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FiB – A Facebook newsfeed accuracy verification Chrome extension
- zachlatta 10y agoGah, I hate how applying heuristics is now considered "AI". Neat project though.
- skywhopper 10y agoWhy is this a problem? I'm pretty sure that's been a typical approach in the field since the 80s or before.
- Normal_gaussian 10y agoLast year, our Image Recognition pipeline was partially built (cleaning, clustering, invariance - essentially ready to feed into 'AI') when we had to stall that part of the project, whack a classifier in front, and pivot to tackling some unexpected problems elsewhere. As such we weren't comfortable calling it Image Recognition, so called it Image Analysis or 'IA'. I loved the fact that IA was AI backwards, almost "It isn't AI, it is IA!". Now I am waiting to use the sentence "Our IA pipeline makes use of several types of AI" without contriving the situation for it. Its the little things that keep you slightly insane.
- rtpg 10y agoIt's always been AI. Pretty much any decision-making toolset can be classified as artificial intelligence. Unless, of course, you subscribe to the "AI technique is no longer AI when it becomes real" school of thought
- vonklaus 10y agohahah reminds me of the adage, Artificial Intelligence is 10 years away...and always will be.
- jwtadvice 10y agoI'm curious how they handle the challenge they specified: "Another challenge was building an AI that knows the difference between a fact and an opinion so that we do not flag opinions as false, since only facts can be false." In news media that is typically considered credible, opinions are very often presented as fact, often marked with "an unnamed official said" or "our anonymous source told us." Much of the news regarding the outside world is gathered at the State Department Press Briefings, where the Press Secretary will him/herself admit that what's being communicated at the stand is the opinion of the US government, after it goes through an interagency research, vetting, and message coordination phases. Very often these coordinated opinions are then presented as fact at CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and others. Of course, this relationship led Americans to think that Saddam Housein had something to do with 9/11 and justified the invasion of Iraq, led the media to report on Mass Surveillance with the opinion label "Bulk Collection", led to inaccurate coverage of Bahrain, Kosovo, Benghazi, Jessica Lynch, etc. President Obama's National Security Advisor publicly bragged about the ability of coordination within the interagency to create an echo chamber in the US press. I don't think there is an algorithm that can tell the difference between fact an opinion, unless somehow that algorithm is an automated investigative reporter. It seems insurmountable at this stage of technology to try to separate US government propaganda or propaganda from interest groups from facts.
- Swizec 10y ago> President Obama's National Security Advisor publicly bragged about the ability of coordination within the interagency to create an echo chamber in the US press. “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” “Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.” “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” Akhem. But seriously though, this "interagency" you speak of sounds a whole lot like State Propaganda Machine.
- jwtadvice 10y ago
- lorenzop 10y agoI went through the code and it doesn't look like it does anything as described, only checks images. I'm afraid this is fake news. Good effort, though.
- plexigras 10y agoits a custom https://www.mywot.com/ https://www.mywot.com/ implementation which indeed dose not show validity but instead user ratings for there safety. https://github.com/anantdgoel/HackPrincetonF16/blob/master/backend/imageverify.py#L128 https://github.com/anantdgoel/HackPrincetonF16/blob/master/b...
- stablemap 10y agoIt seems like most of the work is in backend/imageverify.py and the standard of truth there is whether an address has a high enough MyWOT score.
- lorenzop 10y agoyeah it's hard to claim that it assesses "the truth". I am doing a research project in this exact field and we believe this to be a semi-hard AI problem with very little chance of being approximable.
- alva 10y ago"Fake news" is a shitty meme that needs to stop. If the media truly suggests they be accountable for what they peddle, they will be in for a big surprise. We are witnessing a mortally wounded animal frantically flailing in a primal, desperate bid to hold onto life.
- gfody 10y agoWhat else do you call this sort of thing? e.g.: http://abcnews.com.co http://abcnews.com.co
- insickness 10y agoA better word for this might be counterfeit. This is pretending to be a different website than it really is. The problem is that 'fake' in the current context is being extended to sites that are judged--rightly or wrongly--to have lower journalistic standards. That slippery slope allows more dominant media to dismiss alternative media when they themselves sometimes exhibit bad journalistic standards.
- myowncrapulence 10y agoIt's as if they were pushing for an online "lie detector" which banned people for telling lies.. It's absurd.
- _red 10y ago>"Fake News" Its a shame humanity keeps needing learning the same lessons over and over. Anytime I think of the "newspaper" I can't help but think of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. >“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. >In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
- mooman219 10y agoContrary to the wording of the report, the fake news detector isn't a neural net or an AI. The term is a bit overused, so it's not really worth it to be up in arms about the terminology. The tool is really just a weighted measure of a couple of online services that track website metadata. It would be interesting to use this to train a model with in order to flag potential fake news in the future if they decide to continue with the concept. As it stands now though, it's not special in it's construction, but it's nice to see something on the more practical end emerge from a Hackathon.
- phren0logy 10y agoWho watches the watchmen?
- ahartman00 10y agoI think we all should. It's watchmen all the way down :)
- huangc10 10y agoI'm a bit tired of this "fake news" fad. We, the consumers of the content, need to decide for ourselves if the news is real or fake. Use your common sense and check the damn facts. If we need someone/something to help us determine if the news is real or fake, then we are truly lost. The problem is fundamentally with education. Students need to learn from a young age to fact check and insert correct bibliography. Fake news did not win the election for Trump. We, ourselves and our lack of common sense, did.
- mhalle 10y agoThe cases where it is straightforward to determine "fact" or "truth" aren't the ones that really worry me (although it remains shocking to me that clear, easily debunked falsehoods bounced around this US election cycle in a most dispiriting way). The danger lies in statements that cannot be directly verified or reasoned about. In the most extreme example, "the big lie" is a powerful propaganda tool specifically because big lies overwhelm our ability to distinguish truth from fiction. We can more effectively gauge small lies through our everyday experience, but we find big lies delivered with confidence to be impossible to reconcile. Rather than reject the lie, we also question whether such a lie could be told. In this way, we can begin to believe the lie rather than accept the reality of lying. The big lie is particularly effective in cases where we cannot verify or refute a statement from first principles or from our own life experiences. If verification of a statement requires trust of another authority, a sufficiently egregious and persistent lie can overwhelm that authority by seeding doubt and distrust about the authority itself. Education can be rendered irrelevant if we can be convinced to question what we've learned. I don't know if a relatively simple approach to detecting "fake news" like the submission uses will prove useful or sufficient. But technology clearly has a role in helping us verify facts, correctly attribute statements, and weigh opinions.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- civilian 10y agoMan this code sucks. `detectAdultContent()` returns True if there is no adult content. And I'm not sure what adult content has to do with truth? https://github.com/anantdgoel/HackPrincetonF16/blob/1f5e7bb4412e494ba8b9e057066578374a23b9f0/backend/imageverify.py#L30 https://github.com/anantdgoel/HackPrincetonF16/blob/1f5e7bb4... They also have imports inside of functions :-/
- econnors 10y agoThey admit in the article that they picked up javascript over the weekend. I credit them for open sourcing it rather than waiting until it's perfect code, which would result in it never being released.
- x1798DE 10y agoI don't totally understand who would use this sort of thing. The people who would bother to install an extension that detects fake news and would even know to do so would already be able to identify news as fake much more easily than a few lines of python and a chrome extension. I thought the problem of "fake news" was that people were forwarding it around like it's real, but no one in that chain is going to bother using anything like this, so it's not like this is a firebreak. And if you use something like this to block fake news stories and then install it on your parents' computers when you go in for tech support, they're probably going to call you and say, "Hey, how come I can't see your Uncle Stan's posts on facebook when I use that new chrome browser you installed?" (As an aside, if my kids ever installed any sort of content blocker on my computer, I would write them out of my will.)
- heisenbit 10y agoThere are two problems with fake news. - One is fake news outlets. Astro turfing the internet. It became a lot easier to set up new sites. And there is a big funding machine behind it (yes, Google, looking at you). The key challenge is that fake news is so much more clickable. It is constructed to be alarming. It stands out in our mostly balanced reality. The currency on the internet is attention. It got self sustaining - people were making money of it. - One is social news. Viral forwarding. Facebook may think they are not a publisher but they build a big publishing machine ready to be taken over by the biggest bully in town. Building nukes and leaving them laying around is not responsible (yes, FB, Twitter, looking at you). There is now power with zero accountability. A feast for any bully. Systems with almost infinite amplification are bound to blow up. We need feedback mechanisms that effectively push back. Drop fake news from search. Inform recipients that got fake news that it was fake. Decrease ability to forward fake news. Decrease ability to spread fake news by persistent multipliers. Promote properly vetted but more boring/slower stories. Trump did not only get more attention in the MSM he also was able to use the digital airwaves in a way that drowned out any more balanced messages. His team and fans were able to use a huge lever.
- x1798DE 10y agoMy question was really who does this extension help. This sort of extension would be useful only for people who are unlikely to install it, because anyone who is aware of the phenomenon of entirely fabricated news stories can probably spot them easily. This extension seems to be aimed only at people who wouldn't know to install it in the first place or people who wouldn't want it because they enjoy the fake news for whatever reason.
- vonklaus 10y agoI don't use facebook. Most MSM is bullshit so i don't understand what "fake news" even means. Can someone please provide a few links for reference? Are we talking about the extremely outlandish things like: Obama just ordered a covert strike force to start taking peoples guns Or are we talking about factually inaccurate reporting?
- sigmar 10y agoStuff like this site which tries to look like abc but isn't: http://abcnews.com.co http://abcnews.com.co But also lots of no name websites reporting both conspiracy theories and false info
- camtarn 10y agoI'm not sure whether you're a fan of the Huffington Post or not, but this seems like a nice list of examples of what people are up in arms about. Yes, it's the egregiously fake stuff, not media spin/bias. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/facebook-fake-news-stories-zuckerberg_us_5829f34ee4b0c4b63b0da2ea http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/facebook-fake-news-stori... Of course, if you don't trust HuffPo, you could always theorize that they fabricated those ;)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nicowiko 10y agothis is actually an important field that is today missing when we see the amount of data we need to digest. How to categorize internet data that emerge on internet. This is a big challenge. In real world you trust the source then the information that goes from the source. If you dont have enough information on the source then you look for trusted source advise on this source, or on this info. System being built step by step. However a source can be compromised. This trusted source can be challenged anytime by the system by adequate collegial vote of trusted sources. There is no false or true fact without source. Someone has to see it at first stance.
- chvid 10y agoIs this not really simple to make? Pro Clinton: ok Pro Trump: fake news site
- chvid 10y agoLet me put this in a different way: how much of the variance in the data set is explained by this simple criteria?
- lohankin 10y agoThis simple criteria above perfectly explains how mainstream media came up with 90% probability of Clinton's win. Otherwise please provide your own explanation.
- yarou 10y agoMy reality is better than yours. My truth is more objective than yours. My morals are superior to yours. That's all this is.
- pmorici 10y agoPeople talk about fake news as if it is a phenomenon of the Facebook / Internet age but traditional media outlets have been caught peddling outright false and fabricated stories to varying degrees. Heck half the reason we went to war in Iraq was because of the questionable reporting on "weapons of mass destruction" from the NYT. Then there was the fake document incident that forced Dan Rather to resign, the fabricated story that forced Brian Williams to step down. You could probably name many many more if you wanted to make an exhaustive list.
- coredog64 10y agoHaven Monahan was unavailable for comment.
- lohankin 10y agoDoes posting fake results of fake polls constitute a fake news? If yes, what kind of AI is needed to distinguish it from the real one?
- reagan83 10y agoAs someone who helped mentor this team from the FB-side over the weekend, I'm consistently impressed with the traction they have been able to get. Kudos to you all for a job well done and open sourcing your work.
- alextooter 10y agoI don't think they can build a fake news detector, who has the rights to decide which is fact/fake? Do you trust the main stream media? Trust what they said?
- icanhackit 10y agoWhat do you think about integrating an interpretive overlay at the browser level, supported by Microsoft, Apple, Google and Mozilla out of the box? When Joe Average reads a Facebook post, NYT, Fox News etc any statement like "a source said X" at the browser level we have an annotation that says "an unverifiable source" or when an event or person is referenced there's a direct link to information about it/them? We need to integrate an interpreter so that it's available to everyone and applies to any source of information.
- ddxv 10y agoTo anyone else interested in working on this, I have a number of ideas for how an extension like this might work. I have some experience with NLP and would love to find someone else interested in this project. My goal is a tool that would help journalists and crazy aunts and uncles alike judge the truthiness of facts.
- idw 10y agoIf you're interested in this problem, there's a roadmap for automated factchecking from UK factcheckers Full Fact here (I work there): https://fullfact.org/automated https://fullfact.org/automated, which has just got some funding from Google. The roadmap includes a summary of a lot of the work in this area and a breakdown of what many of the challenges are. It's not going to be solved in a 36 hour hackathon, but it's good to see what they came up with.
- ZenoArrow 10y agoWe need to fight against the 'fake news' crackdown that's emerged after the recent US election. Think about it for a second, who is getting to decide which stories are fake and which stories are real? Do the groups doing this content filtering have their own pro-corporate agendas to push? If we don't start exposing their biases in determining what 'fake news' is we'll end up giving those in power a means to silence dissent. I'm all for fact checking and verification, but it needs to be managed by the people, not by corporate or government interests.
- caffeineblet 10y agoI had a similar idea but mine was just using a predefined list. I just added the domains to /etc/hosts and forwarded to a more pleasant site.