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Fake News Challenge
- coolspot 10y agoIt is simple: everything that does not match your beliefs is a fake news.
- slaunchwise 10y agoThe day we believe that is the day the fascists win.
- wccrawford 10y agoUnfortunately, it's how most people, on both sides, define it. Far too many people are unwilling to recognize that news that confirms their world view might be fact. They cannot or will not challenge it, and simply accept it as fact.
- cmdrfred 10y agoThe right believes Obama is from Kenya, the left believes Trump just signed an order that banned Muslims. Both claims upon inspection fall apart immediately. The fact that both of these are so widely believed shows you how little critical thinking and research the average person does. They really just want "their team" to win, it's really a instinctual reaction more than a intellectual one.
- uppercasenut 10y ago"the left believes Trump just signed an order that banned Muslims" He did ban Muslims, just not all of them (yet.) And he did talk about banning all Muslims on the campaign. Now the Kenyan thing requires to believe that a lot of people and countries are on it, and have been decades before Obama was anyone of note.
- cmdrfred 10y ago>He did ban Muslims, just not all of them (yet.) When Obama bombed those very same countries was he bombing Muslims? Isn't that genocide?
- uppercasenut 10y agoHe did bomb Muslims BUT not because they were Muslims. Get the difference? Trump has said many times he wants to ban Muslims from the USA, even that Muslim with a MIT PHD. Only on Google cache since he removed it: "December 07, 2015 - Donald J. Trump Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration (New York, NY) December 7th, 2015, -- Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on. According to Pew Research, among others, there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population. Most recently, a poll from the Center for Security Policy released data showing "25% of those polled agreed that violence against Americans here in the United States is justified as a part of the global jihad" and 51% of those polled, "agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah." Shariah authorizes such atrocities as murder against non-believers who won't convert, beheadings and more unthinkable acts that pose great harm to Americans, especially women. Mr. Trump stated, "Without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life. If I win the election for President, we are going to Make America Great Again." - Donald J. Trump"
- cmdrfred 10y agoIt seems you care more about intent than outcome. I'm more pragmatic and concerned about what someone does not why they did it. The reason I don't believe the "concern" coming from Democrats is if they actually cared about the Syrian people they would have been protesting in capitol hill while Obama was dropping bombs on their villages and hospitals. I was there, the Quakers were there, even some Republicans were there. Sadly the Democrats were not to be found in any significant number any of the dozen or so times I visted.
- deckard1 10y agohttp://www.npr.org/2017/01/31/512439121/trumps-executive-order-on-immigration-annotated http://www.npr.org/2017/01/31/512439121/trumps-executive-ord... > prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual's country of nationality. You're right. It's not an order that bans Muslims, explicitly. It's an order that bans them implicitly. The NPR annotation: > If you CTRL+F this document, you won’t find the words “Christian” or “Muslim.” But if you read closely, this is the section that indicates prioritizing Christians. How so? Because the seven countries affected by this order are all Muslim-majority countries. Also note that Trump himself indicated a preference for prioritizing Christians in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network. And former Trump campaign surrogate Rudy Giuliani told Fox that Trump first called it a “Muslim ban” but asked him to come up with a legal framework for it. Giuliani said he did, one based on “danger,” not religion.
- cmdrfred 10y agoI dont disagree that he wishes to ban them. Just by the numbers its rather innefective as a Muslim ban if so intended. https://i.redd.it/jh4nz1fm48dy.png https://i.redd.it/jh4nz1fm48dy.png
- gukov 10y agoNot everyone that doesn't share your beliefs is a fascist.
- lacampbell 10y ago99% of the time when I see "fascist" being thrown around its name calling. Now days I just read it as "something a left winger doesn't like". Antifa movements make a lot more sense in that context too.
- Fauntleroy 10y agoThat's definitely something that needs to be said. I've seen way too many instances where people immediately label someone a fascist for giving even an inkling of support for something Trump did. I wish people could calm down just long enough to have something resembling useful discourse.
- deckard1 10y ago> have something resembling useful discourse. How do you debate a person that denies objective reality, and embraces their very own alternative reality? I don't think you can. For the same reason you can't negotiate with terrorists. They aren't playing by the same rule book. You hold out a hand to shake, they stab you in the face with a knife.
- rdtsc 10y agoThe day we stop calling the side we don't agree with fascists just because we don't agree with them is the day we might start winning.
- jacquesm 10y agoA long quote from wikipedia: "Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete, and they regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties. Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society. Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature, and views political violence, war, and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation. Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the principal goal of achieving autarky through protectionist and interventionist economic policies." When I read that I see elements of fascism in many governments around the world, with very few of them coming close to the definition. Even so, you could fairly easily set up a number of points to check off on and score a government (and by extension) it's supporters on a scale from 'definitely not fascist' to 'definitely fascist'. The question then becomes at what point on that scale it becomes reasonable to call a government fascist and to call a support of that government a fascist. I'm pretty sure we're not there yet but I am also pretty sure that we are slowly but surely sliding in that direction. Using the term fascism is like a shot in the arm, it tries to wake up the organism that it is directed at that it is getting ill and needs to fend off some viral element. Unfortunately usually the opposite happens and instead the recipient will wall themselves off from the provider of the message. Even so, I guess that even fascism light is dangerous and ugly enough that plenty of people would not be caught dead being labeled a fascist, especially not when there is some hard evidence that it is so.
- davidivadavid 10y ago> Unfortunately usually the opposite happens and instead the recipient will wall themselves off from the provider of the message. Probably because it often feels like that's the intent of people name-calling others "fascists." The best quote about fascism is and remains: "In Italy, fascists divide themselves into two categories: fascists and antifascists."
- sctb 10y agoAs far as I can tell, this is a serious project that's likely to have sincere community interest. They define the problem in concrete terms and have created a framework to objectively measure the success of submitted solutions. When we start with something substantive like this and take it straight up to generic ideological soundbites, we cheat ourselves of the kind of intellectually interesting discussion that we might've had instead.
- lossolo 10y agoThis is not solvable by humans or machine learning. For example "leonardo dicaprio charity linked to 3 bil money laundering scandal", "raport says trump spent night with hookers in Russia", "angelina jolie divorcig brad pitt", "terrorist attack in Paris, 200 dead" etc. Some of those headlines seems like clickbait and false news but they are not, good luck with classifying those and similar.
- brianbreslin 10y agoI would like to see a test/quiz that shows you headlines or how they would be shared on facebook news feed and asks you to identify which you think are real/fake.
- zeteo 10y ago>It should be possible to build a prototype post-facto “truth labeling” system [...] Such a system would tentatively label a claim or story as true/false based on the stances taken by various news organizations on the topic, weighted by their credibility. And of course nobody would love this technology more than the Chinese and Russian governments. Is a system aimed at quickly identifying obscure blogs that disagree with "high-credibility" sources supposed to help democracy?
- A_Crazy_Idea 10y agoThanks for your opinion. It has been removed.
- vvggff 10y agoWhy China and Russia specifically?
- inevitable2 10y agoBecause they are a lot less covert about their censorship practices and they are quick at adopting new technologies. There are of course a lot of Western countries who claim to be free societies who would love to have those tools and capabilites too.
- KanyeBest 10y agoBecause credible™ news sources such as CNN have confirmed that they are villain states.
- KirinDave 10y agoMachine Learning technology is immensely powerful and will absolutely be used to both the detriment and benefit of the people at large. This is something we as technologists need to understand. It's one of the reasons why our employment choices and our decisions around who to work with must be taken in the context the impact it will cause on the world around us. As we begin to automate more and more of traditionally human jobs, we're going to find our work inextricable from the political landscape our systems are creating.
- chippy 10y agoI'd prefer to see computer learning to identify political propaganda and state the biases in the text as that would be truly unpartisan. Does anyone know if this challenge has anything to do with Media Matters / Shareblue?
- chippy 10y agoFrom "America Matters" pdf: "Media Matters has already secured access to raw data from Facebook, Twitter... Predictive Technology Bringing this data analysis to scale will also allow Media Matters to identify which individuals and outlets are the most destructive forces driving fake news, misinformation and harrasment. Cutting-edge advances in cloud computing and machine learning will enable us to identify patterns and connections that would otherwise go under the radar. ... Media Matters' core budget for 2017 is $13.4 millions which covers a staff of 81. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. This budget allows us to create a 34 person research deparment engaged in media monitoring, research, deep dive analysis and rapid response... this budget also alows us to invest in technological innovations like the creation of an early warning system to identify in the profilerationof fake nws more efficiently and to create cutting-edge predictive technology that allows us to identify patterns and connections in order to asses how misinformation will move and how we can neutralise it. "
- DrDimension 10y agoMedia matters is responsible for some of the fakest news the world has ever seen.
- teh_klev 10y ago> Does anyone know if this challenge has anything to do with Media Matters / Shareblue? If you scroll to the "About" section you can see who's who and do some digging to see if connected. http://www.fakenewschallenge.org#about http://www.fakenewschallenge.org#about Or just contact them and ask (info@fakenewschallenge.org).
- cmdrfred 10y agoI agree. The problem is the only thing Democrats or Republicans hate more that each other nowadays is people who are nonpartisan. Very few sane voices can be heard over the screaming of partisan hacks lately.
- wahsd 10y agoThis effort is immensely scary to me as an objective observer. There is an inherent bias in the self-righteous "majority" that blinds it to its own flaws, fallacies, and "fake news". It's akin to asking corporations or dictators to regulate themselves. There is a precedent and model on how to provide a structure to combat "fake news" and it's called the American Constitution with it's various means for separating and balancing powers in addition to the breakdown into three branched of government. What is overlooked is that the very nature that we have two distinct parties is a core function of this leveling and balance and regulation of powers. The effort to combat "fake news", the solution looks ever more like thought police and authoritarian propaganda machine than it looks, let alone would even be able to provide some sort of accurate and precise filter of "fake news". What a lot of ... basically everyone on the left ... doesn't realize is that CNN was precisely set up after Carter's thumping, with specific and deliberate effort to manipulate people's minds and perceptions for political purposes, i.e., propaganda. Now, will it be accepted that given its history and its rather regular intentional manipulative and false news reporting that CNN will be labeled "fake news"? There is no chance in hell that would happen even if they came out and said "we are fake news". Just let that sink in; this is not a scientific or principled endeavor, it is purely a political one to weed out "fake news" the left disagrees with, while promoting "legitimate news" the left agrees with. It goes to the very core and purpose of the freedom of speech in the USA, for which many foreign and ever increasingly even American people don't have a deep enough appreciation for. The vulnerabilities one party of people cunningly and in a self-satisfactory manner so slyly put in place so that they can misuse it one day, may very well fall into the "wrong" hands the next. It is precisely what happened with the oh so righteous Weimar Republic and it's emergency measures that were meant to be used for "good". Well, the National Socialists used it for "good" too, just not the "good" their ideologically opposite expected it to be used for.
- wyager 10y agoTo detect "fake news", all you have to do is solve all problems in the field of epistemology, especially the ill-founded ones.
- sageikosa 10y agoIf news were just information, anymore its a call to attention and likely action.
- sgustard 10y agoFake news is generally identified by the reputation of its author (New York Times vs Alt-Right Patriot Freedom Observer). Nothing published by the Times or Wall Street Journal (despite any editorial bias) is fake, simply because we know (except in the rare circumstance) that they apply journalistic integrity in sourcing and writing articles. Much of what's published on "fringe" sites, especially if no mainstream outlets cover it, is likely fake (i.e. if it's making a factual claim about the world, not just expressing an opinion). Obviously followers of these sites will fight back against any "fake" labels, by arguing there is a "cover-up" by organized opposition, that their truth is being suppressed, that any fake news classifier intrinsically has a liberal bias, and so on. The difficulty for me is not identifying what's fake, but convincing anyone else that it is.
- RodericDay 10y agoMan some of you guys seriously need to read Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky. I'm as anti-Trump as it gets, but the idea that NYT or WSJ are bastions of reputable journalism is ridiculous. See, for example, the list of controversies associated with the output of Pulitzer prize winner Thomas Friedman.
- dingo_bat 10y agoSo in your assessment "fake" just means non-mainstream. Haven't seen the word defined like this before.
- gibbitz 10y agofake_news !== click_bait
- huehehue 10y agoI agree, but the distinction is really murky. Consider the sensationalist headline "Trump Facing Impeachment for Muslim Ban". Okay, a lot of people (including politicians) are saying "yeah we should maybe impeach that guy", and a lot of Muslims are affected by the order. But there's no impeachment trial and it's not a direct ban on all Muslims. I don't think it's appropriate to shift all the blame to the publishers but, when people just read the title, nod approvingly, and close their browser, it's the same effect.
- msielski 10y agoI am I missing something or is this challenge to produce a system which determines if the headline agrees with a body of text? Many so called "fake news" sites would pass this test with flying colors as their fake headlines are supported by equally fake stories. This seems more like a test against clickbait.
- rdtsc 10y agoAlas we are not supposed to use that term anymore: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/its-time-to-retire-the-tainted-term-fake-news/2017/01/06/a5a7516c-d375-11e6-945a-76f69a399dd5_story.html?utm_term=.363d0eaa0da4 https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/its-time-to-r... Also somehow CNN shows in the front page of result for "fake news" image search on Google. It wouldn't be totally wrong, depending on how the term is defined.
- komali2 10y agoProbably because the trump subreddit does that super annoying "Upvote this post so that people see CNN when they search for fake news!" thing every few weeks.
- necessity 10y agoFact: 99% of "fake news website" classifications are in fact false.
- rdtsc 10y agoIs that "fake news" ;-) Heh, I think need an explicit meta-fake news category.
- billfor 10y agoProbably because the washington post has gotten caught enough times writing fake news: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake-news-and-how-the-washington-post-rewrote-its-story-on-russian-hacking-of-the-power-grid/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake-new...
- DanielBMarkham 10y agoIt makes me sad to see yet another tech team go down the road of "machines will help us filter the truth" They will not, and the reason has to do with language. Ludwig Wittgenstein tackled this 100 years ago. The best that machines will do for you is to label something as true or not as if you had consumed the article and decided on your own That is a completely different thing from identifying fake news or truth There's some value here. There are also some hard stops. You'll find them :) Best of luck, guys!
- debt 10y agoWittgenstein wasn't around when a president used Twitter to both control the media and get elected. Maybe news could rely on first principles approach. Quantify things like political stability, information availability, cultural problems, etc. and maybe apply a first principles approach and maybe an algorithm could tell use what the hell is going on at any given moment and maybe give us some insight into what may go on in the future as well. I would assume intelligence agencies have something similar to the above. The problem is things happen in realtime and if a regime falls or a state fails or whatever, we have to adjust our models immediately. Throwing out hands up and saying Wittgenstein solved it seems lazy but idk.
- dwaltrip 10y ago> Quantify things like political stability, information availability, cultural problems, etc Good luck. It's a worthy goal, but we are very far away from being able to do this in a rigorous fashion. There is a reason academia has the distinctions of "hard science", "soft science", and "not science". Cultural and political dynamics, by their inherent nature, might never be objectively quantified.
- tokenizer 10y agoGood luck, sounds absolutely insane and unworkable. AI needs "Truth" inputs. I imagine if we had this tool when George W invaded Iraq, this AI would have said Weapons Existed, being all the CIA, and Politicians said so. Isn't that how your filter works? Anti alternative media, pro establishment?
- beatpanda 10y agoI don't think they're going about this the right way. The first step to identifying 'fake news' (even in NYT or WSJ!) is to be able to pull out attributions from the source text. This would give you some idea of where the information in an article actually came from. "Fake news" will tend to be either unattributed or misrepresent the thing it's quoting. But a good first step toward better media literacy would just be giving people a representation of who actually said the the things in an article, and that seems much easier.
- jacquesm 10y agoAs long as Google still puts Russia Today and plenty of other sites of questionable plumage on display this is a futile effort. It only works if the big names in news aggregation start by culling the worst offenders.
- Clanan 10y agoIs anyone else put off by this obsession with "solving" fake news? As if we can simply throw technology at such a contentious and controversial issue and then trust the results. It reads to me like the goal is censorship, where only "approved" articles/authors are allowed, all in the name of "fact checking". Never mind that it's incredibly easy to cherry-pick facts or exaggerations to target "offensive" articles (by both/all sides).
- yokisan 10y ago> Never mind that it's incredibly easy to cherry-pick facts or exaggerations to target "offensive" articles (by both/all sides). Exactly. I'd argue that disingenuous news from mainstream news organisations is worse than dedicated "fake news" websites because they exploit legitimacy and reader-trust to peddle falsehoods. They are our port in a storm of bullsh*t, and they're failing us.
- deckard1 10y agoEngineers often operate under the false belief that they can solve social problems with technology. And the systems they build rely on participants being rational actors that subscribe to a shared system of values. They end up devolving into censorship of opposing viewpoints. In fact, I would go as far as saying that the internet, itself, was designed and built in the naive belief that humans would better themselves by instant access to knowledge. This past decade and a half has completely shattered our 1980s and '90s vision of the promise of the internet. We have few means of combating propaganda that threatens our values, reclaiming our privacy, or maintaining our remaining sanity. When a shared objective reality no longer exists, we're all loons.
- lend000 10y agoHow about a 'subjectiveness' ranking instead, with notations for "unable to find link to a source of factual claims"? That's the best we could ever safely do, and we would likely find interesting results (WaPo might be labeled more subjective than Fox News, for example, even though both would generally have low numbers of notations for 'unable to find link to source of factual claim'). As I said in another post: The only thing you can possibly check for with any reliability is the validity of the base, source event, if there is one. Any higher derivation in the wrong hands (Facebook, for example) is systemic censorship. How can we safely do that? Recursive link tracking, perhaps, to a "primary source," which relies on the AI matching the factual claim to an appropriate source, either a video, image, or text that can be considered the legitimate source based on context (for example, an article about Apple's earnings could link to a primary source of their press release). Regardless, the most dangerous form of "fake news" is by the selection/omission of stories, and that seems pretty impossible to quantify with today's technology (and of course the most prevalent on all of our 'real news' sources).
- eplanit 10y ago> Regardless, the most dangerous form of "fake news" is by the selection/omission of stories This. Very true, and woefully absent from most discussions regarding "fake news".
- zzzcpan 10y agoIt's even worse, selection of stories is the whole point of news, they exist for the sole purpose of influencing people's opinions. And the fight against "fake news" looks nothing more than the fight for censorship in the space those in power not yet control.
- VLM 10y agoYour arguments are strong, however have you considered an algorithm based on the laziness and cheapness of humans? Consider that a lot of propaganda is heavily coordinated and not creative in the sense of being centrally created and issued. An algorithm could watch, say, 50 sources and see if they simultaneously start using identical phrases, given access to a thesaurus aren't those odds a little unusual? This happened a couple times in the last election. You'd have a much simpler task of quote analysis of course, to exclude directly quoted content. Then factor in something to detect press releases and video news releases where the verbiage of large sections is identical, this strategy is almost too easy. Another factor is "large known propaganda sources" simultaneously releasing the story but small propaganda sources don't operate at all because fundamentally there is a size cutoff. The Wash Post will be in every propaganda operation because they are huge, but the "nowheresville register" certainly will not. Real news would of course be covered by both, so it should be very easy to detect organic self organizing behavior vs small scale conspiratorial behavior. Now algo-proof propaganda could emerge much like handwritten letters to your congressional representative, before being inevitably ignored, are considered more impressive than mere form letters or signing a list. But it would detect at least some fake news based on fake news being part of a coordinated centralized mass produced campaign rather than trying to detect fake news based on its inherent fake-ness itself. Sorta like swatting bugs that bite you or try to, rather than identifying each individual bug then swatting only the mosquitos. Its very difficult to detect if something is a Walmart product, but its easy to detect if its mass produced, if the quality is very low, if it was made in China, if it contains chemicals banned in the USA for safety reasons, and in the long run works just as well.
- PoarNeemn 10y agoFake news, aka news that doesn't fit my agenda
- eof 10y agofunction isFakeNews(news_piece){ var list_of_legit_sources = _get_current_approved_sources(); // makes synchronous http request to illuminati.com/api if list_of_legit_sources.inArray(getSource(news_piece)) return false; else return true; } ^---- Sadly this is the reality for how fake news is going to play out
- antiffan 10y agoIt seems like Wikipedia would be familiar with a lot of the same challenges that come with identifying fake news articles. Anyone more familiar than I am with Wikipedia care to comment?
- necessity 10y agoWikipedia has a policy to only accept reliable secondary sources on controversial political articles. What comprises a "reliable source" is loosely defined, and what sources are considered reliable is ultimately decided by the editors in a somewhat per-article basis, with some global definitions which are not centrally listed anywhere but are enforced by senior editors and their admin friends. Because of the systematic bias that Wikipedia suffers from there is strong partisan bias in this selection, which resulted in a number of wiki clones with their own bias (e.g. Conservapedia), forums dedicated to show how bad this is (e.g. /r/wikiinaction) and has - among other things - been leading to a steady decline in the number of editors in the last couple years - everyone eventually gets bullied away from that place by a clique of editors + admins. Quoting Wikipedia policy itself: >If Wikipedia had been available around the sixth century B.C., it would have reported the view that the Earth is flat as a fact and without qualification. And it would have reported the views of Eratosthenes (who correctly determined the earth's circumference in 240BC) either as controversial, or a fringe view. Similarly if available in Galileo's time, it would have reported the view that the sun goes round the earth as a fact, and if Galileo had been a Vicipaedia editor, his view would have been rejected as 'originale investigationis'.
- smsm42 10y agoMy personal rule is Wikipedia is very reliable in non-controversial topics, and should be trusted only as much as source of links and search keywords and information about some of the existing opinions for controversial topics. Which is something, but definitely not a full solution of a problem.
- fooker 10y agoTheir approach only works with reasonable people unfortunately..
- hueving 10y ago>Such a system would tentatively label a claim or story as true/false based on the stances taken by various news organizations on the topic, weighted by their credibility. Oh right, because we can all agree on which news organizations are credible. /s
- sageikosa 10y agoObviously the ones that run a news program at 6:30 pm with a heavy introductory drumbeat and lots of fanfare playing while a camera zooms in to a concerned-looking anchor person.
- 3princip 10y agoMainstream media and their corporate backers have already lost this battle. This whole fake news attempt to remain relevant has backfired already, since it's much easier to prove that the peddlers of fake news are those who uncritically backed and still excuse the Iraq war, Libya catastrophe, attempted overthrow of the Syrian government just to name a few recent adventures. They've been beaten at their own game by an opponent better at using modern/popular methods of disseminating information.
- draw_down 10y agoYes, that is about the size of it.
- CM30 10y ago> It should be possible to build a prototype post-facto “truth labeling” system from a “stance detection” system. Such a system would tentatively label a claim or story as true/false based on the stances taken by various news organizations on the topic, weighted by their credibility. So who decides what organisations are credible? Or orders them by their credibility? Someone has to create the list. Someone with obvious human biases towards one view or another.
- padseeker 10y agoThe problem is not "fake news". The problem is people are treating the news like a product in the capitalist paradigm. If you don't like the way your local bakery makes their bread you go somewhere else. Now if the media reports on something you don't like someone else will tell you what you want to hear. This issue happens on both sides of the political spectrum BUT it does seem to be a lot worse on the conservative side of things. All the "liberal" news sources like the NYT and The WashPo seem to be doing lots of reporting on Trump supporters, discussing their fears and hopes, concerns and motivations. Even more conservative sources like the WSJ, not including their editorial page, are trying to take a bigger view of the world. On the other hand my Apple News feed seems to perpetually have a FOX News story. The one this morning was "Is Trump Bashing the new Celeb nude selfie?" All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories also believe global warming is a hoax and Obama was not born in this country. A significant portion of the electorate has been drinking from the well and cannot be reached.
- digler999 10y ago> A significant portion of the electorate has been drinking from the well and cannot be reached. How is that any different than people in the Bible Belt who believe the earth was made in 7 days ? Or elderly people who become vulnerable and fall prey to exploitation (because they believe phone scams, or sob stories from strangers, etc) ? (Edit: or young people who think they're going to grow up and be an astronaut or NBA star). There will always be a sizable proportion of the population who believes wacky stories. I know you weren't implying this, but NYT and WaPo's hands aren't clean either. I really didn't appreciate how they pushed the "Russia HACKED the election" narrative. That's predatory on the same level: take advantage of the nebulous word "hacking" and misapply it to something that doesn't even rely on computers, do some hand-waiving, and voila, there's some "fake news" to dish up to the masses [which is ironic when your other stories are about the spread of "fake news"].
- wybiral 10y ago> How is that any different than people in the Bible Belt who believe the earth was made in 7 days ? I see no difference there but I'm not sure that I get the point. > I really didn't appreciate how they pushed the "Russia HACKED the election" narrative. I never got the impression that those news orgs were saying that actual voting counts were being hacked. But the emails were hacked and leaked. They jumped the gun on blaming Russia, but that wasn't fake news (provided you believe prominent members of US intelligence). Even Trump seemed to think it was plausible... At least plausible enough to publicly ask Russia to hack Hilary's emails [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa2B5zHfbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa2B5zHfbQ
- alyx 10y agoIf everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.
- ziikutv 10y agoFake News is indistinguishable when it is not a blatant lie, and when every news group is on the same page. Think war on ISIS.
- HoppedUpMenace 10y agoNot to sound cliche but I believe the bigger problem in this country is education, which apparently has failed many in this country on both sides of the political spectrum, if the past couple of years are any indication. I guarantee you fix people's problems with English, Math, and History in the classroom, you will have no need for machines or algorithms to filter junk that influences people online.
- billiam 10y agoRussia and China absolutely kick our butts in all these education categories, yet each in its own way is halfway down the road to a being a benighted, ignorant post-modern totalitarian state. Making us better at reading graphs and interpreting data about climate change is a nice goal, but the great strength of the United States is being an open, liberal republic with institutions (like the press) that people trust, not an illiberal democracy as Russia and others are trying to promote with their cunning use of the Internet and social media. That is exactly what is under attack. We need to make some tools that build our muscles to discover, consume and evaluate views that are different than ours, not just map reduce all the news articles.
- Lord_Yoda 10y agoExactly what I was thinking today. Our laziness to read (longer articles, books, etc) and think has caused this problem. Educate the people and this will go away on its own.
- mongmong 10y agoThis is not something you can make people do through education though. Even among people i know that are highly educated and have achieved top marks and went to the best companies, there are those who just don't give a shot about politics. They are not interested enough to look or dig further.
- EGreg 10y agoI think The goal shouldn't be to detect fake news. The goal should be to detect whether a specific claim is true or false. For that, you simply need a site, like a crowd sourced fact checking sites, where people are required to source their arguments precisely, unlike fake news which doesn't. Then you have a resource to turn to, similarly to how fact checkers are used in the face of fake news. After that, you can build an engine to crawl news articles or have them submitted, and detect the claims being made. Those claims can be either auto-matched to existing ones or create new ones (deduplication) and then the site has a fresh new stream of claims to fact check. StackOverflow could build this site on their existing engine. If someone here knows them, can you reply and put me in touch?
- niftich 10y agoTheir headline is a bit hyperbolic (oh, the irony, given stance detection!) but the FAQ [1] covers what's really going on: Q: Why did you choose the stance detection task rather than the task of labeling a claim, headline or story True/False, which seems to be what the fake news problem is all about? A: (...) Our extensive discussions with journalists and fact checkers made it clear both how difficult "truth labeling" of claims really is, and how they'd rather have reliable semi-automated tool to help them in do their job better rather than fully-automated system whose performance will inevitably fall far short of 100% accuracy. (...) Q: OK, but what does stance detection have to do with detecting fake news? A: (...) From our discussions with real-life fact checkers, we realized that gathering the relevant background information about a claim or news story, including all sides of the issue, is a critical initial step in a human fact checker's job. One goal of the Fake News Challenge is to push the state-of-the-art in assisting human fact checkers, by helping them quickly gather the information they need to make their assessment. In particular, a good Stance Detection solution would allow a human fact checker to enter a claim or headline and instantly retrieve the top articles that agree, disagree or discuss the claim/headline in question. They could then look at the arguments for and against the claim, and use their human judgment and reasoning skills to assess the validity of the claim in question. Such a tool would enable human fact checkers to be fast and effective. (...) This means they're very much aware that 'solving the fake news issue' in a fully-automated way is a folly, so they are instead looking for tools to classify and retrieve corroborating or dissenting reports about the same topic. I feel this approach demonstrates an awareness of the problem, addresses some of the criticisms raised in this thread, and could lead to useful tools and datasets down the road. [1] http://www.fakenewschallenge.org/#faq http://www.fakenewschallenge.org/#faq
- Lord_Yoda 10y agoI applaud this initiative. I am sure something good will come out of it, even though it does not completely resolve the problem. At least acknowledging and stepping in that direction is more than doing nothing. That said, I think the other part of this problem is how the news is consumed. Our lazy minds are trained to read the shorter version if there is one available. Every day more people are liking the 140 character version of news. The more you read (from more people), the more you're reinforced in that belief. So while we train the models on news articles, we should also attempt to train on tweets. Just my two cents.
- khana 10y agoAI is the reason we have fake news.
- firefoxd 10y agoI think we are turning *term into a thing. The more we talk about it, and try to combat it, the more it's roots grows and settle in. This is not a new thing, and we used to simply ignore it. Now we made it a thing.
- draw_down 10y agoJust don't bring up Iraq WMDs. That was different, because, ummm... [mumbling]
- uppercasenut 10y agoOK, fake or real? (background: Russia might have "kompromat" on President Trump...blah blah ) Headline: President Trump appoints "friend of Russia award" winner as Secretary of State. Just put a "Alert" or "Fake news" button. A lot of political writing can be considered "fake news" depending on our biases.
- michaelfeathers 10y agoStance detection is nice but does anyone know of any effort to evaluate text based on Russell Conjugation? https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27181 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27181
- JacobJans 10y agoYou'll notice so many posts here that deny the existence of fake news, or attempt to redefine it as "bias." Frankly, I find it disturbing that so many well educated people aren't able to objectively think about an actually objective problem. The fake news that started the concept of "fake news" is not a subjective problem. The problem is literal invention of facts not even related to reality, combined with the mass distribution of those invented facts. It is a problem of mass deception. The classic example: Millions of people shared a post saying the Pope endorsed Donald Trump. This is objectively false. It's not about liberal vs. conservative. It's not about whether it fits your worldview or not. It simply isn't true. During the election there were so many literally false stories that got a very large amount of attention. That is the problem. And yet, so many people seem to think it is a political issue. It's a sad world we live in where even objective facts no longer matter. I think that is why so many people are terrified of the direction things are headed.
- lend000 10y ago> You'll notice so many posts here that deny the existence of fake news, or attempt to redefine it as "bias." That's a hyperbole -- most of the dissidents here do not deny that completely fake stories occur, but express valid concerns about what kind of things will be labeled as facts or not. Based on what we've already seen (the WaPo list, for example), there are publications they would like to censor with very good track records, including the "Ron Paul Liberty Report." Production budget aside, that's often the first source that reports on interesting new bills submitted to the House, such as the recent pre-authorization for invasion of Iran bill. This is not a fake fact -- you can see it on the House website. And there aren't supporting examples of fakeness provided by WaPo for their list, even though I could find numerous factual errors by WaPo or NYT, like the power grid hacking or Aleppo (usually fixed within a few days, but still). And of course, there's the fact that powerful propaganda does not need to stem from provably false facts -- it uses selection/omission of stories and crafting heavily-opinionated narratives to 'mislead.' That is just as concerning as fake facts, and a poor attempt to stem the latter would most likely end up stifling unpopular opinions and further empower the propaganda you see on major sources like WaPo/FoxNews.
- fullshark 10y ago
- benmcnelly 10y agoI am concerned that we may have an AI breakthrough with this project, but no matter how hard we try, not be able to remove its conservative bias.
- busterarm 10y agoFake News is just Culture Jamming done by media insiders.
- skc 10y agoSo it seems logical to me that someone could become very, very, very rich if they built a news platform that was effectively "fake news" free. Even if all the platform did was accept "news stories" and transparently verify it's authenticity I think people would clamor for it. Of course the devil is in the details because that would require proper investigative journalism, which may be prohibitively expensive.
- MikeGale 10y agoFrom my observation the majority of news media manipulate much of what they report in significant ways. When they're reporting on politicians they're generally slanting something already manipulated. Where the facts lie in many subjects is not immediately obvious. Algorithms like this are a good idea provided that they're used wisely. I expect them to detect conflicts between treatments (with false + and false -), which would be useful to humans making their own judgements. Inflicting their results, without a chance of additional vetting, would not be a good idea.
- wahsd 10y agoQuite ironic that comments are being shadow banned, i.e., censored considering this site. Sure, you're smugly satisfied with yourself that you've blocked that meddling opposing view point, but you have no idea in your abuse of power that you are just causing more problems. You're no better than nazis or any other dictatorship, precisely why it is immensely dangerous to give anyone the power to censor "fake news"
- nl 10y agoI've been following this and somewhat involved on the Slack channel since late last year. A few comments based on what I've seen here so far: "Fake News" might not be "the problem", but it is a problem. There is a real set of completely fake stories with no supporting evidence. Taking this away from politics for a minute, the archetype of this is "celebrities XX is moving to town YY"[1] Comments around "this is just mainstream news attempting to justify its role" absolutely and completely have a point. There is plenty of room for new players to fix this problem (and hopefully be rewarded for it), on both sides of the political spectrum. Comments around "The NYT does fake news - see their Iraq war advocacy" are somewhat misguided IMHO. The NYT has a number of problems, but no one should make the mistake of confusing opinion, analysis and forecasts for news. In the NYT Iraq War case, their analysis and forecasts were completely wrong and their opinion was misguided because of that. It is completely fair to make the point that their reputation suffered because of this, but we need to separate that from news reporting. This is something that news organizations don't do very well at the moment, IMHO. As has been pointed out, this won't fix the whole problem. Most of the "Yes, but..." discussions here have been had when trying to come up with a reasonable but helpful task. I think stance detection is a reasonable subset of the problem. [1] http://www.snopes.com/celebrity-moving-small-towns/ http://www.snopes.com/celebrity-moving-small-towns/
- deboboy 10y agoGet money out of news. Sure money doesn't corrupt news as badly as politics but it does bias what, how news is delivered. And I'm not suggesting all news agencies [whatever this means in 2017] should transform into NPR or PBS clones. I like MSNBC, FOX, CNN , ABC... news but they all exist within media empires. Let's figure out how to spin them out into entities not funded from media business models. Hard problem, sure. So what. We have to figure this out.
- intended 10y agoGoddamit. No. Fake news is a meta problem, and it's solve by funding news agencies and removing them from the advertising loop, as well as laws which make news vs opinion different discussions. Tech cannot solve it without also creating tools which will be used against us. The magic tech solution to solve fake news is essentially an assessment of the intent of the author. Any tool which even gets close to ascertaining this will be badly misused.
- milesf 10y agoSo we're going to create bots to trust what is true/not true so when Skynet goes live it will have an easier time defeating us? I see what you did there ;) In all seriousness, though, if people do not learn to read the news and media critically then an AI system isn't going to make things better. I remember back in high school, here in Canada, being taught media literacy. I think it was because of our close proximity to the US, and how influential US media can be.
- drewkarri 10y ago#fakenews formula, sensation+celebrity+cause=fakenews Use twitter to label all #fakenews (a code hashtag that isn't visible to viewers by changing the twitter foundation. The articles are then required to be vetted following rules from a panel that provides clear check lists to be considered fake news. Anytime news Is to be broadcast it must include standardized format, citations, rules for ad revenue and a list of all contributors to prevent a conflict of interest. Articles are not allowed to be written about companies who contribute to an outlet. There also needs to be a limit on how many ads can be displayed as well as how many a company can buy across platforms. Do not allow them to perform any "news broadcasting" unless followed and if it is violated, fine the culprit. The party identifying the "#codeword" would get paid the fines minus an administrative fee paid to the ethics committee as a commission. It's a system that ensures checks and balances in the journalism world. This would have a political component basically requiring places like twitter to follow these rules and guidelines. Otherwise they will not do it because this solution takes away a major source of their income and then they will actually have to compete for your subscriptions instead of just pumping out continuously overwhelming sensationalism