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Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
- centizen 10y agoVery nice project, I will definitely be using it and will try to contribute in my spare time. One recommendation I'd have is not to use the word 'safety' in this context, it feels kind of overprotective. Perhaps the link should read "Take me back to reality" instead?
- jnotarstefano 10y agoI like "reality" : ) I chose "safety" because I think I copied Chrome's message when visiting a website with an invalid certificate.
- invisible 10y agoNice! I love this idea. What happens when most sites that deliver news have at least some bullshit?
- devoply 10y agoThat's really the issue. It's just a question of whose bullshit. Bullshit of the rich media mughals? Right wing conservatives? Liberal elite? Environmentalists? Alt-right nutters? At the end of the day, media has stopped being about objectivity, just as long as there is a semblance, anything goes. People tell lies, or next to lies in order to get people to see things their ways. It's just a question of the level of sophistication of those lies. Outright lies are the lowest level of sophistication, all the way up to manufactured consent.
- jjawssd 10y agoHow can you distinguish between news that pisses a lot of people off and news that is fake/spam? If I write a blatant hit piece which is based entirely on factual information a lot of people will report it because they are upset over it but it doesn't change the fact that is truthful. How do you prevent people from suppressing opposing view points by reporting them as fake?
- tptacek 10y agoThe idea isn't to target sites that occasionally run false stories; it's to target fakenews webspam sites.
- invisible 10y agoI never used the word "occasionally." Some news outlets run outright false stories that _are as bad as_ "fakenews" sites daily/weekly. Impling that those stories aren't as bad as the "fakenews" schemes and that we can't automate hiding those is just false. I was merely pointing out that there could be more to address this problem and that I love this idea so far (I read the readme).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lj3 10y agoFake news = news we don't like. This is just another way to make secluded echo chambers. I see some people learned nothing from the election.
- tptacek 10y agoNo, fake news = spam sites built from scripts consisting largely of a backcatalog nonsense stories ("Pope endorses Putin for US Presidential Election") with a one or two carefully produced fake stories as a "payload", instead of a purchasing call-to-action like other webspam sites.
- allemagne 10y agoThe example of "endingthefed.com" (appears to be an ultra-conservative platform, but nothing overly nonsensical) from the README implies otherwise.
- tptacek 10y agoFront page of that site: "German Scientists Prove There Is Life After Death". From the backcatalog: Putin Issues US Election Theft Warning, Orders Military To Protect Trump “At All Costs” BREAKING: Putin Just Gave Obama 24 Hours Or His Ships Will Open Fire Putin ally tells Americans: vote Trump or face nuclear war Putin Warns Trump…ELITES PLANNING YOUR ASSASSINATION Vladimir Putin Escapes New World Order Assassination Attempt Putin Goes On LIVE TV And CONFIRMS That Obama And Hillary CREATED ISIS and my personal favorite Putin and Dalai Lama: Obama Is Responsible for ISIS, Along With Hillary (and 23 more pages of stuff like this) This is webspam. The trick is: look past the front page. The front page is designed to look semi-sane. That's the point. Fakenews wouldn't work if you were just one click away from seeing that it's all a troll factory construction. You have to click a couple times to see that.
- allemagne 10y ago>The front page is designed to look semi-sane. That's the point. Fakenews wouldn't work if you were just one click away from seeing that it's all a troll factory construction. That didn't occur to me. Makes total sense. Thanks
- elihu 10y agoHow does it work? Is it just a blacklist? > "Also includes a clustering analysis that could lead to an algorithm to automatically detect Fake News." This implies that they want to do automatic fake news detection, but aren't quite there yet. Is that correct?
- makepanic 10y agoLooks like it's currently using a hard coded list of urls that are considered to be bad. For general requests: https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/blob/master/src/js/background.js#L11-L34 https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/blob/master/s... For facebook: https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/blob/master/src/js/facebook.js#L3-L25 https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/blob/master/s...
- ultrasandwich 10y agoYeah, it's just some arbitrary list of a few hardcoded URLs right now... Is this really useful??
- jnotarstefano 10y agoConsider that I built it this night for http://lauzhack.com/ http://lauzhack.com/, so it's not intended to be a fully-featured solution to the problem. The main issue I wanted to address is the fact that such a blocker must be widely installed to be useful. Therefore, the Facebook message is intended to prod current users of the extensions to ask that their friends install it as well.
- makomk 10y agoI'm amused that long-running British newspaper the Daily Star has made the list. I mean, it's probably accurate as they do have a bit of a reputation, but still - surprising.
- spejson 10y agoI was working on something similar, but with a database that would contain credibility ratings from users and users would rate the website. The extension was supposed to display the rating and ev. warnings on top of the website. Nice project. I may use it :)
- CM30 10y agoSo in other words, Web of Trust for news sites. Sounds like an interesting concept, though it'll need some really careful moderation to stop it getting abused. I've seen sites get low WOT ratings because the staff banned a few members and said members then took it out on their WOT page. You'll need a good way to stop these negative SEO type attacks from being weaponised against a news site's rating by its competitors.
- colllectorof 10y agoYou need a browser extension for this nowadays? Is the target audience so judgement-impaired that they can't, you know, not click on obvious clickbait and think about what they're seeing on Facebook?
- knowaveragejoe 10y ago> Is the target audience so judgement-impaired As we've seen this last election, yes, they are. How else do you explain millions of shares on "news" stories that are immediately, obviously false to anyone looking past the headlines?
- TheOsiris 10y agoare we really pretending that those people would've changed their vote had they not seen the "fake" news? I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of these shares were by people who wanted the news to be true anyway. I have friends who shared some stuff like that. they were never gonna change their vote/view. everyone else would just roll their eyes. I'm with Zuckerberg on this one. fake news did not affect the election. people are just looking for an excuse to blame. I would love to see how many people will still be against fake news come April first
- eloel 10y agoYou seem to enjoy pretending that Hillary lost because of fake news and "clearly everyone else is just plain stupid" and not because she's the most corrupt politician possibly in our country's history, so why not pretend about more stuff?
- sctb 10y agoPlease don't post only snarky comments. We ask that HN users comment civilly and substantively or not at all.
- elipsey 10y agoZoom out one meta level: Show HN: Stop the Stop-the-Bullshit. A Fake Fake News Detector Detector. Wait, but then we would need Stop the Stop the Stop-the-Bullshit.... um... but what if?!!
- allemagne 10y agoThere have been a lot of these projects lately. It's clever, but I am not close to being convinced that fake news is a problem that we can engineer our way out of.
- aswanson 10y agoIf it at least amplifies awareness in the general public about the problem, it's done it's job.
- farright 10y agoIsn't that exactly what the fake news sites works say?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- devoply 10y agoPeople read what they want to read. For instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning You can get rid of the fake news outlets, but you can't get rid of fake news as long as there is free speech.
- pohl 10y agoEliminating it would be an overly ambitious goal. We only need to mitigate its effects.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ZenoArrow 10y agoI'd argue it could end up backfiring for multiple reasons. The most obvious one is that it will undoubtedly end up strengthening filter bubbles. The problems that face us will not be solved by siloing ourselves away from views we disagree with. It might take more effort to filter out bullshit in our current age, but if we're not even aware of the bullshit someone else is feeding off, how are we going to combat it? We need to bring more people into public debate, not isolate them.
- isuckatcoding 10y agoThis will be subjective at some point beyond the BuzzFeeds of the Internet.
- CM30 10y agoHow is the clustering analysis going to work? Because the current hard coded list of URLs is a start, but it's not really a scalable solution to the issue. However, from what I can see in this file: https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/blob/master/discriminating-fake-news-from-real-news.ipynb https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/blob/master/d... It just seems like it's going to compare examples of articles included in the source files, as found here: https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/tree/master/data https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/tree/master/d... So how is it going to detect the difference between a real or fake piece from this?
- jnotarstefano 10y agoGiven two clusters, I can predict the class of a new article by choosing the cluster whose centroid is closest to the article. So, given some training data that produced two reasonable clusters with respect to the ground truth, I have a model that I can expect to generalize well on new data. Now, this is not what that notebook shows, because it's missing the evaluating on testing data! The main point of the notebook is that the Jaccard Distance of the tokens of the HTML of the page, despite being very simple, appears to generate a reasonable model.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- caymanjim 10y agoDoes anyone smart enough to install a browser plugin (much less visit GitHub) really need something to identify fake news sites?
- ecesena 10y agoYou never know. Also, the smart enough person can install it on browsers on less smart people.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- alvil 10y agoDefine bullshit.
- mihok 10y agoInteresting project, Is censorship the best coarse of action? Bare with me for a second, would it not be better to somehow overlay a meter or light indicating that this story is likely false. Even better, some sort of indicator that showed the # of sources (if any) and devised some sort of rating of quality/truthfulness. I'm against all the fake news in Facebook et all but if we dont teach people to be good at detecting it we're just putting a bandaid over a broken bone so to speak. Am I being overly optimistic of society, that learning how to detect bullshit is better than doing the hard work for them?
- astrowilliam 10y agoWe need to make things ridiculously simple for the users. A meter on an article showing them if its true or not will likely be ignored. I like this approach, big, bold and in your face. We need to call out all the fake, garbage news out there.
- Ursium 10y agoIt's not censorship as long as you have to install the extension yourself.
- amelius 10y agoThe problem is that the bad guys are actively trying to circumvent any detection mechanism people have. You can't teach people to be on full alert all the time.
- tptacek 10y agoThe whole point of fakenews spam is that the effort it takes to evaluate individual stories exceeds the capacity of the reader. It's a little like asking for a "truth meter" for cialis resellers. The analysis that shows you whether a site is fakenews or not is structural (and simple: go through the backcatalog, see if the Dalai Lama or the Pope is endorsing both Putin and Trump). Once you've accomplished that, there is no point to wasting any energy on any of the stories on the site.
- ahartman00 10y ago
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jjawssd 10y agoSafe spaces for the Internet
- tptacek 10y agoI do not see how filtering spam is equivalent to "safe spaces", or who you thought you might persuade with this comment. Could you go into more detail?
- jjawssd 10y agoThis blocklist is ridiculously easy to extend to sources of information which upset many people but are not fake
- tptacek 10y agoYes, computers are good at things like that. For my part, I'm worried that they might choose to blacklist Pitchfork, and then I won't know whether to buy the next Animal Collective album.
- sctb 10y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12999875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12999875 and marked it off-topic.
- sbuttgereit 10y agoI find it fascinating how paternalistic this whole topic is, and "Stop the Bullshit" is part of this. The goal is not developing independent thinkers, but merely ensuring that blind trust is given to the "enlightened people". The whole idea behind this sort of filtering and vetting is not about teaching people how better to reason about the world and judging the truth of those that would tell you what is happening and why, but rather it says that most people are incapable of making those types of decisions for themselves and that an informed elite should be in control of what information is available to the plebs. Once you concede this, how far is it before we make "fake news", or rather unapproved news, simply illegal? How long until news simply becomes propaganda? There absolutely is a problem with "fake news" from all quarters and it is nothing new at all: whether that was "bat boy" at the grocery checkout, the sinking of the Maine, or the news and characterizations during the recent campaign. "Stop the Bullshit" and filtering efforts is not a solution to the problem, merely the creation of new problems such an even less thoughtful populous and a new set of arbiters of the truth that I for one won't trust any more that the current ones.
- wrongc0ntinent 10y agoWhile I like the friendly notification/explanation, any tool targeting fake news should do a little better in establishing its own credibility. You want to persuade, not block. I'm not sure the dollar amount is enough. We see it in these very comments: show the user a sample of obvious falsehoods they published. This way you could probably come up with a threshold where you just give up.
- jnotarstefano 10y agoThat's an excellent idea. I wrote the copy on that page trying to convey "can I get your help against these bad people?", rather than something blaming the user, or a scary looking warning. But showing them the _reason_ why a certain website is blocked can become an opportunity to teach people critical thought, something that other comment threads point out.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- chiefalchemist 10y agoFake news isn't the problem. People willing to think critically is. The problem is, no one wants to know their baby is ugly. So the bury their heads in their person echo chamber.
- jknoepfler 10y agoTo people who believe this kind of project is "paternalistic" or that filtering out noise is somehow weak or irresponsible, I disagree. Time is finite. It is impossible to consume all of the information that is published in the world. It's not just a little impossible: the fraction of information that an individual can consume is very near zero. Most people who have worked in an academic or scientific field know that it is impossible to consume even a fraction of the domain-specific publications in their field, much less "all the news that's fit to print." It makes sense, therefore, to have a strategy for selecting a subset of information that one trusts as "worth considering," which might include a spam filter (just as email has, for good reason). I personally very seldom read news articles shared online, because my experience has been that they are consistently of very low quality. Speaking for myself, I get big world event news from the Economist, which has earned some trust, and the rare nytimes/wsj article that is about something it can't possibly fuck up (anything outside the borders of the United States is generally beyond NYT/WSJ). Would I be wrong for filtering all of the shared news articles from my feed? The only reason I keep them there is that I skim Facebook to get a feel for what people are thinking about and feeling on a given day (to stay slightly "in touch" with people, even if I think they wallow in a world of self-serving garbage information and would be better served by finding something more interesting to occupy their minds). A better criticism of this kind of filtering might that it is intrinsically arrogant, but I don't think it is any more paternalistic or irresponsible than a spam filter for email.
- torkable 10y agoyou could always, you know, like, not read all the shit on facebook?
- torkable 10y agoHey everyone you can also just ask me. If you're every curious if something is true or not, just ask me. I know what is true and what's not, and I'll always tell you the truth about what is true, don't think about any of it, let me do that. Happy news reading everyone, remember, don't do your own thinkin.
- eloel 10y agoif anyone doesn't want to use a clunky browser addon, you can just ask me. Like the author of the app, I too know what is true and what is not and I will guide you on what news is safe for you to read. Please, let me do your thinking for you.
- eloel 10y agoWhy is the author allow to pedal truth-identifying services by I am not. If I make my own HN post would that be better lol
- seanwilson 10y agoMy feeling is that people with good critical thinking skills wouldn't buy into fake news anyway so wouldn't need an app to help them and people that buy into fake news don't want to improve their critical thinking skills so wouldn't use an app to help them either. People like being surrounded by other people that agree with them. Are there any examples of subtle fake news stories? My feeling is they're really obvious especially if not being covered by major news sites.