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I wonder how labelling would work with news like saddam hussain's weapons of mass destruction - reported by cia, backed by the goverment as truth, but turns out

I wonder how labelling would work with news like saddam hussain's weapons of mass destruction - reported by cia, backed by the goverment as truth, but turns out it was all fake. Labels will probably have to change retrospectively. Maybe they should also include "according to ..." reference? I can imagine that some statements will be flagged as truth by one side and as fake by the other. If you play this game further with creating graph of dependencies and recorded switches from truth to fake you can even get "accuracy score" for source reference - I wonder how CIA as source ref would score in this game - hopefully not somewhere in the area of "compulsive liar"?

chronic6l 10y ago
> I wonder how labelling would work with news like saddam hussain's weapons of mass destruction - reported by cia, backed by the goverment as truth, but turns out it was all fake. There's no need to talk technical about graph nodes and machine learning. It's very simple - the fake news labels are, and will always be biased in favor of the liberal/progressive/Democrat agenda. Objective news is a lie. No one wants to hear it. We want echo chambers that make us feel good. The labels will shift to accommodate this desire.
- nunobrito 10y ago
  Indeed we'll keep seeing the mass stream media biased to omit objective news. Otherwise you would see the US population asking themselves why on earth are their armed forces so deep involved in Syria, just short of military invasion. They get spoon-fed that the country is ruled by a dictator and their population needs to be freed, but so is Saudi Arabia with a far worse regime where people get their heads cut on monthly basis, which are praised as critical ally in the region. "Fake news" is a way to block the things deemed as dissident from the main stream, effectively blocking the room for logical argument and exposing the facts.
- mirekrusin 10y ago
  I think there are many people who are interested in truth - whatever it is, without feeling the need to associate their position with any red/blue person (politician). There was no mention of machine learning (no predictions of any kind) - the idea is to keep track of history of raw data (labelling and it's changes) and report on "reliability score ..." (how many times labelling itself was false). The thing is it doesn't need to be biased at all. You just keep all data for all sources. There's no "objective truth" per se, there are only true/false labels according to source. Of course you can create your own "beyond reasonable doubt by xyz" or "government xyz pov" source and assume that this is going to be your objective truth reference. But, just like any other sources, your source will just have reliability rating in context of any other source.
TulliusCicero 10y ago
> I wonder how labelling would work with news like saddam hussain's weapons of mass destruction - reported by cia, backed by the goverment as truth, but turns out it was all fake. That has nothing to do with the kind of 'fake news' being discussed. There's nothing 'fake' about reporting "Government claims WMDs in Iraq" while elaborating on what evidence the government has or claims to have, even if it turns out there were no WMDs. The fake news is question comes from sites that just make up random crap to get page views, not websites that are making a good faith effort to report on what is real.
- dilemma 10y ago
  The Iraq war was preceded and enabled by a massive propaganda campaign where close to 100% of American outlets went along with the WMD claim and were for an invasion (FAIR.org). You don't get to say a propaganda campaign that ruined a country and killed hundreds of thousands wasn't fake news. It was - complete and utter fabrication on an industrial scale, and it had devastating effects.
  - thecatspaw 10y ago
    it is fake news, but its not faked by the newsorganizations, which is what they are trying to prevent.
    - supergreg 10y ago
      Should a tool trying to fight fake news make any distinctions?
      - intended 10y ago
        Insufficient resolution to Question, scope too broad. There's several levels to "truth". What happened. What an eyewitness/machine reported happened Whether the witness maliciously lied/mistakenly reported the event Was all of this reported faithfully Separately was reporting done to verify the facts. And do note, we've (coders) created the world where most newspapers have already gone out of business, and they have to in turn compete with everything and everyone for what remains of human attention spans. So the new question I would append to that list is - does it even matter anymore ? ProPublica for example tries very hard to do good in depth reporting. There have been reams of leaks with more data than what most people know what to do with. This has to compete for human attention bandwidth against documents/content designed to press buttons, elicit emotions and thus propagate (generating more page views, and so revenue) My point is simply that truth is a narrow view on the scope of the problem. In a year or two this will die down and a new generation of coders will parrot "move fast and break things." The larger system at play her must be front and center. Ideally people would have more time to reflect on their own - see more news that causes dissonance - hopefully causing people to check their opinions and beliefs. And of course the tool to Achieve this should itself not create a worse problem
quonn 10y ago
I think there are two levels: One is if the information is ultimately true. The other is if the information is correctly reported according to the impression a journalist would get (at press conference for example). In other words, is the website deliberately lying? I think this is the problem that FB is trying to address here.
- return0 10y ago
  That's hard to tell. Were the reports of hillary's imminent win false? of course they were. Were they deliberately lying? Probably not . Could they have lied less if they had done some actual research? Probably yes. Did it matter that they lied? definitely yes. And every situation is even more peculiar. This is a futile exercise.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
brlewis 10y ago
Getting a good accuracy score sounds really hard to do, but if done it would be super valuable. Right now there's no economic incentive for accuracy. All news outlets, old big ones and new small ones, draw in eyeballs to advertise to using drama and controversy, not accuracy.
MK999 10y ago
Not to mention the 'Incubator babies' lie. 'Atrocity Propaganda' is the operative term.

chronic6l 10y ago

> I wonder how labelling would work with news like saddam hussain's weapons of mass destruction - reported by cia, backed by the goverment as truth, but turns out it was all fake. There's no need to talk technical about graph nodes and machine learning. It's very simple - the fake news labels are, and will always be biased in favor of the liberal/progressive/Democrat agenda. Objective news is a lie. No one wants to hear it. We want echo chambers that make us feel good. The labels will shift to accommodate this desire.

nunobrito 10y ago
Indeed we'll keep seeing the mass stream media biased to omit objective news. Otherwise you would see the US population asking themselves why on earth are their armed forces so deep involved in Syria, just short of military invasion. They get spoon-fed that the country is ruled by a dictator and their population needs to be freed, but so is Saudi Arabia with a far worse regime where people get their heads cut on monthly basis, which are praised as critical ally in the region. "Fake news" is a way to block the things deemed as dissident from the main stream, effectively blocking the room for logical argument and exposing the facts.
mirekrusin 10y ago
I think there are many people who are interested in truth - whatever it is, without feeling the need to associate their position with any red/blue person (politician). There was no mention of machine learning (no predictions of any kind) - the idea is to keep track of history of raw data (labelling and it's changes) and report on "reliability score ..." (how many times labelling itself was false). The thing is it doesn't need to be biased at all. You just keep all data for all sources. There's no "objective truth" per se, there are only true/false labels according to source. Of course you can create your own "beyond reasonable doubt by xyz" or "government xyz pov" source and assume that this is going to be your objective truth reference. But, just like any other sources, your source will just have reliability rating in context of any other source.

TulliusCicero 10y ago

> I wonder how labelling would work with news like saddam hussain's weapons of mass destruction - reported by cia, backed by the goverment as truth, but turns out it was all fake. That has nothing to do with the kind of 'fake news' being discussed. There's nothing 'fake' about reporting "Government claims WMDs in Iraq" while elaborating on what evidence the government has or claims to have, even if it turns out there were no WMDs. The fake news is question comes from sites that just make up random crap to get page views, not websites that are making a good faith effort to report on what is real.

dilemma 10y ago
The Iraq war was preceded and enabled by a massive propaganda campaign where close to 100% of American outlets went along with the WMD claim and were for an invasion (FAIR.org). You don't get to say a propaganda campaign that ruined a country and killed hundreds of thousands wasn't fake news. It was - complete and utter fabrication on an industrial scale, and it had devastating effects.
- thecatspaw 10y ago
  it is fake news, but its not faked by the newsorganizations, which is what they are trying to prevent.
  - supergreg 10y ago
    Should a tool trying to fight fake news make any distinctions?
    - intended 10y ago
      Insufficient resolution to Question, scope too broad. There's several levels to "truth". What happened. What an eyewitness/machine reported happened Whether the witness maliciously lied/mistakenly reported the event Was all of this reported faithfully Separately was reporting done to verify the facts. And do note, we've (coders) created the world where most newspapers have already gone out of business, and they have to in turn compete with everything and everyone for what remains of human attention spans. So the new question I would append to that list is - does it even matter anymore ? ProPublica for example tries very hard to do good in depth reporting. There have been reams of leaks with more data than what most people know what to do with. This has to compete for human attention bandwidth against documents/content designed to press buttons, elicit emotions and thus propagate (generating more page views, and so revenue) My point is simply that truth is a narrow view on the scope of the problem. In a year or two this will die down and a new generation of coders will parrot "move fast and break things." The larger system at play her must be front and center. Ideally people would have more time to reflect on their own - see more news that causes dissonance - hopefully causing people to check their opinions and beliefs. And of course the tool to Achieve this should itself not create a worse problem

quonn 10y ago

I think there are two levels: One is if the information is ultimately true. The other is if the information is correctly reported according to the impression a journalist would get (at press conference for example). In other words, is the website deliberately lying? I think this is the problem that FB is trying to address here.

return0 10y ago
That's hard to tell. Were the reports of hillary's imminent win false? of course they were. Were they deliberately lying? Probably not . Could they have lied less if they had done some actual research? Probably yes. Did it matter that they lied? definitely yes. And every situation is even more peculiar. This is a futile exercise.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

brlewis 10y ago

Getting a good accuracy score sounds really hard to do, but if done it would be super valuable. Right now there's no economic incentive for accuracy. All news outlets, old big ones and new small ones, draw in eyeballs to advertise to using drama and controversy, not accuracy.

MK999 10y ago

Not to mention the 'Incubator babies' lie. 'Atrocity Propaganda' is the operative term.