5 ms·

The last 12 months I have visited Snopes more times than not in order to disprove some of the articles my Facebook friends choose to share. It's slightly alarm

by joshmn 10y ago

The last 12 months I have visited Snopes more times than not in order to disprove some of the articles my Facebook friends choose to share. It's slightly alarming that people don't think they need to fact check. You know it's bad when the President-elect opens up about his internet fact checking[0]. It sets a dangerous precedent. There are less intelligent people in this world who read deeply into these "articles" and act on them. They choose to take it as fact because it's a website. It's scary. What can we do? Upvotes/downvotes? Won't work at scale, because likes/shares have a connotation of legitimacy. Can we educate the public? We can try, but some people are so far from being able to (or willing to) learn. They'll discard any help, citing propaganda, claiming "xyz source" is trying to influence their thinking; how dare they. Can you tell this exhausts me? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9IEIP3k_8c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9IEIP3k_8c

sedachv 10y ago
> What can we do? Upvotes/downvotes? Won't work at scale, because likes/shares have a connotation of legitimacy. News verification seems like the perfect application of NLP, AI, and data mining techniques. Can it make any money for anyone? Right now it is much more profitable to make fake news and use data mining to manipulate people: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2015-11-12/is-the-republican-party-s-killer-data-app-for-real- http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2015-11-12/is-the...
- yosito 10y ago
  I don't think those technologies are well suited to this problem at all. I was just talking to some Swiss journalists last night. You know what Swiss news organizations are using those technologies for? To make their writing more "engaging", i.e. more sensationalist, not for fact-checking.
  - sedachv 10y ago
    > I don't think those technologies are well suited to this problem at all. How so? Deciding whether news is fake or not seems like a textbook application of natural language classification and search.
    - OJFord 10y ago
      I haven't read any textbooks on the subject (I don't mean that facetiously) - what would this look like? Because it seems to me that to such an algorithm virality ~ legitimacy.
    - inimino 10y ago
      The only difference between a fake news story and a real news story that you can rely on is that the events in the real news story actually took place. Obviously there is no way to determine that by looking at the text itself. Yes, at present the fake news may be written more colorfully or poorly. Obviously if you filter on that difference, it will go away.
      - sedachv 10y ago
        How do you personally tell if a news story is suspicious? The publication it originated in, the places where it gets syndicated, shared, and re-posted, the style of the writing, and how sensational the content is. Authors that specialize in writing fake news stories will also have an identifiable individual writing style. There are a lot of signals you can use to classify news as fake or real, and that is before going to databases like Snopes. This is IMO a much easier problem than a lot of the NLP work for sentiment analysis and other marketing stuff that is working or being funded today. The problem is not technical, the problem is that fake news is profitable.
        inimino 10y ago
        Suspicious, sure, but that's moving the goalposts. And all of these signals exist at present, but as soon as Facebook starts suppressing posts based on machine classification then obviously fake news publishers will adapt and it won't work anymore. The only reliable identifying factor of fake news is that it reports facts that aren't. This obviously cannot be detected by text analysis. People who are suggesting technical solutions just haven't thought past the very first step in the dance. To speculate, perhaps part of it a lack of respect for the hard work of real journalism, education, and geniune political dialogue, so the fantasy of surfacing all the crap from social media and then extracting the ground truth with a magical algorithm appeals to some people despite being a completely hopeless idea. What you're actually arguing for is the negative twin of today's filter bubble effect. Algorithms already prioritize things you'll like, but now that the SV elite is shocked (shocked!) by how that worked out, there is a crisis of fake conscience. Obviously the solution is to also filter out the things that you'll think are fake. Or the things that "look fake" to Facebook's algorithm. It's concerning to me that the relatively intelligent folks here could be taking this at all seriously.
cm127 10y ago
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ~ William Casey, CIA Director
- grzm 10y ago
  Link? Or is this 78.3% of statistics on internet quotes are made up?
- crdb 10y ago
  The discussion by the source of the quote is worth a read (in the comment thread): https://www.quora.com/Did-William-Casey-CIA-Director-really-say-Well-know-our-disinformation-program-is-complete-when-everything-the-American-public-believes-is-false https://www.quora.com/Did-William-Casey-CIA-Director-really-... > Though not explicitly said at that time, it was made clear in other contexts during my two years in the West Wing in the highest level meetings that the pretext for this mentality was the claim that in a Cold War era when communications were essentially instantaneous, the vast majority of "the enemy's" - then the Soviet Union's - "intelligence" was also based on open press and media sources, so the most efficient way to lie to the Soviets was to lie in the U.S. and allied media, which meant the American public believing the lies was considered a kind of 'collateral damage.' (Barbara Honegger)
  - grzm 10y ago
    All Cretans are liars. My brain hurts.
tomrod 10y ago
> What can we do? Upvotes/downvotes? Won't work at scale, because likes/shares have a connotation of legitimacy. I think you just explained some very popular subreddits, in addition to a lot of the extreme political fake-news issues on facebook.

by joshmn 10y ago

sedachv 10y ago

> What can we do? Upvotes/downvotes? Won't work at scale, because likes/shares have a connotation of legitimacy. News verification seems like the perfect application of NLP, AI, and data mining techniques. Can it make any money for anyone? Right now it is much more profitable to make fake news and use data mining to manipulate people: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2015-11-12/is-the-republican-party-s-killer-data-app-for-real- http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2015-11-12/is-the...

yosito 10y ago
I don't think those technologies are well suited to this problem at all. I was just talking to some Swiss journalists last night. You know what Swiss news organizations are using those technologies for? To make their writing more "engaging", i.e. more sensationalist, not for fact-checking.
- sedachv 10y ago
  > I don't think those technologies are well suited to this problem at all. How so? Deciding whether news is fake or not seems like a textbook application of natural language classification and search.
  - OJFord 10y ago
    I haven't read any textbooks on the subject (I don't mean that facetiously) - what would this look like? Because it seems to me that to such an algorithm virality ~ legitimacy.
  - inimino 10y ago
    The only difference between a fake news story and a real news story that you can rely on is that the events in the real news story actually took place. Obviously there is no way to determine that by looking at the text itself. Yes, at present the fake news may be written more colorfully or poorly. Obviously if you filter on that difference, it will go away.
    - sedachv 10y ago
      How do you personally tell if a news story is suspicious? The publication it originated in, the places where it gets syndicated, shared, and re-posted, the style of the writing, and how sensational the content is. Authors that specialize in writing fake news stories will also have an identifiable individual writing style. There are a lot of signals you can use to classify news as fake or real, and that is before going to databases like Snopes. This is IMO a much easier problem than a lot of the NLP work for sentiment analysis and other marketing stuff that is working or being funded today. The problem is not technical, the problem is that fake news is profitable.
      - inimino 10y ago
        Suspicious, sure, but that's moving the goalposts. And all of these signals exist at present, but as soon as Facebook starts suppressing posts based on machine classification then obviously fake news publishers will adapt and it won't work anymore. The only reliable identifying factor of fake news is that it reports facts that aren't. This obviously cannot be detected by text analysis. People who are suggesting technical solutions just haven't thought past the very first step in the dance. To speculate, perhaps part of it a lack of respect for the hard work of real journalism, education, and geniune political dialogue, so the fantasy of surfacing all the crap from social media and then extracting the ground truth with a magical algorithm appeals to some people despite being a completely hopeless idea. What you're actually arguing for is the negative twin of today's filter bubble effect. Algorithms already prioritize things you'll like, but now that the SV elite is shocked (shocked!) by how that worked out, there is a crisis of fake conscience. Obviously the solution is to also filter out the things that you'll think are fake. Or the things that "look fake" to Facebook's algorithm. It's concerning to me that the relatively intelligent folks here could be taking this at all seriously.

cm127 10y ago

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ~ William Casey, CIA Director

grzm 10y ago
Link? Or is this 78.3% of statistics on internet quotes are made up?
crdb 10y ago
The discussion by the source of the quote is worth a read (in the comment thread): https://www.quora.com/Did-William-Casey-CIA-Director-really-say-Well-know-our-disinformation-program-is-complete-when-everything-the-American-public-believes-is-false https://www.quora.com/Did-William-Casey-CIA-Director-really-... > Though not explicitly said at that time, it was made clear in other contexts during my two years in the West Wing in the highest level meetings that the pretext for this mentality was the claim that in a Cold War era when communications were essentially instantaneous, the vast majority of "the enemy's" - then the Soviet Union's - "intelligence" was also based on open press and media sources, so the most efficient way to lie to the Soviets was to lie in the U.S. and allied media, which meant the American public believing the lies was considered a kind of 'collateral damage.' (Barbara Honegger)
- grzm 10y ago
  All Cretans are liars. My brain hurts.

tomrod 10y ago

> What can we do? Upvotes/downvotes? Won't work at scale, because likes/shares have a connotation of legitimacy. I think you just explained some very popular subreddits, in addition to a lot of the extreme political fake-news issues on facebook.