. Imagine I develope a newspaper that only reports crimes committed by a particular race and I excruciatingly fact check every incident and highlight when they are uneducated (but don't mention education otherwise). What will result is one of the biggest macro lies that will fuel racism through its broader message while everything will be perfect to a fact checker. This would rank perfectly in such a system while broader newspapers would get hammered for messing up picture captions and confusing Airbus A319s with 737s.
- drumdance 10y ago
  The polls were not that far off. If 1 in 100 Trump voters had gone for Clinton instead she would have won. I think polling is pretty broken though. A lot has changed from 20 years ago when everyone had a landline phone.
  - Sacho 10y ago
    The polls were off by the same percentage amount that would have allowed Romney to win the popular vote over Obama.
jerf 10y ago
"This problem isn't that hard. You filter this stuff and rank it by its SOURCE, not by the content of individual articles." I don't think reifying ad hominem into code is the solution to the problem. Of course, if you don't mind a rare few false positives here and there on articles, I've got your filter right here: def source_is_trustworthy(source): return False Remember as you sit here thinking through your exceptions what we're talking about; if your "trustworthy" source was confidently telling you about how Clinton was going to win, it's not one of the exceptions. I won't say I was confident Trump would win, but I was certainly less suprised than most; the fact that I generated this somewhat more predictive model by tossing out pretty much every "mainstream" news source is not a good sign for them. And to be honest, Trump news isn't the only thing that I find this useful for. Beyond the bare facts, most media outlets really aren't good for much anymore, and do you ever have to de-spin their news just to get those bare facts in the first place. (I can't, however, pack up into a recipe how to do this yourself. I think we're in a period of transition in the news industry, much greater than just "the internet makes the old dinosaurs stumble" makes it sound, and I'm at the moment not really all that confident in anything.)
- ethbro 10y ago
  I don't think you're ever going to detect truth correctly, but you can absolutely detect falsehood. Compare "{Candidate} up over 5000% in polls" vs "{Candidate} up over 15% in polls". Baby steps. PageRank wasn't built in a day.
  - tomrod 10y ago
    Correct. The singular value decomposition it was based on was first described 100 years before.
  - MarkPNeyer 10y ago
    It's a lot easier to look for inconsistency than it is to look for incorrectness. Here's a pagerank like reputation system i've built. http://github.com/neyer/respect http://github.com/neyer/respect
smsm42 10y ago
Pretty much all mainstream media outlets did, at some point, publish something that can be qualified as "bad propaganda" by at least some of the observers. Now, either you filter out pretty much all the internet except maybe for bare statistics, numbers, math, etc., or you say "well, these guys are not as bad as those guys, because obviously being completely wrong about X much worse than being slightly less than right about Y", at which point you are just implementing your own biases.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
JabavuAdams 10y ago
Non-starter. The NYTimes and Washington Post, for example, are respected but have a very strong yet subtle bias. On the one hand, they seem more interested in fact-checking. On the other, they propagate concepts like: on-balance the US is a force for good and should lead the world. This is highly contentious and non-obvious for many (most?) people outside the US.
joshkpeterson 10y ago
This. You can probably counter the worst of it this way.
CM30 10y ago
Using the source to figure out whether something is accurate/correct has its own issues unfortunately. These include: 1. Editors/writers/management changes, since quite a few media publications have gone from being fairly reliable to biased as all hell based purely on who's taken over there. Or in some (rarer cases), the opposite has happened. So you'd have to make sure older less biased pieces weren't being punished for the actions of the publication in the present. 2. A lot of sources are correct about some things but not about others. It's very possible to have a publication that's terrible at writing about politics in an accurate and unbiased way, but fantastic at writing about technology or sports. So ideally your system would have to detect the subject of the article as well as the publication. However, I guess you could at least add known 'satire' and fake information sites to a 'non credible' list. Like the ones listed here: http://www.snopes.com/2016/01/14/fake-news-sites/ http://www.snopes.com/2016/01/14/fake-news-sites/

by Bud 10y ago

LoSboccacc 10y ago

this assumes their interest is in being fair, but I suspect their goal will gravitate mostly toward 'not being sued/investigated' which may very well create a selection bias.

cpr 10y ago

Sorry. Most of the official sources in this recent campaign were dead wrong on a lot of issues, mostly because of their own massive biases.

kbenson 10y ago
Are you referring to wrong when they described what they thought was going on, which contains a large amount of opinion, or wrong on the facts as they exist? Facts can be presented in a biases way (generally through omission of other contextual facts), but if what is said is factual, at least that bit of information is still correct. If combining multiple sources to generate a grouping of facts, that presentation bias way well disappear. If system weeds out people that present opinion as fact, all the better.
- bmj 10y ago
  Or opinions can be presented as facts, or at least presented in a way that makes it hard to tell if it is reporting or analysis.
- hueving 10y ago
  Frankly papers that lie through crafted contexts are much more dangerous because they give a false sense of authority due to their correctness at the micro level but incorrectness at the macro level. Imagine I develope a newspaper that only reports crimes committed by a particular race and I excruciatingly fact check every incident and highlight when they are uneducated (but don't mention education otherwise). What will result is one of the biggest macro lies that will fuel racism through its broader message while everything will be perfect to a fact checker. This would rank perfectly in such a system while broader newspapers would get hammered for messing up picture captions and confusing Airbus A319s with 737s.
drumdance 10y ago
The polls were not that far off. If 1 in 100 Trump voters had gone for Clinton instead she would have won. I think polling is pretty broken though. A lot has changed from 20 years ago when everyone had a landline phone.
- Sacho 10y ago
  The polls were off by the same percentage amount that would have allowed Romney to win the popular vote over Obama.

jerf 10y ago

"This problem isn't that hard. You filter this stuff and rank it by its SOURCE, not by the content of individual articles." I don't think reifying ad hominem into code is the solution to the problem. Of course, if you don't mind a rare few false positives here and there on articles, I've got your filter right here: def source_is_trustworthy(source): return False Remember as you sit here thinking through your exceptions what we're talking about; if your "trustworthy" source was confidently telling you about how Clinton was going to win, it's not one of the exceptions. I won't say I was confident Trump would win, but I was certainly less suprised than most; the fact that I generated this somewhat more predictive model by tossing out pretty much every "mainstream" news source is not a good sign for them. And to be honest, Trump news isn't the only thing that I find this useful for. Beyond the bare facts, most media outlets really aren't good for much anymore, and do you ever have to de-spin their news just to get those bare facts in the first place. (I can't, however, pack up into a recipe how to do this yourself. I think we're in a period of transition in the news industry, much greater than just "the internet makes the old dinosaurs stumble" makes it sound, and I'm at the moment not really all that confident in anything.)

ethbro 10y ago
I don't think you're ever going to detect truth correctly, but you can absolutely detect falsehood. Compare "{Candidate} up over 5000% in polls" vs "{Candidate} up over 15% in polls". Baby steps. PageRank wasn't built in a day.
- tomrod 10y ago
  Correct. The singular value decomposition it was based on was first described 100 years before.
- MarkPNeyer 10y ago
  It's a lot easier to look for inconsistency than it is to look for incorrectness. Here's a pagerank like reputation system i've built. http://github.com/neyer/respect http://github.com/neyer/respect

smsm42 10y ago

Pretty much all mainstream media outlets did, at some point, publish something that can be qualified as "bad propaganda" by at least some of the observers. Now, either you filter out pretty much all the internet except maybe for bare statistics, numbers, math, etc., or you say "well, these guys are not as bad as those guys, because obviously being completely wrong about X much worse than being slightly less than right about Y", at which point you are just implementing your own biases.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

JabavuAdams 10y ago

Non-starter. The NYTimes and Washington Post, for example, are respected but have a very strong yet subtle bias. On the one hand, they seem more interested in fact-checking. On the other, they propagate concepts like: on-balance the US is a force for good and should lead the world. This is highly contentious and non-obvious for many (most?) people outside the US.

joshkpeterson 10y ago

This. You can probably counter the worst of it this way.

CM30 10y ago

Using the source to figure out whether something is accurate/correct has its own issues unfortunately. These include: 1. Editors/writers/management changes, since quite a few media publications have gone from being fairly reliable to biased as all hell based purely on who's taken over there. Or in some (rarer cases), the opposite has happened. So you'd have to make sure older less biased pieces weren't being punished for the actions of the publication in the present. 2. A lot of sources are correct about some things but not about others. It's very possible to have a publication that's terrible at writing about politics in an accurate and unbiased way, but fantastic at writing about technology or sports. So ideally your system would have to detect the subject of the article as well as the publication. However, I guess you could at least add known 'satire' and fake information sites to a 'non credible' list. Like the ones listed here: http://www.snopes.com/2016/01/14/fake-news-sites/ http://www.snopes.com/2016/01/14/fake-news-sites/