8 ms·

Oft-quoted paper on spread of fake news is retracted

131 points by danso 8y ago

dilawar 8y ago
Glad that authors retracted it by themselves. Surprised that no one found the mistake in such a popular paper for so long.
- rjf72 8y ago
  It's confirmation bias. When you want something to be true because it confirms your biases, most people are not going to actively try to refute it. This is one big argument for avoiding ideological homogeneity in academia. Homogeneity reduces the quality of work since ideas that are not properly supported are less challenged than they would be in cases where ones idea goes against the biases of other researchers. Consider the replication crisis in psychology as another embodiment of this. This was all really started when a replication study attempted to replicate a number of impactful studies from top tier psychology journals. It turns out that 64% of all studies, including 74% of social psychology studies, could not be replicated. That means if somebody actually tried to replicate any given study, they'd more likely than not find it was dodgy. But nobody did this, because there was not much motivation to do it. Refuting others' studies hurts them, likely creates enemies for you, and doesn't do all that much for your own career. It's a messed up system that basically needs ideological heterogeneity to create that motivation needed to ensure good quality. But such heterogeneity is practically nonexistent in many soft sciences now a days, and to some degree the problem is even starting to seep into the hard sciences.
- wasdfff 8y ago
  It takes a lot of work to come through other people’s work in detail. Even revisiting your old papers that you yourself wrote can have you scratching your head and reaching for your notes from the time. Maybe the authors had some problems using these methods for another more recent project, and found the error. Retraction doesn’t mean ‘it’s wrong please pretend this never happened,’ they will pull the paper as it contains an error, fix it, then resubmit it.
dredmorbius 8y ago
Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20190110014608/https://retractionwatch.com/2019/01/09/oft-quoted-paper-on-spread-of-fake-news-turns-out-to-befake-news/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190110014608/https://retractio... (Source appears hugged to death.)
- danso 8y ago
  The notice as it appears in the original journal can be found here (though it lacks the context about how this study was popularly shared/written about): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0507-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0507-0
  - nkurz 8y ago
    Adding another layer of complexity, versions of the paper both pre- and post-retraction are available on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.02694 https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.02694 It wasn't clear from the RetractionWatch page that the authors think that at least some form of the paper is still worth republishing.
cbsmith 8y ago
This is so deliciously meta... news about the spread of fake news appears to itself be fake news, and the spread of said fake news displays all the properties described in the paper.
- jackpirate 8y ago
  I hope this was secretly the authors' plan all along.
- ajross 8y ago
  Wrong science is not "fake news". A retraction by an author isn't a refutation by an antagonist. The conflation of the two, however, is definitely on the spectrum. They messed up and told everyone so. That's pretty much the opposite of propaganda falsehoods.
  - kosievdmerwe 8y ago
    Given that retractions have less publicity than their initial publication, I don't see why an unscrupulous entity (talking in the hypothetical and not about the authors) can't use a publication-followed-by-a-retraction to smear something/someone while also trying to maintain legitimacy. The authors get some points for issuing a retraction, but they lose some for not doing proper due diligence first. Especially when they likely published their paper to cash in on the zeitgeist.
    - ajross 8y ago
      Don't know that I disagree with any of that. Bad science is a problem. It's not fake news.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - rjf72 8y ago
    I think the key point here is that nobody knows precisely what fake news is, so we all create our own often times incompatible definitions. This probably goes back to the source of the word. The terms usage seems to have been organized by mainstream media outlets to attack smaller sites. If that sounds controversial check out the trends on the term [1]. It was a basically nonexistent term, in spite of what it means having been a thing for many years, which then spiked to ubiquity everywhere in a matter of days. That reeks of collusion. And so does it's demise. The term backfired and began to be used against mainstream sites when they ran articles that were 'factually challenged'. And though 'fake news' has hardly faded, now that the big players have almost entirely stopped using the term - as quickly as they had chosen to start using it in the first place, it's trending back to 0. You even now have articles such as CNN suggesting we "ban the term 'fake news'" [2], a WaPo columnist suggesting, "It’s time to retire the tainted term 'fake news.'", and so on. [3]. The moral of the story being just yet another telling of Frankenstein. 'Fake news' as a term probably did well in focus tests, but once the term was used in the wild it took on a life of its own leading those that created it to desire nothing other than its extermination. [1] - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=fake%20news https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=f... [2] - https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/26/opinions/fake-news-and-disinformation-opinion-wardle-derakhshan/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/26/opinions/fake-news-and-di... [3] - https://www.wired.com/2017/02/internet-made-fake-news-thing-made-nothing/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/internet-made-fake-news-thing-...
minimaxir 8y ago
> “Our work is not fake news,” Filippo Menczer, a professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University and a coauthor of the study, told BuzzFeed News. “In the moment that we found the error, we immediately contacted the editors to retract it. It was our own initiative. We were not trying to trick anyone. This is how science works.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/fake-news-study-retraction https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/fake-news...
- nonbel 8y ago
  Fair enough, still it is too funny to not call it "fake news". I think fighting that is a losing battle.
  - cwillu 8y ago
    Which is exactly the problem. It doesn't matter how careful you are if you're one bad meme away from irrelevance.
    - nonbel 8y ago
      They weren't that careful. It needs to be standard to require "independent" (as far as that is possible) replication of all studies at least once before they are taken seriously. If that means publishing half the current number of original research papers, that is fine. This simple practice would take care of all sorts of issues (bugs, fraud, bias, random fluctuations).
      - calvano915 8y ago
        And also increase public trust in what is published (less of the "first they said ... was bad for you, now they say ... is good for you", etc)
        nonbel 8y ago
        Well, the way research is usually run they look for "statistical significance" and try to have "power" of ~80% to find it.[1] The power is controlled by the sample size, which is a big determinant of how much is spent on the study so it is chosen to be the lowest acceptable value. Anyway, my point is if there is an 80% chance of getting a result and you run two trials with those same odds, then only about 64% of the studies will replicate with the correct result (in R): p = 0.8 res = t(replicate(1e5, sample(0:1, 2, prob = c(1 - p, p), replace = T))) # 0 = Replicated wrong result # 1 = Non-replicated result # 2 = Replicated correct result > table(rowSums(res)) 0 1 2 3944 32135 63921 So, the standard practice is designed to generate a large percentage of conflicting results. [1] 80% is the target, but is probably usually optimistic
tombert 8y ago
I think the title of this article is a bit unfair; pretty much all of our understanding of science is going to be wrong at some level at some point in time, either due to mistakes in the experimentation, or in this case a software bug; good scientists realize this and issue corrections or retract the paper. Doesn't "fake news" imply dishonesty?
- User23 8y ago
  I think it’s pretty cool that computing science is a unique exception to this rule. Because computing semantics were constructed from first principles, they can be completely understood in a way that things we didn’t construct, like genes, can’t be. Computing scientists are just people so of course they can make errors, but with diligence those errors can be made extremely rare. Knuth is a living existence proof for this claim.
  - tombert 8y ago
    I'd argue that even before computers pure mathematics gave the same level of precision.
    - gh02t 8y ago
      Errors are common in mathematics in practice, though, and even expected to a degree because errors in a deep theorem or proof can be extremely subtle. A complex monograph might contain dozens of proofs and lemmas, all of which are completely interdependent so one mistake can be a major problem requiring significant revisions. Part of the purpose for publishing in the first place is to see if other people can find mistakes in your logic. This is particularly the case at the real frontiers of science and theoretical mathematics, where truly new ground is being broken. Computer-aided theorem provers would like to improve this, but they are currently fairly specialized tools with limited use.
      - User23 8y ago
        There are certainly some examples. However a lot of older mathematics was actually quite sloppy formally speaking. It was the demands of early primitive and unreliable computing hardware that forced developers to focus on provable software correctness: it was the best way to find hardware bugs! Dijkstra has a great monograph on developing early interrupt handling correctly. More people should read it, since as anyone who has worked with Unix signals knows, it's easy to get wrong in subtle and nasty ways. Edit: Also to speak to the pure math point, Dijkstra's official title after graduating was "Mathematical Engineer."
BadassFractal 8y ago
Seems exactly how researchers should behave in this case? Putting the search for truth ahead of potential reputation hits. In my eyes at least, this makes me more likely to trust them, as I know they're standing behind their work.
code_duck 8y ago
I would love to never hear that term again.
- minimaxir 8y ago
  Even after the end of the Trump presidency, you'll still hear the term "fake news." It's how language evolves, for better or for worse.
  - code_duck 8y ago
    The phrase lost any realistic meaning after it was hijacked by Trump. This was his intent, since it originally meant the complete horseshit that propagandists were publishing to support Trump, spread by targeted Facebook news articles. I don’t expect to hear the term much by the time we don’t hear about him much.
- sn41 8y ago
  Yes, I prefer the term "rumor". But maybe that is not persuasive enough, hence the emphasis using "fake".
  - jerkstate 8y ago
    I prefer the phrase "According to people familiar with their thinking"
  - code_duck 8y ago
    ‘Unsubstantiated’ or ‘speculative’ would be fairly neutral
  - code_duck 8y ago
    Where do you envision that term being applied exactly? It would make sense if the term was only leveled against specific news that is not based on openly verifiable fact. However, some individuals use it to refer to entire news organizations, seemingly ones that oppose their views, while not applying it to other organizations that clearly have the same or lower standards for verifiability.
thomasmeeks 8y ago
It demeans the scientific process to call this fake news. If you want fake news to stop, probably don’t do that. But it is true that it is a difficult battle to fight.
- nonbel 8y ago
  I've been skeptical of the news for far longer than this recent "fake news" fad. So to me it is great that people are finally getting skeptical. Just read the news on any political topic to see they have been getting away with reporting rumors from "unnamed officials" as news for decades, with no one even recording the track record of these anonymous sources. So we have no way to figure out if they are reliable or not. It reminds me of when wikipedia became a thing and no one trusted it since "anyone could edit it". I was like "you should be skeptical of the regular encyclopedia too."
- MarsAscendant 8y ago
  You can be cheeky and still take the matter seriously. Just 'cause the paper describes (or, used to describe?) a serious problem, doesn't mean one has to tread carefully around such an obvious foundation for situational humor.
  - thomasmeeks 8y ago
    I don't believe that is true. I've witnessed too much satire of that sort become reality, both offline and online. Of course, I can't speak to the rate at which it is harmful.
    - MarsAscendant 8y ago
      I believe you're exaggerating the threat a laugh at the "fake-newsness" of a scientific study about fake news can bring. One can't account for everyone, but there's no conversation to be had ever, about *anything, if you automatically presume that the other person is not at least somewhat serious about the subject matter and does not care about it at least a little bit. I'm sure grown men and women will not lose their capacity for critical thinking after a laugh. If anything, the humor's role is to relieve tension. Maybe it would enhance the conversation. Not that there is any, at the moment. The paper got retracted, and we know why, and we know the reason wasn't a matter of falsification, but in the following of the ethics of science. The way I see it, there are other subjects around the news that are worth considering – for example, as someone in the comments has already mentioned, how come the bug hasn't been noticed before.
mkumm6 8y ago
Anyone else here not even bother reading about new psychology findings? Ever since learning about the "replication crisis" and seeing how so much popular psychology has fallen victim to it (e.g. priming, ego depletion, power poses, impicit bias, stereotype threat) I wonder if news organizations will bring in rules not to report on them until there's been a number of successful replications. They just mislead people.
CM30 8y ago
Now the question lies in how far said retraction will be spread. How many of the news sites who posted about this paper in the past will post about the retraction as well? That's a huge issue with finding credible media sources nowadays. Depressingly few will admit they're wrong/update an incorrect story, and those that do will barely advertise that.

131 points by danso 8y ago

Glad that authors retracted it by themselves. Surprised that no one found the mistake in such a popular paper for so long.

rjf72 8y ago
It's confirmation bias. When you want something to be true because it confirms your biases, most people are not going to actively try to refute it. This is one big argument for avoiding ideological homogeneity in academia. Homogeneity reduces the quality of work since ideas that are not properly supported are less challenged than they would be in cases where ones idea goes against the biases of other researchers. Consider the replication crisis in psychology as another embodiment of this. This was all really started when a replication study attempted to replicate a number of impactful studies from top tier psychology journals. It turns out that 64% of all studies, including 74% of social psychology studies, could not be replicated. That means if somebody actually tried to replicate any given study, they'd more likely than not find it was dodgy. But nobody did this, because there was not much motivation to do it. Refuting others' studies hurts them, likely creates enemies for you, and doesn't do all that much for your own career. It's a messed up system that basically needs ideological heterogeneity to create that motivation needed to ensure good quality. But such heterogeneity is practically nonexistent in many soft sciences now a days, and to some degree the problem is even starting to seep into the hard sciences.
wasdfff 8y ago
It takes a lot of work to come through other people’s work in detail. Even revisiting your old papers that you yourself wrote can have you scratching your head and reaching for your notes from the time. Maybe the authors had some problems using these methods for another more recent project, and found the error. Retraction doesn’t mean ‘it’s wrong please pretend this never happened,’ they will pull the paper as it contains an error, fix it, then resubmit it.

dredmorbius 8y ago

Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20190110014608/https://retractionwatch.com/2019/01/09/oft-quoted-paper-on-spread-of-fake-news-turns-out-to-befake-news/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190110014608/https://retractio... (Source appears hugged to death.)

danso 8y ago
The notice as it appears in the original journal can be found here (though it lacks the context about how this study was popularly shared/written about): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0507-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0507-0
- nkurz 8y ago
  Adding another layer of complexity, versions of the paper both pre- and post-retraction are available on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.02694 https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.02694 It wasn't clear from the RetractionWatch page that the authors think that at least some form of the paper is still worth republishing.

cbsmith 8y ago

This is so deliciously meta... news about the spread of fake news appears to itself be fake news, and the spread of said fake news displays all the properties described in the paper.

jackpirate 8y ago
I hope this was secretly the authors' plan all along.
ajross 8y ago
Wrong science is not "fake news". A retraction by an author isn't a refutation by an antagonist. The conflation of the two, however, is definitely on the spectrum. They messed up and told everyone so. That's pretty much the opposite of propaganda falsehoods.
- kosievdmerwe 8y ago
  Given that retractions have less publicity than their initial publication, I don't see why an unscrupulous entity (talking in the hypothetical and not about the authors) can't use a publication-followed-by-a-retraction to smear something/someone while also trying to maintain legitimacy. The authors get some points for issuing a retraction, but they lose some for not doing proper due diligence first. Especially when they likely published their paper to cash in on the zeitgeist.
  - ajross 8y ago
    Don't know that I disagree with any of that. Bad science is a problem. It's not fake news.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- rjf72 8y ago
  I think the key point here is that nobody knows precisely what fake news is, so we all create our own often times incompatible definitions. This probably goes back to the source of the word. The terms usage seems to have been organized by mainstream media outlets to attack smaller sites. If that sounds controversial check out the trends on the term [1]. It was a basically nonexistent term, in spite of what it means having been a thing for many years, which then spiked to ubiquity everywhere in a matter of days. That reeks of collusion. And so does it's demise. The term backfired and began to be used against mainstream sites when they ran articles that were 'factually challenged'. And though 'fake news' has hardly faded, now that the big players have almost entirely stopped using the term - as quickly as they had chosen to start using it in the first place, it's trending back to 0. You even now have articles such as CNN suggesting we "ban the term 'fake news'" [2], a WaPo columnist suggesting, "It’s time to retire the tainted term 'fake news.'", and so on. [3]. The moral of the story being just yet another telling of Frankenstein. 'Fake news' as a term probably did well in focus tests, but once the term was used in the wild it took on a life of its own leading those that created it to desire nothing other than its extermination. [1] - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=fake%20news https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=f... [2] - https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/26/opinions/fake-news-and-disinformation-opinion-wardle-derakhshan/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/26/opinions/fake-news-and-di... [3] - https://www.wired.com/2017/02/internet-made-fake-news-thing-made-nothing/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/internet-made-fake-news-thing-...

minimaxir 8y ago

> “Our work is not fake news,” Filippo Menczer, a professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University and a coauthor of the study, told BuzzFeed News. “In the moment that we found the error, we immediately contacted the editors to retract it. It was our own initiative. We were not trying to trick anyone. This is how science works.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/fake-news-study-retraction https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/fake-news...

nonbel 8y ago
Fair enough, still it is too funny to not call it "fake news". I think fighting that is a losing battle.
- cwillu 8y ago
  Which is exactly the problem. It doesn't matter how careful you are if you're one bad meme away from irrelevance.
  - nonbel 8y ago
    They weren't that careful. It needs to be standard to require "independent" (as far as that is possible) replication of all studies at least once before they are taken seriously. If that means publishing half the current number of original research papers, that is fine. This simple practice would take care of all sorts of issues (bugs, fraud, bias, random fluctuations).
    - calvano915 8y ago
      And also increase public trust in what is published (less of the "first they said ... was bad for you, now they say ... is good for you", etc)
      - nonbel 8y ago
        Well, the way research is usually run they look for "statistical significance" and try to have "power" of ~80% to find it.[1] The power is controlled by the sample size, which is a big determinant of how much is spent on the study so it is chosen to be the lowest acceptable value. Anyway, my point is if there is an 80% chance of getting a result and you run two trials with those same odds, then only about 64% of the studies will replicate with the correct result (in R): p = 0.8 res = t(replicate(1e5, sample(0:1, 2, prob = c(1 - p, p), replace = T))) # 0 = Replicated wrong result # 1 = Non-replicated result # 2 = Replicated correct result > table(rowSums(res)) 0 1 2 3944 32135 63921 So, the standard practice is designed to generate a large percentage of conflicting results. [1] 80% is the target, but is probably usually optimistic

tombert 8y ago

I think the title of this article is a bit unfair; pretty much all of our understanding of science is going to be wrong at some level at some point in time, either due to mistakes in the experimentation, or in this case a software bug; good scientists realize this and issue corrections or retract the paper. Doesn't "fake news" imply dishonesty?

User23 8y ago
I think it’s pretty cool that computing science is a unique exception to this rule. Because computing semantics were constructed from first principles, they can be completely understood in a way that things we didn’t construct, like genes, can’t be. Computing scientists are just people so of course they can make errors, but with diligence those errors can be made extremely rare. Knuth is a living existence proof for this claim.
- tombert 8y ago
  I'd argue that even before computers pure mathematics gave the same level of precision.
  - gh02t 8y ago
    Errors are common in mathematics in practice, though, and even expected to a degree because errors in a deep theorem or proof can be extremely subtle. A complex monograph might contain dozens of proofs and lemmas, all of which are completely interdependent so one mistake can be a major problem requiring significant revisions. Part of the purpose for publishing in the first place is to see if other people can find mistakes in your logic. This is particularly the case at the real frontiers of science and theoretical mathematics, where truly new ground is being broken. Computer-aided theorem provers would like to improve this, but they are currently fairly specialized tools with limited use.
    - User23 8y ago
      There are certainly some examples. However a lot of older mathematics was actually quite sloppy formally speaking. It was the demands of early primitive and unreliable computing hardware that forced developers to focus on provable software correctness: it was the best way to find hardware bugs! Dijkstra has a great monograph on developing early interrupt handling correctly. More people should read it, since as anyone who has worked with Unix signals knows, it's easy to get wrong in subtle and nasty ways. Edit: Also to speak to the pure math point, Dijkstra's official title after graduating was "Mathematical Engineer."

BadassFractal 8y ago

Seems exactly how researchers should behave in this case? Putting the search for truth ahead of potential reputation hits. In my eyes at least, this makes me more likely to trust them, as I know they're standing behind their work.

code_duck 8y ago

I would love to never hear that term again.

minimaxir 8y ago
Even after the end of the Trump presidency, you'll still hear the term "fake news." It's how language evolves, for better or for worse.
- code_duck 8y ago
  The phrase lost any realistic meaning after it was hijacked by Trump. This was his intent, since it originally meant the complete horseshit that propagandists were publishing to support Trump, spread by targeted Facebook news articles. I don’t expect to hear the term much by the time we don’t hear about him much.
sn41 8y ago
Yes, I prefer the term "rumor". But maybe that is not persuasive enough, hence the emphasis using "fake".
- jerkstate 8y ago
  I prefer the phrase "According to people familiar with their thinking"
- code_duck 8y ago
  ‘Unsubstantiated’ or ‘speculative’ would be fairly neutral
- code_duck 8y ago
  Where do you envision that term being applied exactly? It would make sense if the term was only leveled against specific news that is not based on openly verifiable fact. However, some individuals use it to refer to entire news organizations, seemingly ones that oppose their views, while not applying it to other organizations that clearly have the same or lower standards for verifiability.

thomasmeeks 8y ago

It demeans the scientific process to call this fake news. If you want fake news to stop, probably don’t do that. But it is true that it is a difficult battle to fight.

nonbel 8y ago
I've been skeptical of the news for far longer than this recent "fake news" fad. So to me it is great that people are finally getting skeptical. Just read the news on any political topic to see they have been getting away with reporting rumors from "unnamed officials" as news for decades, with no one even recording the track record of these anonymous sources. So we have no way to figure out if they are reliable or not. It reminds me of when wikipedia became a thing and no one trusted it since "anyone could edit it". I was like "you should be skeptical of the regular encyclopedia too."
MarsAscendant 8y ago
You can be cheeky and still take the matter seriously. Just 'cause the paper describes (or, used to describe?) a serious problem, doesn't mean one has to tread carefully around such an obvious foundation for situational humor.
- thomasmeeks 8y ago
  I don't believe that is true. I've witnessed too much satire of that sort become reality, both offline and online. Of course, I can't speak to the rate at which it is harmful.
  - MarsAscendant 8y ago
    I believe you're exaggerating the threat a laugh at the "fake-newsness" of a scientific study about fake news can bring. One can't account for everyone, but there's no conversation to be had ever, about *anything, if you automatically presume that the other person is not at least somewhat serious about the subject matter and does not care about it at least a little bit. I'm sure grown men and women will not lose their capacity for critical thinking after a laugh. If anything, the humor's role is to relieve tension. Maybe it would enhance the conversation. Not that there is any, at the moment. The paper got retracted, and we know why, and we know the reason wasn't a matter of falsification, but in the following of the ethics of science. The way I see it, there are other subjects around the news that are worth considering – for example, as someone in the comments has already mentioned, how come the bug hasn't been noticed before.

mkumm6 8y ago

Anyone else here not even bother reading about new psychology findings? Ever since learning about the "replication crisis" and seeing how so much popular psychology has fallen victim to it (e.g. priming, ego depletion, power poses, impicit bias, stereotype threat) I wonder if news organizations will bring in rules not to report on them until there's been a number of successful replications. They just mislead people.

CM30 8y ago

Now the question lies in how far said retraction will be spread. How many of the news sites who posted about this paper in the past will post about the retraction as well? That's a huge issue with finding credible media sources nowadays. Depressingly few will admit they're wrong/update an incorrect story, and those that do will barely advertise that.