3 ms·
I challenge anyone to put together a robust definition of what "real news" is. This is a fundamentally unsolved problem at the philosophical level.
by mentat 10y ago
I challenge anyone to put together a robust definition of what "real news" is. This is a fundamentally unsolved problem at the philosophical level.
- hota_mazi 10y agoReporting an event that actually happened. How hard a concept is this, really?
- mentat 10y agoAnd that report is just the facts? I haven't seen real news in a couple decades then. Better just filter it all.
- yosito 10y agoFake news is saying that George Soros has voting machines that are rigging the election. It's just not true no matter how much people want to hear it. Real news is saying that Trump wants to address immigration by building a wall. People may disagree about what that means, but it's still a true story.
- yosito 10y agoYou can't tell me that Clinton lost the election. You're just biased against democrats. ;)
- pixl97 10y agoVery. Prove I went to a restaurant yesterday. You could show a video of me at a restaurant, but is it from yesterday, or some other day. Is it really me there, or someone that looked like me.
- hota_mazi 10y agoYou are describing the difficulty of proving that an event really happened. The discussion is about the definition of "real news". Two very different things.
- dingaling 10y agoWell perhaps that is the problem. "The news" used to be about events that had happened, often several days in the past due to the propagation speed of information. Nowadays "the news" also includes: 1. What someone says might be happening right now. 2. What someone says about something that happened, or which might be happening right now. 3. What someone thinks might happen next. None of which are necessarily true or grounded in fact but all of which are valued by the media in the race to be first with the headlines. So perhaps "real news" could be defined as "events which have occurred and for which we have objective proof" and everything else is just "editorial".
- tomp 10y agoMost mainstream media post interpretations, not facts. E.g. that Trump is "racist" (based on some comments about some, not even all, Mexican, who aren't even a race!).
- sulam 10y agoI'd start with: news posted on sites that are fake. What's a fake site, you say? Well, how about one that claims to be a site that it is obviously not. IOW, this is very similar to a problem we expect companies to be able to solve: identifying phishing sites. If a site claims to be ABC News, a known media entity, and it clearly is not, I'd argue anything posted on it should be considered fake.
- sndean 10y agoThis is probably a good way to decide, since it's relatively easy to determine whether a new site is fake. Another example, the "Denver Guardian": http://www.denverpost.com/2016/11/05/there-is-no-such-thing-as-the-denver-guardian/ http://www.denverpost.com/2016/11/05/there-is-no-such-thing-...
- daveFNbuck 10y agoYou don't need a robust definition to implement something practical that deals with the clear cases.
- sytelus 10y agoChallenge accepted. Define "news" as probabilistic statement of an event. Define "real news" as news with probability > e, where e is some chosen threshold value.
- username223 10y agoFortunately, Facebook only has to solve the much simpler problem of identifying clearly fake news. This is like determining that a site is a link farm, not that it is a content farm. (I think Google has even made decent progress on the latter, harder problem, though I still see ask.com results sometimes.)
- burkaman 10y agoAnything pertaining to recent events that has more facts than opinions, and no falsehoods.