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I really don't like the "fact checks" being done by news sites these days - that's your responsibility as a reader, tech can't do it for you. Even more reputab

I really don't like the "fact checks" being done by news sites these days - that's your responsibility as a reader, tech can't do it for you. Even more reputable sites like Snopes tend to draw absolutist conclusions about things which I find are certainly not absolute.

ceejayoz 9y ago
"Do your own research!" is precisely how we wind up with conspiracy theories in the first place.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Critical thinking is a fundamental requirement of an educated electorate. Google and Facebook are culpable, but the news consumer is the problem. If you believe any information put in front of you, we've already lost. EDIT: @mikeash: We don't give up. I just don't know what the solution is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ @projekti: If "it doesn't scale", your only option is to meet with your representatives with a lobbying group, and introduce legislation to bring Google, Facebook, and other tech companies under US government oversight with legislation. They will not do this willingly, except possibly under the threat of regulation.
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    That's a lovely idea, but said requirement isn't in our election laws, and it's quite clear that plenty of voters lack even basic critical thinking skills. 29% of LA Republicans blame Obama for the federal government's response to Katrina. http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/08/polls_show_louisianians_disapp.html http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/08/polls_show_lo... It's fundamentally responsible for news media to take a subject like vaccines or "was Obama president during Hurricane Katrina?" and give a solid, well-sourced answer instead of "well one side says X and the other says Y".
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      > That's a lovely idea, but said requirement isn't in our election laws, and it's quite clear that plenty of voters lack even basic critical thinking skills. The problem is beyond repair then. > It's fundamentally responsible for news media to take a subject like vaccines or "was Obama president during Hurricane Katrina?" and give a solid, well-sourced answer instead of "well one side says X and the other says Y". The first amendment has no such exceptions. EDIT: (hn throttling limits kicked in) > I said "it's fundamentally responsible", not "they should be legally compelled by the government". If your policy doesn't exist in law, it doesn't exist; it's an unfunded mandate with no teeth. We might as well wish for unicorns that bring us gold.
      - ceejayoz 9y ago
        > The first amendment has no such exceptions. That's silly. I said "it's fundamentally responsible", not "they should be legally compelled by the government".
    - DarronWyke 9y ago
      The problem is the average adult has a miniscule attention span. Giving a bunch of data and a path to a conclusion, or even contrasting viewpoints, isn't going to solve the problem. One of two things will happen: 1) They want a summary, and denied that, will lose interest. 2) They will look for the summary that reaffirms their viewpoint and discard the rest (echo chamber/bias).
    - ryb73 9y ago
      > That's a lovely idea, but said requirement isn't in our election laws, and it's quite clear that plenty of voters lack even basic critical thinking skills. I mean, sounds to me like you're both saying roughly the same thing. The question is what is the solution to the problem of an electorate which is unable or unwilling to think critically?
      - ceejayoz 9y ago
        > The question is what is the solution to the problem of an electorate which is unable or unwilling to think critically? I'm of the opinion that fact checks from reputable sources are beneficial when tackling moderate/undecided voters. No, hard-core "Sandy Hook was a false flag" folks are never going to be convinced, but they're not the audience for sane coverage anyways.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Then we've already lost. Is there any way forward, or do we just give up?
  - projektir 9y ago
    This doesn't scale. There's too much information out there for even the most critical of voters to verify.
    - dmix 9y ago
      The critical difference is that even if this statement is (mostly) true that doesn't mean we have adequate solutions available to solve it... "Think of the children", etc. A centrally controlled whitelist has as many (or more) risk than a pagerank algorithm. Moral panics about the gatekeeper's blacklist not being all-encompassing is also of questionable value... especially in regards to an event in the very early hours of a high-traffic news story which are generally full of incomplete information.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    Observationally, our society seems to have forgotten that liberties come with responsibilities. It seems that we are unaware that freedom comes with a price, and that price is not a one-time payment, but an ever-present obligation. We have the right to a free press. Our responsibilities include vetting our information sources, responding to bad press, and providing better press should the existing press fail in its duties. We have the right of free speech. Our responsibilities include countering dishonest speech, being mindful of our own speech, and defending the right to free speech. We have the right to bear arms. Our responsibilities include keeping our arms reasonably repaired and secured, being educated in their safe use, and encouraging safe use from others. The list goes on. To paraphrase a certain superhero, with great rights come great responsibilities. The system appears to fail when people ignore their responsibilities. It seems to fail when we rely on others to fulfill our duties. Every member of that society is obligated to those responsibilities, though shirking their duty has become the norm. I don't have a solution and I am not a skilled writer, but hopefully this gibberish makes sense.
sova 9y ago
I disagree and maintain that news organizations and information organizations like Facespace, Google News, Twitter, etc, should have a "reliability value" beside links or stories that a large number of users are sharing or reposting. Even if it's just a simple "2% of users found this unreliable information" or "97% of 104 users find this source to be reliable." To say that the information distributors can publish whatever they want and the responsibility of information accuracy and quality must fall on the layuser, that's just poppycock. That's just a way for the giants to save money while we all get questionable data with which to live our lives. Unacceptable.
- Karunamon 9y ago
  That hypothetical score will just trend towards 50% as people who disagree with the slant of the story (or more realistically, the source, since people even here make knee-jerk judgments based on source without even reading the meat of the story) will vote it down and those who agree vote it up.
  - devrelm 9y ago
    My thought would be that it would be at the source level. "98% of people find this source reliable", though that's certainly subject to the same biases. Better systems might require more work to mark a story as false (such as how reporting a story as false currently works in Facebook.) Over time, Facebook can see on their end which domains are pushing fake news and choose not to surface unreliable sources on people's news feeds.
    - Karunamon 9y ago
      That idea is also vulnerable. Conservatives will just flag off stories from MSNBC, liberals will just flag off stories from Brietbart, the truth of the actual article notwithstanding.
  - sova 9y ago
    I am not suggesting a democratic end-user process, I am suggesting making the investment of a fact-checking department that any credible news source would be delighted to fund and create. The end-user process is the sharing, the veracity metric must be up-stream, or something that is triggered once a threshold number of users start sharing/approving something. To know the veracity of something that "goes viral" would be valuable, and the veracity metric is not something that end-users would be able to edit directly.
maxerickson 9y ago
They are just media commentary. Should newspapers do movie reviews or should they stick to baseball box scores? I sort of think the radical idea is that a "news aggregator" is some new thing that can operate without editorial standards. People should be mocking Google for the shit job they do highlighting content.
kartan 9y ago
> that's your responsibility as a reader I live in Sweden. How do I fact check what happens in a neighborhood in the USA? How do I know that a result of a clinical test is reliable? Do I check it on another on-line source? Do I spend millions on R&D and do my own analysis? Or just few thousands going to Las Vegas and gathering my own data? Or do I need to wait for a Newspaper that actually has fact-checking? > Even more reputable sites like Snopes tend to draw absolutist conclusions about things which I find are certainly not absolute. Billions of citizens fact-checking every single news is not cost effective. It will be good to have a minimum of quality, and then you can apply any correction to the inherent bias of that medium. There is a difference between someway biased information and bullshit.
- KekDemaga 9y ago
  > I live in Sweden. How do I fact check what happens in a neighborhood in the USA? I question the utility of you having any opinion on US politics, especially at the local level. You are certainly entitled to one but I don't know what it gets you without a vote.
  - astura 9y ago
    Did we read the same comment? Being interested in world events and/or the results of clinical trials conducted overseas is in no way "having [an] opinion on US politics." (Not to mention that a Swede can have a very legitimate, personal, vested interest in what's going on in the US, maybe the GP had family vacationing in Vegas. - I had family vacationing in France during the Paris bombings, my mother-in-law called me up frantically that day.)
    - KekDemaga 9y ago
      How is anyone sure of the results of a clinical trial, and how would proximity increase the level of certainty? In regards to world politics when could you ever be certain a report is accurate? Didn't you always have to use critical thinking?
  - eterm 9y ago
jhayward 9y ago
I couldn't disagree with you more. To make this statement is akin to saying that the opinion of experts is useless. This is exactly what has lead to the flood of conspiracy theories, malicious mis-statements, and general degradation of the media commons that has put us in our present state. I do not have the infinite amount of time necessary to fact check the flood of bullshit in social media, much less deliberate BS in politically motivated media. I rely on curators and fact checkers, experts and analysts to winnow the very narrow set of confirmable facts and conclusions from the vast sewer that you would prefer.
- rightos 9y ago
  > To make this statement is akin to saying that the opinion of experts is useless. That's not at all what I'm saying - absolutely, look at the opinions of experts, just don't expect a news service to present all the ideal experts to you in one place. Go out and seek those experts on your own and verify who you think is credible and where their existing biases are.
  - pwinnski 9y ago
    And how do you determine who are the experts? There are many trolls actively seeking to represent themselves as such, some more credibly than others. Once you push past those--if you can, since they grow like Topsy--then you get the actual experts with their own biases. This very quickly becomes more than a full-time job, much more even than a single full-time person can handle. Asking every person interested in world events to spend more than eight hours a day determining the veracity of everything they read, well, it's not a reasonably proposition.
    - rightos 9y ago
      It's really not that hard to Google something and find reputable sources. Established names, links to well-known institutions, past history, etc. If you expect some single organization or worse, crappy AI to put together the perfect list of experts for you, I'd be deeply concerned about your susceptibility to this kind of thing in general.
dmix 9y ago
I'm not sure about your first claim but I have found a number of Snopes articles making binary (or qubit) assertions that were very obviously full of grey area or were simply wrong depending on context. The worst offenders were typically politically slanted (as would be expected in any human run system or ideological subject) but not only that as many academic subjects are full of internal debates with varying priorities depending on context, which made me question the utility of relying on 'trusted' 3rd-parties like Snopes for fact-checking. If the fact-checking sources are as editorialized or based on the author's worldview on what is 'true' then it's just as bad as the root source. What then is the point? The utility is that they offer a bit of extended research on specific claims, which larger articles or speeches often can't go into for the sake of brevity, lack of research, or occasionally (and likely less so) intentional deception. Their utility should not be fact-checking in any absolute terms. 4chan has had useful research on a number of occasions, that have gone beyond other journalistic sources, but more often the motivation is not the truth but entertainment and like any open forum has it's share of conspiracies. It should neither be entirely dismissed or given some inherent 'authoritative' credibility. This is why context matters, a context currently beyond the scope of machines, and too dangerous for a few 'trusted' humans. There's no absolute authorities on a general internet-wide scale.
- tomjakubowski 9y ago
  > 4chan has had useful research on a number of occasions. Like what?
  - KekDemaga 9y ago
    They found a isis training camp: https://imgur.com/gallery/NpC7k https://imgur.com/gallery/NpC7k
    - doktrin 9y ago
      > They found a isis training camp From the text : "These guys weren't ISIS, just opposing Assad and Russia."
  - 9y ago
vkou 9y ago
Fact checking everything you read on the individual level is not scalable[1], or feasible. It's why we have the general expectation that journalists and Google won't feed us blatant untruths - and why we should have a conversation about it whenever it happens. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/#lack_of_information http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertar...
yahna 9y ago
So you prefer to be able to absorb the endless stream of lies without any refutation?

ceejayoz 9y ago

"Do your own research!" is precisely how we wind up with conspiracy theories in the first place.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
Critical thinking is a fundamental requirement of an educated electorate. Google and Facebook are culpable, but the news consumer is the problem. If you believe any information put in front of you, we've already lost. EDIT: @mikeash: We don't give up. I just don't know what the solution is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ @projekti: If "it doesn't scale", your only option is to meet with your representatives with a lobbying group, and introduce legislation to bring Google, Facebook, and other tech companies under US government oversight with legislation. They will not do this willingly, except possibly under the threat of regulation.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  That's a lovely idea, but said requirement isn't in our election laws, and it's quite clear that plenty of voters lack even basic critical thinking skills. 29% of LA Republicans blame Obama for the federal government's response to Katrina. http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/08/polls_show_louisianians_disapp.html http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/08/polls_show_lo... It's fundamentally responsible for news media to take a subject like vaccines or "was Obama president during Hurricane Katrina?" and give a solid, well-sourced answer instead of "well one side says X and the other says Y".
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    > That's a lovely idea, but said requirement isn't in our election laws, and it's quite clear that plenty of voters lack even basic critical thinking skills. The problem is beyond repair then. > It's fundamentally responsible for news media to take a subject like vaccines or "was Obama president during Hurricane Katrina?" and give a solid, well-sourced answer instead of "well one side says X and the other says Y". The first amendment has no such exceptions. EDIT: (hn throttling limits kicked in) > I said "it's fundamentally responsible", not "they should be legally compelled by the government". If your policy doesn't exist in law, it doesn't exist; it's an unfunded mandate with no teeth. We might as well wish for unicorns that bring us gold.
    - ceejayoz 9y ago
      > The first amendment has no such exceptions. That's silly. I said "it's fundamentally responsible", not "they should be legally compelled by the government".
  - DarronWyke 9y ago
    The problem is the average adult has a miniscule attention span. Giving a bunch of data and a path to a conclusion, or even contrasting viewpoints, isn't going to solve the problem. One of two things will happen: 1) They want a summary, and denied that, will lose interest. 2) They will look for the summary that reaffirms their viewpoint and discard the rest (echo chamber/bias).
  - ryb73 9y ago
    > That's a lovely idea, but said requirement isn't in our election laws, and it's quite clear that plenty of voters lack even basic critical thinking skills. I mean, sounds to me like you're both saying roughly the same thing. The question is what is the solution to the problem of an electorate which is unable or unwilling to think critically?
    - ceejayoz 9y ago
      > The question is what is the solution to the problem of an electorate which is unable or unwilling to think critically? I'm of the opinion that fact checks from reputable sources are beneficial when tackling moderate/undecided voters. No, hard-core "Sandy Hook was a false flag" folks are never going to be convinced, but they're not the audience for sane coverage anyways.
- mikeash 9y ago
  Then we've already lost. Is there any way forward, or do we just give up?
- projektir 9y ago
  This doesn't scale. There's too much information out there for even the most critical of voters to verify.
  - dmix 9y ago
    The critical difference is that even if this statement is (mostly) true that doesn't mean we have adequate solutions available to solve it... "Think of the children", etc. A centrally controlled whitelist has as many (or more) risk than a pagerank algorithm. Moral panics about the gatekeeper's blacklist not being all-encompassing is also of questionable value... especially in regards to an event in the very early hours of a high-traffic news story which are generally full of incomplete information.
- KGIII 9y ago
  Observationally, our society seems to have forgotten that liberties come with responsibilities. It seems that we are unaware that freedom comes with a price, and that price is not a one-time payment, but an ever-present obligation. We have the right to a free press. Our responsibilities include vetting our information sources, responding to bad press, and providing better press should the existing press fail in its duties. We have the right of free speech. Our responsibilities include countering dishonest speech, being mindful of our own speech, and defending the right to free speech. We have the right to bear arms. Our responsibilities include keeping our arms reasonably repaired and secured, being educated in their safe use, and encouraging safe use from others. The list goes on. To paraphrase a certain superhero, with great rights come great responsibilities. The system appears to fail when people ignore their responsibilities. It seems to fail when we rely on others to fulfill our duties. Every member of that society is obligated to those responsibilities, though shirking their duty has become the norm. I don't have a solution and I am not a skilled writer, but hopefully this gibberish makes sense.

sova 9y ago

I disagree and maintain that news organizations and information organizations like Facespace, Google News, Twitter, etc, should have a "reliability value" beside links or stories that a large number of users are sharing or reposting. Even if it's just a simple "2% of users found this unreliable information" or "97% of 104 users find this source to be reliable." To say that the information distributors can publish whatever they want and the responsibility of information accuracy and quality must fall on the layuser, that's just poppycock. That's just a way for the giants to save money while we all get questionable data with which to live our lives. Unacceptable.

Karunamon 9y ago
That hypothetical score will just trend towards 50% as people who disagree with the slant of the story (or more realistically, the source, since people even here make knee-jerk judgments based on source without even reading the meat of the story) will vote it down and those who agree vote it up.
- devrelm 9y ago
  My thought would be that it would be at the source level. "98% of people find this source reliable", though that's certainly subject to the same biases. Better systems might require more work to mark a story as false (such as how reporting a story as false currently works in Facebook.) Over time, Facebook can see on their end which domains are pushing fake news and choose not to surface unreliable sources on people's news feeds.
  - Karunamon 9y ago
    That idea is also vulnerable. Conservatives will just flag off stories from MSNBC, liberals will just flag off stories from Brietbart, the truth of the actual article notwithstanding.
- sova 9y ago
  I am not suggesting a democratic end-user process, I am suggesting making the investment of a fact-checking department that any credible news source would be delighted to fund and create. The end-user process is the sharing, the veracity metric must be up-stream, or something that is triggered once a threshold number of users start sharing/approving something. To know the veracity of something that "goes viral" would be valuable, and the veracity metric is not something that end-users would be able to edit directly.

maxerickson 9y ago

They are just media commentary. Should newspapers do movie reviews or should they stick to baseball box scores? I sort of think the radical idea is that a "news aggregator" is some new thing that can operate without editorial standards. People should be mocking Google for the shit job they do highlighting content.

kartan 9y ago

> that's your responsibility as a reader I live in Sweden. How do I fact check what happens in a neighborhood in the USA? How do I know that a result of a clinical test is reliable? Do I check it on another on-line source? Do I spend millions on R&D and do my own analysis? Or just few thousands going to Las Vegas and gathering my own data? Or do I need to wait for a Newspaper that actually has fact-checking? > Even more reputable sites like Snopes tend to draw absolutist conclusions about things which I find are certainly not absolute. Billions of citizens fact-checking every single news is not cost effective. It will be good to have a minimum of quality, and then you can apply any correction to the inherent bias of that medium. There is a difference between someway biased information and bullshit.

KekDemaga 9y ago
> I live in Sweden. How do I fact check what happens in a neighborhood in the USA? I question the utility of you having any opinion on US politics, especially at the local level. You are certainly entitled to one but I don't know what it gets you without a vote.
- astura 9y ago
  Did we read the same comment? Being interested in world events and/or the results of clinical trials conducted overseas is in no way "having [an] opinion on US politics." (Not to mention that a Swede can have a very legitimate, personal, vested interest in what's going on in the US, maybe the GP had family vacationing in Vegas. - I had family vacationing in France during the Paris bombings, my mother-in-law called me up frantically that day.)
  - KekDemaga 9y ago
    How is anyone sure of the results of a clinical trial, and how would proximity increase the level of certainty? In regards to world politics when could you ever be certain a report is accurate? Didn't you always have to use critical thinking?
- eterm 9y ago

jhayward 9y ago

I couldn't disagree with you more. To make this statement is akin to saying that the opinion of experts is useless. This is exactly what has lead to the flood of conspiracy theories, malicious mis-statements, and general degradation of the media commons that has put us in our present state. I do not have the infinite amount of time necessary to fact check the flood of bullshit in social media, much less deliberate BS in politically motivated media. I rely on curators and fact checkers, experts and analysts to winnow the very narrow set of confirmable facts and conclusions from the vast sewer that you would prefer.

rightos 9y ago
> To make this statement is akin to saying that the opinion of experts is useless. That's not at all what I'm saying - absolutely, look at the opinions of experts, just don't expect a news service to present all the ideal experts to you in one place. Go out and seek those experts on your own and verify who you think is credible and where their existing biases are.
- pwinnski 9y ago
  And how do you determine who are the experts? There are many trolls actively seeking to represent themselves as such, some more credibly than others. Once you push past those--if you can, since they grow like Topsy--then you get the actual experts with their own biases. This very quickly becomes more than a full-time job, much more even than a single full-time person can handle. Asking every person interested in world events to spend more than eight hours a day determining the veracity of everything they read, well, it's not a reasonably proposition.
  - rightos 9y ago
    It's really not that hard to Google something and find reputable sources. Established names, links to well-known institutions, past history, etc. If you expect some single organization or worse, crappy AI to put together the perfect list of experts for you, I'd be deeply concerned about your susceptibility to this kind of thing in general.

dmix 9y ago

I'm not sure about your first claim but I have found a number of Snopes articles making binary (or qubit) assertions that were very obviously full of grey area or were simply wrong depending on context. The worst offenders were typically politically slanted (as would be expected in any human run system or ideological subject) but not only that as many academic subjects are full of internal debates with varying priorities depending on context, which made me question the utility of relying on 'trusted' 3rd-parties like Snopes for fact-checking. If the fact-checking sources are as editorialized or based on the author's worldview on what is 'true' then it's just as bad as the root source. What then is the point? The utility is that they offer a bit of extended research on specific claims, which larger articles or speeches often can't go into for the sake of brevity, lack of research, or occasionally (and likely less so) intentional deception. Their utility should not be fact-checking in any absolute terms. 4chan has had useful research on a number of occasions, that have gone beyond other journalistic sources, but more often the motivation is not the truth but entertainment and like any open forum has it's share of conspiracies. It should neither be entirely dismissed or given some inherent 'authoritative' credibility. This is why context matters, a context currently beyond the scope of machines, and too dangerous for a few 'trusted' humans. There's no absolute authorities on a general internet-wide scale.

tomjakubowski 9y ago
> 4chan has had useful research on a number of occasions. Like what?
- KekDemaga 9y ago
  They found a isis training camp: https://imgur.com/gallery/NpC7k https://imgur.com/gallery/NpC7k
  - doktrin 9y ago
    > They found a isis training camp From the text : "These guys weren't ISIS, just opposing Assad and Russia."
- 9y ago

vkou 9y ago

Fact checking everything you read on the individual level is not scalable[1], or feasible. It's why we have the general expectation that journalists and Google won't feed us blatant untruths - and why we should have a conversation about it whenever it happens. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/#lack_of_information http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertar...

yahna 9y ago

So you prefer to be able to absorb the endless stream of lies without any refutation?