9 ms·

It's impossible to assign a "true"/"fake" value to all news stories... especially with our increasingly biased and divided media. Here's an example of what hap

• divbit 10y ago
  >And they probably know that. I imagine their hands are kind of tied- if they don't do anything, then people complain. If they do something, it is possibly not perfect, unless they can come up with some amazing spam reducing innovation which probably close to an AGI fake news bouncer. The only thing to really do is throw some tools up, and adjust them as adversaries (fake news makers) get more tricky, until finally, after a long time, you get the big innovation. In any case, deciding to take a stand is clearly better than doing nothing at all.
  • pharrington 10y ago
    In line with your first sentence: the stand to take is to do nothing.
  • narrator 10y ago
    If the person who was supposed to win the election had won the election there wouldn't have been this huge fake news crisis. The system was working just fine until it wasn't doing what it was supposed to do. The tsunami like immune reaction of all the players in the political system to the incorrect person being elected president is certainly awesome to behold.
    • wernercd 10y ago
      Which person who was "supposed" to win the election didn't win the election? The person who was supposed to win did win. There was only one person with the most Electoral College votes...
      • MichaelBurge 10y ago
        If you suppose that X is true, that doesn't mean that X is true or even that you're claiming X is true, just that you've supposed it's true.
      • divbit 10y ago
        I think one can have this attitude with a lot of things. The job which you were supposed to get is the one you got, etc. It must then be that 'supposed to' doesn't really have any meaning, or the opposite, that things are going according to whatever grand plan there exists for us. Who knows.
      • narrator 10y ago
        There are a set of inputs that go into the voters mind that produce a certain output: the voting decision. The technology inputs to produce the correct candidate choice has been somehow thwarted by a bug in the system. The bug has been identified as fake news. To restore the proper functioning of the system the bug has to be fixed by implementing AI systems, overseen by properly vetted quality control personnel, in order to detect and remove fake news. The quality control personnel should be properly vetted to make sure that they are not under the influence of fake news which may cause errors in voting behavior to leak through. You see, people having an incorrect voting decision is evidence that there is a bug in the system that feeds them information. That, or there is a fundamental flaw in their cognitive systems which is why they have been called "deplorables". /end of the movie evil guy speech
        • wernercd 10y ago
          Incorrect opinion? Who gets to decide the incorrect opinion? The side that thinks Trump is a racist/xenophobe/terrorist? Or the side that thinks Hillary Benghazi/Emails/Charity? Or the side that thinks Bernie Venezuela/Socialist/etc? Or the side that think Stein ... Or the side that think Johnson... or... or... What makes a Trump Supporters opinion wrong and a Clinton supporters opinion right? Or Bern? Stein? Johnson? We should absolutely work on getting rid of "Fake" news... but what is fake news? What is true news that is obviously biased (CNN/Fox/etc)? What is satire (Onion)? Who is producing "Non" fake news? CNN? Fox? CBS? NBC? Politico? I can look at news stories on all of the above and see "True" information spun to make one side look good and the other bad... I love how people think their opinion is OBVIOUSLY right... their opponents opinion is OBVIOUSLY wrong and anyone who doesn't agree with them is a Terrorist/Xenophobe/Islamaphobe/Racist/etc'ad'naseum.
• tehwebguy 10y ago
  Seems like there should be a new category for statements which can hold up to "technically true" but are intended to mislead.
  • empressplay 10y ago
    Virtually all political articles have spin, and thus they would all fall into your category.
  • noobermin 10y ago
    The heading on that article says: "Why Donald Trump's tweet about national debt decrease in his first month is highly misleading"
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• zyxzevn 10y ago
  "Fake-news" was from the start a tool for censorship with a political agenda. Now we can vote "disputed" if you do not agree with something. Great. If it is fully democratic: "Any climate change news is fake". Or if it is Technocratic (only certain scientists and companies are allowed to mark fake news): "Patents are great. Open source is bad. Monsanto never does any bad things." Or a CIA echo chamber: "Iraq (or Syria or Iran) has Weapons of Mass Destruction." (Not really, but we don't know until we have invaded it).
  • mrdrozdov 10y ago
    Spam detectors are clearly also political in nature. And I know some Nigerian princes that you really need to meet.
    • im3w1l 10y ago
      I don't agree with your analogy, but I still found it very interesting to consider. I think the fundamental difference is that spam detectors are seen as acting on their users behalf. If I say an email isn't spam, then it isn't and that's the final word on the matter. Fake news classifiers don't give one classification per user. They don't try to predict for every single user whether that user would find it credible. Instead, they output a single value for the whole community. They act on the community's behalf. Because of this, some people will always disagree, and they will feel that the system is imposing on them. That's why it's political when spam detectors are not.
      • URSpider94 10y ago
        That's a pretty naive view on spam detection. Haven't you ever found something filed in your spam box that you wanted, like this month's newsletter from your favorite club? While you are right that the "ground truth" of spam vs ham comes from you, the process of classifying your mail relies on a lot of data provided by the community.
        • 69mlgsniperdad 10y ago
• Merad 10y ago
  The real world is vastly more complex than "true or fake". The Trump tweet you mentioned is a perfect example. His tweet was not a simple statement of fact: > The media has not reported that the National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Obama first mo. That's a claim: "I have lowered the debt in my first month while Obama raised it". While the facts are true (the debt did go down), the claim is false. Trump has taken no action that would cause the debt to be lowered; it's not unusual for the debt level to fluctuate in the short term. The real problem we have is that most people aren't interested in this kind of nuance at all. A statement that makes your team look like the winners, or the other team look like the losers, is easy to accept without much thought or analysis.
  • pharrington 10y ago
    The next level of nuance, of course, is separating Trump's propensity of associating everything positive he sees with himself and the completely true words of that tweet. The fact stated is a legitimate starting point for a policy discussion that is easily and cleanly distinct for the implied claim you referred to.
    • memmcgee 10y ago
      That's why it was "mostly false" instead of "false". Technically, he told the truth. But the way he wants to spin it is false.
      • pharrington 10y ago
        This is a good illustration of the problem of purported fact checking organizations using the supposed fact check actually as a headline for political/social commentary. If the product you're selling is commentary, don't claim you are a fact checking service.
      • empressplay 10y ago
        This is not fact-checking, this is opining.
• mrdrozdov 10y ago
  It's really a great approach that they're taking. I do think classification of "True" is very difficult, although "Disputed" seems reasonable. For instance, if I wrote an article saying I was a billionaire, I'd assume this would eventually receive the "Disputed" label. Articles not marked as "Disputed" are clearly not necessarily "True".
  • maxlybbert 10y ago
    I prefer "disputed" over marking something "false" if Facebook isn't doing the fact checking itself. But I personalky would prefer Facebook simply make a statement that you can't believe everything you read, on the internet or not.
• coolgeek 10y ago
  > didn't like that Trump took credit for a hard and proven fact Since you, yourself, note that Trump is trying to take credit for it, perhaps you should explain why their reasoning is wrong. "The national debt fluctuates up and down depending on the day. While the debt is "down" after one month, experts say that trend will reverse and the debt will continue to rise. This factoid is a gross misrepresentation of the state of the debt and the role the new president had in shaping the figure."
  • coolgeek 10y ago
    To clarify my reason for asking artursapek to explain - the tweet isn't a "hard and proven fact", it is a claim - albeit an implicit claim, but a claim nonetheless - as such, Politifact is evaluating the claim If artursapek disagrees with the analysis, he should either - explain why the Tweet is not a claim, or - explain why Politifact's evaluation of the claim is incorrect, misleading or otherwise wrong Otherwise, this is not an example of "a consistently liberal-biased source"
• samirillian 10y ago
  My favorite example of bias from Politifact. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/19/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-blames-russia-putin-wikileaks-rele/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/...
  • markdown 10y ago
    They endorsed Hillary Clinton for President. No further example of bias is necessary.
    • samirillian 10y ago
      Yeah? And I voted for her. Doesn't mean I turned off my critical faculties. Politifact is even less objective than an organization with obvious ideological commitments might be expected to be (given their explicit aim for objectivity).
      • markdown 10y ago
        > Doesn't mean I turned off my critical faculties. If a media org whose entire claim to credibility is based around being impartial decided it was a good idea to publicly endorse a candidate, than they're pretty invested in that candidate. From that point, they don't have to forgo critical thinking to manipulate public opinion if they choose to. They could just be selective about the "facts" they fact-check.
• kordless 10y ago
  > It's impossible to assign a "true"/"fake" value to all news stories... especially with our increasingly biased and divided media. This is an absolutely irrational argument, which is not to say it is incorrect. It is possible to assign levels of truths to information - we do it all the time in infrastructure. OTOH, it matters not if biases exist in media - those biases can be "truths" as well to the groups of entities who share the biases. Truths don't imply absolute labeling however, as you so well point out. We all knew Fox News was biased toward the Republican's views. In hindsight, Fox looks quaint compared to Breitbart. Supporting Breitbart or Infowars is another thing entirely, given they support continued, or self-referential irrationality. Irrationality that spreads itself, in other words. I consider this harmful to humans. The only people who don't want truths to exist is people whose intent is to spread their irrationality to gain control over others. What will happen, and you can mark my words on this, is that AI will be known primarily in assisting humans in their final effort to reduce the amount of damage those-who-speak-for-others cause the larger group, primarily by detecting their intent in FUCKING with the way we all communicate with each other in a trusted manner. When, not if, this happens, those who played this game will learn the real price of dissonance.
  • intended 10y ago
    No. I agree with everything you said, except, critically the last part. I too believe that Intent identification is the holy grail of any algorithmic way of solving this. I think the creation of such a system will be then of us. Not our savior. All of the websites, tracking, micro targeting in current and future elections were ostensibly created to make the world a better place. People believed that code would allow humanity to break the restraints of old nation states, and keep ahead of them. But eventually nation states did catch up, and we see what that has resulted in. I think AI is far too overused a term for statistical modeling and categorization. But creating any tool to "help" people understand each other will only result in its insights being used to target people open/vulnerable to having their opinions changed. And that will result in MORE control. Not less. Don't create a tool until you understand how it will be used against you.
    • kordless 10y ago
• abalone 10y ago
  Politifact is a consistently fact-biased source. What you're objecting to is their inclusion of the clear implications of a claim, not just the letter. Here Trump was clearly implying that his administration is more fiscally responsible than Obama's in the first month. That is mostly false. These things are not impossible.
  • Buge 10y ago
    fact-biased?
• donovanm 10y ago
  Yeah I feel like this will just be manipulated by those with an agenda.
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    Socially or politically epistemic systems inevitably are. So designing around this must be among your initial objectives. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_epistemic_systems_gain_social_and_political/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep...
• awinder 10y ago
  The main underlying "evil" of censorship is that it obscures the truth and rallies people behind ideas that aren't accurate, ideas that also have some upside to another party. It's weaponized information essentially. That's where Facebook finds itself already. The utter amount of garbage facts that then color people's perspective -- falsely. Facebook is then left to choose their reality -- do they want to try to fight off this crap even if it means potential controversy, or do they want to endure ongoing controversy over what they could be doing. There's no winning so they have to choose how they lose. They're also not a government, so, their duty in all of this is pretty minimal. If Facebook takes action and it's seen as less trustful in regards to news, I have to think they'd be okay with that. Who cares. At that point it's not their problem, go somewhere else for unbiased news. At least they don't have the active problem of being a clearinghouse for false facts.