14 ms·

Microsoft's mobile Edge browser begins issuing fake news warnings

105 points by jmsflknr 8y ago

glenrivard 8y ago
How about just stop recommending child porn. https://www.technowize.com/investigation-reveals-microsofts-bing-recommends-child-pornography/ https://www.technowize.com/investigation-reveals-microsofts-... Investigation Reveals Microsoft Bing Recommends Child Pornography
pmarreck 8y ago
You can't just "enforce correct news" because people will just accuse it of being part of the left-wing media conspiracy (which is, largely but not completely, a fallacy). EDIT: Not sure why downvotes (currently at -4). Here is what typically happens when I try to point to "facts" (linked assertions) that invalidate someone's point: 1) Person says bullshit 2) I show person link from credible source that seems to invalidate the bullshit At this point one of 5 things invariably happens: A) The source I linked to is not read, wasting my time B) The goalposts are now moved to some OTHER bullshit assertion C) The source is accused of being "bought and paid for" (this literally happened to me when I was blocked by someone on Facebook for using factcheck and politifact links). D) "Wikipedia is editable by anyone!" E) "That's just MSM conspiracy talk!" https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/74/Conspiracy_Theory https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla... We have a situation where the far-left and the far-right (but mostly the far-right) are basically being gaslighted by their sources of media. Maybe the solution is not to enforce The One And True Source Of Facts, but to teach people how to fucking lose an argument gracefully. Or at least, to "compete" on rational/empirical grounds. And gracefully win or lose on those grounds, and not just on "what I believe". And, for the record (and to my point), regarding the "news is slightly left-wing-biased" claim, third-party media bias reviewers have all rated the major news sources, at least in the U.S. (ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN) as left-leaning, save for Faux News of course. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/nbc-news/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/nbc-news/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/abc-news/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/abc-news/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/cbs-news/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/cbs-news/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/cnn/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/cnn/
- wil421 8y ago
  I was happy when the Fake News stuff started to take off. Then I saw politicians use it anytime they wanted to discredit something, especially legitimate criticism.
  - sudomakeup 8y ago
    Thats how I feel about russia-gate. "Criticizing the corporate democrats and exposing their records? You must be a russian shill!"
- setquk 8y ago
  Unfortunately you’re right. This plugin triggers on daily mail which should start the crazies off pretty sharpish.
  - ilaksh 8y ago
    I have heard a lot of bad things about Daily Mail but the fact that you are describing people who have a different worldivew than you as "crazy" is very problematic.
    - setquk 8y ago
      Go read the comments on the articles and make your own judgement. Here’s a starter https://m.imgur.com/80iDatZ https://m.imgur.com/80iDatZ DM comments section is the cesspit of humanity.
      - ilaksh 8y ago
        Obviously suggesting that people be murdered is completely out of line. However I have seen that type of comment made by both the left and the right. I still think you are mainly identifying that people have a very different worldview and devaluing them mostly because of that. Comments that are completely out of line are just reinforcing an existing hatred of this other group.
ilaksh 8y ago
Who decides which sites have "real" news and which sites have "fake" news? A big thing missing from these discussions is the history of propaganda. I think a lot of people who are worried about "fake news" need to research that term. Propaganda is still very prevalent especially as far as war goes. Do people really think that CNN tells them the real reasons for going to war? They will say whatever the Pentagon tells them. Why? Because no one is going to risk their lives and kill other people for some technical, strategic reason or just as part of a larger military campaign. People risk their lives to fight the "bad guys" who are "evil". They need to believe its a moral cause. Don't let some giant company (or a small one) dictate what source your information comes from. If I used a Microsoft browser I would uninstall that plugin. Assuming that's an option.
- phjesusthatguy3 8y ago
  >Who decides which sites have "real" news and which sites have "fake" news? https://www.newsguardtech.com/about/team/ https://www.newsguardtech.com/about/team/
  - m348e912 8y ago
    RT ran an interesting peice on NewsGuard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkY9fMK26dE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkY9fMK26dE
    - tptacek 8y ago
      Well, not that I love being this glib, but, I guess now I know what the Russian government wants me to think about NewsGuard. Also: because WaPo and NYT have issued corrections about Deripaska stories, they're "repeat offenders" who "publish lies" (their citation: Fox News). Also, according to the chyron, I should be really scared of Islam.
      - Bartweiss 8y ago
        It's a reasonable criticism of RT, but it's amusing how thoroughly it cuts both ways: we now know what the Russian government wants us to think about NewsGuard, and also what a team of former US government officials want us to think about RT. That's not to say RT is a usable source, I'm not particularly interested in their coverage here. But I'm also not very interested in hearing what news Michael Hayden wants me to listen to.
somethingle234 8y ago
I feel this will end badly. People are screaming at Facebook/Twitter/and whatever to ban fake news from their platforms. They want to ban it so much that they are willing to give the power of deciding which news is fake to Facebook and Twitter. Alex Jones is a prime example. People were screaming at Twitter to ban the fake news Alex Jones kept saying. An obvious better choice is to get the justice system to make a judgement whether news is fake. Then, those news can be legally banned from social media. It's just lazy to scream at Twitter/Facebook instead of your representatives or justice system. ---- But Alex Jones' case was an easy one. Eventually, the justice system said that Alex Jones was at fault, IIRC. What about a more difficult one like below: * Trump claimed that Warren wasn't native american. * Warren said that she was a part of native american and showed an evidence that she was like 1% native american. I don't like Trump. But, in this case, who is spilling out fake news here? How do you judge whether Warren is a native american? What percentage is the threshold here? Twitter and Facebook and whatever tech companies definitely cannot make this judgement.
ryanmarsh 8y ago
What's to stop powerful or wealthy people from pressuring, or subverting this?
throw2016 8y ago
Anything like this is essentially trying to set up a 'ministry of truth' which is a propaganda operation itself. The kind of structures and thinking you would need to create this challenge fundamental ideas of dissent, free speech and democracy at which point you should stop and question your objectives, but of course if its not in good faith that won't bother you.
partiallypro 8y ago
I think the main problem with these sorts of measures is two fold: a) who gets to decide what constitutes "fake news," would the BuzzFeed story that the Special Council discredited be considered "fake news?" If not, why? How would that story be different than any other that's fake? b) The idea of labeling "fake news" often emboldens believers of fake news to think of some grand conspiracy to hide the truth. Another thing is that the "fake news" scare is largely a farce. A recent study showed that people that share fake news are largely older...well, that's what the headlines highlighted. However, in the actual study they found sharing of fake news to be incredibly low and not really even terribly common. I think the thing I most fear in media, is not obvious fake news sites, it's actual journalists rushing to judgement or being told by and editor they need click/engagement numbers up (this happens, I've worked in multiple news rooms.) What I call "outrage culture" is largely a corporate creation to drive clicks/viewership and social engagement, because current media models need this sort of thing. If you ever go through media training for cable news (I have) they will tell you to play things up. They also often don't go after level headed people, they want conflict. Conflict gets viewers and viewers get ad dollars. That to me, is a far bigger threat...not only because it divides us, but because it discredits the media itself in the minds of many, on actual important stories. So in those cases, people do turn to alternative (or overtly partisan) media sources...and that's where "fake news" often breeds and feeds off of. I think if we really want to battle "fake news" we need to be reevaluating business models of media companies. News should not be something people "hate watch" or "hate click" because what they are watching is so divisive or nonsensical. The media is really its own worst enemy here.
- ljm 8y ago
  There’s also the problem of people sharing meme content ontaining obviously misleading information, like in big anti-vax groups. I don’t think you can run a NewsGuard for badly compressed JPEGs. More to the point, I think the issue goes beyond media and into culture. People want to be outraged and the media is happy to oblige. Something in that equation needs to change.
- dfxm12 8y ago
  would the BuzzFeed story that the Special Council discredited be considered "fake news?" For better or worse, this product judges sources, not individual stories. FWIW, Buzzfeed News lets their readers know, right in the lede, that this particular story is disputed by Mueller. As others have mentioned in this thread, a hard definition for "fake news" is hard to pinpoint, but disreputable sources certainly don't own up to mistakes like this.
galadran 8y ago
NewsGuard gives a red mark for Wikileaks, but a green tick for Fox News. I think we're done here. https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1084876278065446913 https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1084876278065446913 On NewsGuard's advisory board, 5 of the 7 slots are taken by people who have held high level posts in US Intelligence and other state affairs. If NewsGuard was just being rolled out to the USA, I'd still consider it horribly biased, but its a complete joke to make it on by default for the entire world.
- quantumwoke 8y ago
  Why are they wrong in giving a red mark to Wikileaks?
  - dleslie 8y ago
    While it could be argued that WikiLeaks has acted as a useful fool, or that it has withheld publishing information for questionable reasons, it could not be said that they have published much false information. The veracity of the information they do publish is certainly more reliable than what you'll get from Fox.
    - nickysielicki 8y ago
      > that it has withheld publishing information for questionable reasons This is echoed quite a bit lately, I have not seen any evidence to support it. Is there any documented case where WikiLeaks withheld information? Is the criticism about the fact that they have a release schedule rather than always immediately publishing? They're a journalism group at the end of the day, don't they have a right to publish stories in a way that maximizes impact?
      - quantumwoke 8y ago
        A quick Google search for 'wikileaks withheld' yields a few links [0][1][2]. [0] https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/09/wikileaks-may-have-withheld-key-russian-documents-from-syria-files-leaks/ https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/09/wikileaks-may-have-withhe... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42019835 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42019835 [2] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/report-wikileaks-withheld-email-linking-syria-to-russian-bank https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/report-wikileaks-withheld...
est31 8y ago
This is very interesting. We are seeing a shift of browsers from being neutral tools to actively influencing the content that users see. * Firefox about:newtab pocket links * Brave browser replacing ads * Edge shipping NewsGuard With this content curation going on, will there be one day a Fox news browser and a CNN browser?
- tracker1 8y ago
  s/(Fox News|CNN) browser/$1 app/
- annadane 8y ago
  I wouldn't include Firefox in this just yet, a lot of people still trust Mozilla (who nevertheless still have to be very careful not to lose that trust)
  - est31 8y ago
    My point wasn't about trusting or not trusting. It was about browsers adding/influencing content as a default setting, and this being a new thing. I don't know whether this is bad or good in general.
  - fxfan 8y ago
    Call me when they actually start caring about end users and ship ublock origin by default and stop their ad 'experiments'. And I am a Firefox user. Since 2006. But because they are the least bad browser (by far). Not because they are good.
- ilaksh 8y ago
  The thing that people don't realize is that Fox and CNN are two sides of the same coin. Both are controlled by the establishment when it comes to certain lines. For example, reporting about war on those channels is war propaganda not real information. What you are going to have is a 'normal' internet with government-controlled and sanctioned information on one hand. Then the real 'free' internet will run on an entirely different set of distributed technologies. China is the leader in controlling media and the real inspiration for technologies like NewsGuard.
JdeBP 8y ago
A related item is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18977365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18977365 , on NewsGuard's "nutrition label" for the Daily Mail.
sandymcmurray 8y ago
It feels like the time is right for a snopes.com for daily news, but it would need trustworthy gatekeepers and a big budget. I think wikitribune.com is doing something interesting: providing permanence to news stories. Most media cover "breaking news" as quickly as possible, with whatever facts are available, but have no time or space for follow-up or analysis. (Hey, remember that big story from last year (whatever it was)? What happened to those people?)
- tracker1 8y ago
  Not sure that I agree.. I think a news aggregator that works with snopes could be great though. In the end, I don't think that a single news entity will cover things as well as multiple news sites. Some are better with political coverage, others better for given localities, others still outside given localities, etc. In the end, no news source is perfect and those that are better still have a LOT of bias.
- CM30 8y ago
  The issue is likely speed; it takes much longer to debunk a fake or incorrect story than to publish the story to begin with. And in a world where social media is seen as a primary news source (unfortunately), a story is basically seen as 'settled' approximately X hours after being published, if that. You would need an absolute ton of resources, and even that probably wouldn't be enough to fact check the entire online media in anything close to real time.
calimac 8y ago
Corporate Thought police
ravenstine 8y ago
This really isn't the job of a web browser.
yzb 8y ago
I am terrified of Microsoft going this route, since they make my OS of choice. I could expect Google doing this kind of stuff, like deciding what sites I can visit or what people I can contact using Gmail (examples that have yet to happen, but wouldn't surprise me), but Microsoft? They've always been uninterested in politics, or so it seemed. What if they decide to push this kind of political stuff in their OS?
- fxfan 8y ago
  I share your feelings and not just because this is political and thru have no business but because my browsing is my business and not theirs, political or not
- pixl97 8y ago
  The biggest problem with any large corporation being a arbitrator of truth, is the only truth they truly believe in is they should always make more profit at the end of the day. With whatever technical and political means they have, they will make that happen. With the massive amount of data collected at an individual level they have a large amount of potential power when it comes to influencing others towards their will.
- isostatic 8y ago
  > I am terrified of Microsoft going this route, since they make my OS of choice So change your OS. There are dozens, hundereds even, of options, or you can roll your own.
sam0x17 8y ago
This could actually have a big impact as the ones who believe fake news are likely the ones using Edge.
sudomakeup 8y ago
I wonder if this system would have flagged evidence of Iraq WMD's as fake news? Or is it something primitive that just asserts that anything != CNN et. al. is fake news?
- ilaksh 8y ago
  It just gives blanket credence to everything CNN publishes. That is because CNN is a controlled media. The media is actually an important part of warfare. WMD was the official propaganda for the Iraq war.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    Which the media reported was exageration
josefresco 8y ago
Found this reply to the wikileaks twitter post* "So let's educate people that the green tick means fake news and red means trustworthy" This is what we're dealing with folks - people who push conspiracy theories to the detriment of society. It makes sense coming from the wikileaks crowd but it's infecting the entire culture. See also those that oppose/reject the Polio vaccine. *https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1084876278065446913 https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1084876278065446913
diminish 8y ago
Twitter is full of endless fraud phishing ads. I report and report but they pop up back again. If we can detect fake news, why can't Twitter detect fraudulent ads?
- ilaksh 8y ago
  They can't detect fake news. Its just a way to put a rubber stamp on government-controlled (when it comes to certain stories) media sites and suppress sites that are not.
moonshinefe 8y ago
Maybe we should start thinking for ourselves what is "fake" or not by, you know, independently thinking. Not relying on some "truth-o-meter" feeded to us by the browser by a bunch of people who we know little about. This is not a good move and it's not the job of the web browser, as others have pointed out.
samcday 8y ago
ITT: a lot of criticism toward NewsGuard. Though it does seem that it has some pretty glaring flaws. I'm curious what ideas people have to combat the problem more effectively? Solutions like "people should just l2thinkcritically" don't seem practical to me. I think crowdsourced approaches will just degenerate into partisan feuds. Relying on a central authority just paves the way for the nation-states/illuminati/"globalists"/evil-sentient-penguins to manipulate public opinion on a grand scale. So, what else is there?
- repolfx 8y ago
  Your first task is to prove there's a problem at all. Kodablah (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18980290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18980290) is not the only one with serious doubts that there's any such thing as a problem that needs to be combatted. Let's review a quick timeline. The term "fake news" was hardly used until recently: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=fake%20news https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... The huge spike corresponds exactly with the election of Trump and Britain voting for Brexit. Suddenly, fake news was supposedly everywhere and the problem of the moment. Before mid 2016 though, nobody talked about it. To any outside observer it's very clear what has happened here. Several problems have intersected. Firstly, a huge chunk of the left wing population doesn't really understand conservatism - not why people think like that, or even what they think at all. This isn't some idle speculation, it's actually been studied at scale: https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conservatives-understand-liberals-better-than-liberals-understand-conservatives/ https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conserva... Conservatives understand liberals at scale but not the other way around - Republicans may as well be an alien race, as far as many Democrats are concerned. So of course they look for explanations of why people can hold such obviously 'wrong' set of beliefs. And they find it in the belief that the population is as easily programmable as your TV set. Rewind the clock a few years and you can find a lot of rhetoric about campaign spending. Citizens United and Obama saying there should be a constitutional amendment. The belief was simple - whoever spends the most on advertising wins over the weak minded and wins the election. Huge swathes of voters don't think for themselves, they simply vote for whoever they saw advertised the most. Because conservatives were backed by big business, allowing businesses to spend money on political advertising would doom the correct way of thinking to oblivion. 2016 rendered that idea completely untenable. In America Clinton outspent Trump 2:1 and in the UK the Remain campaign obliterated the Leave campaign in terms of resources and spending. Remain spent more on a single leaflet campaign than the entire Leave campaign combined. Yet both sides lost. So now the money=winning line is proven false, what can be the explanation? There has to be something else brainwashing the weak minded population other than obvious political advertising. The conundrum was solved with the idea of "fake news" and the Russian bogeyman, who used ... Twitter ... to have an even bigger impact than political advertising. The fervour that was previously directed at the idea of unlimited ad spend was now turned on the idea of news sources that didn't cooperate and support Clinton (like Wikileaks). The problem with this worldview is that it's as wrong as the previous belief. At least political advertising had a concrete definition which allowed it to be studied, and found to have little impact once people became informed about an election and who the candidates are: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/gsb-cmis/gsb-cmis-download-auth/442076 https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/gsb-cmis/gsb-cmis-download-auth... "We argue that the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general elections is zero. First, a systematic meta-analysis of 40 field experiments estimates an average effect of zero in gen- eral elections. Second, we present nine original field experiments that increase the statistical evidence in the literature about the persuasive effects of personal contact 10-fold. These exper- iments’ average effect is also zero." But nobody can quite identify what fake news really means, hence the arguments over what is and isn't fake. It's probably the case that if Clinton and Remain had won, nobody would be talking about fake news or Russia at all.
tzs 8y ago
Business Insider has a nice article that simply shows the summary for a whole bunch of common sites (NYT, Fox, WP, Guardian, WSJ, National Review, NY Post, Daily News, Federalist, Economist, Breitbart, Daily Kos, RT, Times of Israel, BI, Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, MSNBC, AP, Daily Beast, TMZ, Splinter, Vice News, Forbes, LA Times, Time, and BBC) https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-web-browser-fake-news-how-it-works-2019-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-web-browser-fake-n... Looking over the results for those sites, it seems reasonably fair as far as left vs. right goes. I see both liberal and conservative sites covered, and in both groups see sites with perfect ratings and sites with terrible ratings and site in between. Edit: Implementation wise, this thing is really well done. I installed the Firefox version, and when I visit a site that it has info on, the green/red summary shows up, and clicking that gives details, as would be expected, and that was all I expected. What I didn't expect is that when I'm in Google news, it puts the indicator beside the source name on each story. It also does this on Google search results. It's also working with Bing search results.
aaron695 8y ago
NewsGuard is turned off by default. This seems missing from the conversation here and the "fake news" reporting on NewsGuard.
fawelo123 8y ago
How surprising NewsGuard runs fingerprinting scripts on their homepage. Very trustable.

105 points by jmsflknr 8y ago

How about just stop recommending child porn. https://www.technowize.com/investigation-reveals-microsofts-bing-recommends-child-pornography/ https://www.technowize.com/investigation-reveals-microsofts-... Investigation Reveals Microsoft Bing Recommends Child Pornography

pmarreck 8y ago

You can't just "enforce correct news" because people will just accuse it of being part of the left-wing media conspiracy (which is, largely but not completely, a fallacy). EDIT: Not sure why downvotes (currently at -4). Here is what typically happens when I try to point to "facts" (linked assertions) that invalidate someone's point: 1) Person says bullshit 2) I show person link from credible source that seems to invalidate the bullshit At this point one of 5 things invariably happens: A) The source I linked to is not read, wasting my time B) The goalposts are now moved to some OTHER bullshit assertion C) The source is accused of being "bought and paid for" (this literally happened to me when I was blocked by someone on Facebook for using factcheck and politifact links). D) "Wikipedia is editable by anyone!" E) "That's just MSM conspiracy talk!" https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/74/Conspiracy_Theory https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla... We have a situation where the far-left and the far-right (but mostly the far-right) are basically being gaslighted by their sources of media. Maybe the solution is not to enforce The One And True Source Of Facts, but to teach people how to fucking lose an argument gracefully. Or at least, to "compete" on rational/empirical grounds. And gracefully win or lose on those grounds, and not just on "what I believe". And, for the record (and to my point), regarding the "news is slightly left-wing-biased" claim, third-party media bias reviewers have all rated the major news sources, at least in the U.S. (ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN) as left-leaning, save for Faux News of course. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/nbc-news/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/nbc-news/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/abc-news/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/abc-news/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/cbs-news/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/cbs-news/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/cnn/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/cnn/

wil421 8y ago
I was happy when the Fake News stuff started to take off. Then I saw politicians use it anytime they wanted to discredit something, especially legitimate criticism.
- sudomakeup 8y ago
  Thats how I feel about russia-gate. "Criticizing the corporate democrats and exposing their records? You must be a russian shill!"
setquk 8y ago
Unfortunately you’re right. This plugin triggers on daily mail which should start the crazies off pretty sharpish.
- ilaksh 8y ago
  I have heard a lot of bad things about Daily Mail but the fact that you are describing people who have a different worldivew than you as "crazy" is very problematic.
  - setquk 8y ago
    Go read the comments on the articles and make your own judgement. Here’s a starter https://m.imgur.com/80iDatZ https://m.imgur.com/80iDatZ DM comments section is the cesspit of humanity.
    - ilaksh 8y ago
      Obviously suggesting that people be murdered is completely out of line. However I have seen that type of comment made by both the left and the right. I still think you are mainly identifying that people have a very different worldview and devaluing them mostly because of that. Comments that are completely out of line are just reinforcing an existing hatred of this other group.

ilaksh 8y ago

Who decides which sites have "real" news and which sites have "fake" news? A big thing missing from these discussions is the history of propaganda. I think a lot of people who are worried about "fake news" need to research that term. Propaganda is still very prevalent especially as far as war goes. Do people really think that CNN tells them the real reasons for going to war? They will say whatever the Pentagon tells them. Why? Because no one is going to risk their lives and kill other people for some technical, strategic reason or just as part of a larger military campaign. People risk their lives to fight the "bad guys" who are "evil". They need to believe its a moral cause. Don't let some giant company (or a small one) dictate what source your information comes from. If I used a Microsoft browser I would uninstall that plugin. Assuming that's an option.

phjesusthatguy3 8y ago
>Who decides which sites have "real" news and which sites have "fake" news? https://www.newsguardtech.com/about/team/ https://www.newsguardtech.com/about/team/
- m348e912 8y ago
  RT ran an interesting peice on NewsGuard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkY9fMK26dE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkY9fMK26dE
  - tptacek 8y ago
    Well, not that I love being this glib, but, I guess now I know what the Russian government wants me to think about NewsGuard. Also: because WaPo and NYT have issued corrections about Deripaska stories, they're "repeat offenders" who "publish lies" (their citation: Fox News). Also, according to the chyron, I should be really scared of Islam.
    - Bartweiss 8y ago
      It's a reasonable criticism of RT, but it's amusing how thoroughly it cuts both ways: we now know what the Russian government wants us to think about NewsGuard, and also what a team of former US government officials want us to think about RT. That's not to say RT is a usable source, I'm not particularly interested in their coverage here. But I'm also not very interested in hearing what news Michael Hayden wants me to listen to.

somethingle234 8y ago

I feel this will end badly. People are screaming at Facebook/Twitter/and whatever to ban fake news from their platforms. They want to ban it so much that they are willing to give the power of deciding which news is fake to Facebook and Twitter. Alex Jones is a prime example. People were screaming at Twitter to ban the fake news Alex Jones kept saying. An obvious better choice is to get the justice system to make a judgement whether news is fake. Then, those news can be legally banned from social media. It's just lazy to scream at Twitter/Facebook instead of your representatives or justice system. ---- But Alex Jones' case was an easy one. Eventually, the justice system said that Alex Jones was at fault, IIRC. What about a more difficult one like below: * Trump claimed that Warren wasn't native american. * Warren said that she was a part of native american and showed an evidence that she was like 1% native american. I don't like Trump. But, in this case, who is spilling out fake news here? How do you judge whether Warren is a native american? What percentage is the threshold here? Twitter and Facebook and whatever tech companies definitely cannot make this judgement.

ryanmarsh 8y ago

What's to stop powerful or wealthy people from pressuring, or subverting this?

throw2016 8y ago

Anything like this is essentially trying to set up a 'ministry of truth' which is a propaganda operation itself. The kind of structures and thinking you would need to create this challenge fundamental ideas of dissent, free speech and democracy at which point you should stop and question your objectives, but of course if its not in good faith that won't bother you.

partiallypro 8y ago

I think the main problem with these sorts of measures is two fold: a) who gets to decide what constitutes "fake news," would the BuzzFeed story that the Special Council discredited be considered "fake news?" If not, why? How would that story be different than any other that's fake? b) The idea of labeling "fake news" often emboldens believers of fake news to think of some grand conspiracy to hide the truth. Another thing is that the "fake news" scare is largely a farce. A recent study showed that people that share fake news are largely older...well, that's what the headlines highlighted. However, in the actual study they found sharing of fake news to be incredibly low and not really even terribly common. I think the thing I most fear in media, is not obvious fake news sites, it's actual journalists rushing to judgement or being told by and editor they need click/engagement numbers up (this happens, I've worked in multiple news rooms.) What I call "outrage culture" is largely a corporate creation to drive clicks/viewership and social engagement, because current media models need this sort of thing. If you ever go through media training for cable news (I have) they will tell you to play things up. They also often don't go after level headed people, they want conflict. Conflict gets viewers and viewers get ad dollars. That to me, is a far bigger threat...not only because it divides us, but because it discredits the media itself in the minds of many, on actual important stories. So in those cases, people do turn to alternative (or overtly partisan) media sources...and that's where "fake news" often breeds and feeds off of. I think if we really want to battle "fake news" we need to be reevaluating business models of media companies. News should not be something people "hate watch" or "hate click" because what they are watching is so divisive or nonsensical. The media is really its own worst enemy here.

ljm 8y ago
There’s also the problem of people sharing meme content ontaining obviously misleading information, like in big anti-vax groups. I don’t think you can run a NewsGuard for badly compressed JPEGs. More to the point, I think the issue goes beyond media and into culture. People want to be outraged and the media is happy to oblige. Something in that equation needs to change.
dfxm12 8y ago
would the BuzzFeed story that the Special Council discredited be considered "fake news?" For better or worse, this product judges sources, not individual stories. FWIW, Buzzfeed News lets their readers know, right in the lede, that this particular story is disputed by Mueller. As others have mentioned in this thread, a hard definition for "fake news" is hard to pinpoint, but disreputable sources certainly don't own up to mistakes like this.

galadran 8y ago

NewsGuard gives a red mark for Wikileaks, but a green tick for Fox News. I think we're done here. https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1084876278065446913 https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1084876278065446913 On NewsGuard's advisory board, 5 of the 7 slots are taken by people who have held high level posts in US Intelligence and other state affairs. If NewsGuard was just being rolled out to the USA, I'd still consider it horribly biased, but its a complete joke to make it on by default for the entire world.

quantumwoke 8y ago
Why are they wrong in giving a red mark to Wikileaks?
- dleslie 8y ago
  While it could be argued that WikiLeaks has acted as a useful fool, or that it has withheld publishing information for questionable reasons, it could not be said that they have published much false information. The veracity of the information they do publish is certainly more reliable than what you'll get from Fox.
  - nickysielicki 8y ago
    > that it has withheld publishing information for questionable reasons This is echoed quite a bit lately, I have not seen any evidence to support it. Is there any documented case where WikiLeaks withheld information? Is the criticism about the fact that they have a release schedule rather than always immediately publishing? They're a journalism group at the end of the day, don't they have a right to publish stories in a way that maximizes impact?
    - quantumwoke 8y ago
      A quick Google search for 'wikileaks withheld' yields a few links [0][1][2]. [0] https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/09/wikileaks-may-have-withheld-key-russian-documents-from-syria-files-leaks/ https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/09/wikileaks-may-have-withhe... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42019835 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42019835 [2] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/report-wikileaks-withheld-email-linking-syria-to-russian-bank https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/report-wikileaks-withheld...

est31 8y ago

This is very interesting. We are seeing a shift of browsers from being neutral tools to actively influencing the content that users see. * Firefox about:newtab pocket links * Brave browser replacing ads * Edge shipping NewsGuard With this content curation going on, will there be one day a Fox news browser and a CNN browser?

tracker1 8y ago
s/(Fox News|CNN) browser/$1 app/
annadane 8y ago
I wouldn't include Firefox in this just yet, a lot of people still trust Mozilla (who nevertheless still have to be very careful not to lose that trust)
- est31 8y ago
  My point wasn't about trusting or not trusting. It was about browsers adding/influencing content as a default setting, and this being a new thing. I don't know whether this is bad or good in general.
- fxfan 8y ago
  Call me when they actually start caring about end users and ship ublock origin by default and stop their ad 'experiments'. And I am a Firefox user. Since 2006. But because they are the least bad browser (by far). Not because they are good.
ilaksh 8y ago
The thing that people don't realize is that Fox and CNN are two sides of the same coin. Both are controlled by the establishment when it comes to certain lines. For example, reporting about war on those channels is war propaganda not real information. What you are going to have is a 'normal' internet with government-controlled and sanctioned information on one hand. Then the real 'free' internet will run on an entirely different set of distributed technologies. China is the leader in controlling media and the real inspiration for technologies like NewsGuard.

JdeBP 8y ago

A related item is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18977365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18977365 , on NewsGuard's "nutrition label" for the Daily Mail.

sandymcmurray 8y ago

It feels like the time is right for a snopes.com for daily news, but it would need trustworthy gatekeepers and a big budget. I think wikitribune.com is doing something interesting: providing permanence to news stories. Most media cover "breaking news" as quickly as possible, with whatever facts are available, but have no time or space for follow-up or analysis. (Hey, remember that big story from last year (whatever it was)? What happened to those people?)

tracker1 8y ago
Not sure that I agree.. I think a news aggregator that works with snopes could be great though. In the end, I don't think that a single news entity will cover things as well as multiple news sites. Some are better with political coverage, others better for given localities, others still outside given localities, etc. In the end, no news source is perfect and those that are better still have a LOT of bias.
CM30 8y ago
The issue is likely speed; it takes much longer to debunk a fake or incorrect story than to publish the story to begin with. And in a world where social media is seen as a primary news source (unfortunately), a story is basically seen as 'settled' approximately X hours after being published, if that. You would need an absolute ton of resources, and even that probably wouldn't be enough to fact check the entire online media in anything close to real time.

calimac 8y ago

Corporate Thought police

ravenstine 8y ago

This really isn't the job of a web browser.

yzb 8y ago

I am terrified of Microsoft going this route, since they make my OS of choice. I could expect Google doing this kind of stuff, like deciding what sites I can visit or what people I can contact using Gmail (examples that have yet to happen, but wouldn't surprise me), but Microsoft? They've always been uninterested in politics, or so it seemed. What if they decide to push this kind of political stuff in their OS?

fxfan 8y ago
I share your feelings and not just because this is political and thru have no business but because my browsing is my business and not theirs, political or not
pixl97 8y ago
The biggest problem with any large corporation being a arbitrator of truth, is the only truth they truly believe in is they should always make more profit at the end of the day. With whatever technical and political means they have, they will make that happen. With the massive amount of data collected at an individual level they have a large amount of potential power when it comes to influencing others towards their will.
isostatic 8y ago
> I am terrified of Microsoft going this route, since they make my OS of choice So change your OS. There are dozens, hundereds even, of options, or you can roll your own.

sam0x17 8y ago

This could actually have a big impact as the ones who believe fake news are likely the ones using Edge.

sudomakeup 8y ago

I wonder if this system would have flagged evidence of Iraq WMD's as fake news? Or is it something primitive that just asserts that anything != CNN et. al. is fake news?

ilaksh 8y ago
It just gives blanket credence to everything CNN publishes. That is because CNN is a controlled media. The media is actually an important part of warfare. WMD was the official propaganda for the Iraq war.
- isostatic 8y ago
  Which the media reported was exageration

josefresco 8y ago

Found this reply to the wikileaks twitter post* "So let's educate people that the green tick means fake news and red means trustworthy" This is what we're dealing with folks - people who push conspiracy theories to the detriment of society. It makes sense coming from the wikileaks crowd but it's infecting the entire culture. See also those that oppose/reject the Polio vaccine. *https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1084876278065446913 https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1084876278065446913

diminish 8y ago

Twitter is full of endless fraud phishing ads. I report and report but they pop up back again. If we can detect fake news, why can't Twitter detect fraudulent ads?

ilaksh 8y ago
They can't detect fake news. Its just a way to put a rubber stamp on government-controlled (when it comes to certain stories) media sites and suppress sites that are not.

moonshinefe 8y ago

Maybe we should start thinking for ourselves what is "fake" or not by, you know, independently thinking. Not relying on some "truth-o-meter" feeded to us by the browser by a bunch of people who we know little about. This is not a good move and it's not the job of the web browser, as others have pointed out.

samcday 8y ago

ITT: a lot of criticism toward NewsGuard. Though it does seem that it has some pretty glaring flaws. I'm curious what ideas people have to combat the problem more effectively? Solutions like "people should just l2thinkcritically" don't seem practical to me. I think crowdsourced approaches will just degenerate into partisan feuds. Relying on a central authority just paves the way for the nation-states/illuminati/"globalists"/evil-sentient-penguins to manipulate public opinion on a grand scale. So, what else is there?

repolfx 8y ago
Your first task is to prove there's a problem at all. Kodablah (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18980290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18980290) is not the only one with serious doubts that there's any such thing as a problem that needs to be combatted. Let's review a quick timeline. The term "fake news" was hardly used until recently: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=fake%20news https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... The huge spike corresponds exactly with the election of Trump and Britain voting for Brexit. Suddenly, fake news was supposedly everywhere and the problem of the moment. Before mid 2016 though, nobody talked about it. To any outside observer it's very clear what has happened here. Several problems have intersected. Firstly, a huge chunk of the left wing population doesn't really understand conservatism - not why people think like that, or even what they think at all. This isn't some idle speculation, it's actually been studied at scale: https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conservatives-understand-liberals-better-than-liberals-understand-conservatives/ https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conserva... Conservatives understand liberals at scale but not the other way around - Republicans may as well be an alien race, as far as many Democrats are concerned. So of course they look for explanations of why people can hold such obviously 'wrong' set of beliefs. And they find it in the belief that the population is as easily programmable as your TV set. Rewind the clock a few years and you can find a lot of rhetoric about campaign spending. Citizens United and Obama saying there should be a constitutional amendment. The belief was simple - whoever spends the most on advertising wins over the weak minded and wins the election. Huge swathes of voters don't think for themselves, they simply vote for whoever they saw advertised the most. Because conservatives were backed by big business, allowing businesses to spend money on political advertising would doom the correct way of thinking to oblivion. 2016 rendered that idea completely untenable. In America Clinton outspent Trump 2:1 and in the UK the Remain campaign obliterated the Leave campaign in terms of resources and spending. Remain spent more on a single leaflet campaign than the entire Leave campaign combined. Yet both sides lost. So now the money=winning line is proven false, what can be the explanation? There has to be something else brainwashing the weak minded population other than obvious political advertising. The conundrum was solved with the idea of "fake news" and the Russian bogeyman, who used ... Twitter ... to have an even bigger impact than political advertising. The fervour that was previously directed at the idea of unlimited ad spend was now turned on the idea of news sources that didn't cooperate and support Clinton (like Wikileaks). The problem with this worldview is that it's as wrong as the previous belief. At least political advertising had a concrete definition which allowed it to be studied, and found to have little impact once people became informed about an election and who the candidates are: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/gsb-cmis/gsb-cmis-download-auth/442076 https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/gsb-cmis/gsb-cmis-download-auth... "We argue that the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general elections is zero. First, a systematic meta-analysis of 40 field experiments estimates an average effect of zero in gen- eral elections. Second, we present nine original field experiments that increase the statistical evidence in the literature about the persuasive effects of personal contact 10-fold. These exper- iments’ average effect is also zero." But nobody can quite identify what fake news really means, hence the arguments over what is and isn't fake. It's probably the case that if Clinton and Remain had won, nobody would be talking about fake news or Russia at all.

tzs 8y ago

Business Insider has a nice article that simply shows the summary for a whole bunch of common sites (NYT, Fox, WP, Guardian, WSJ, National Review, NY Post, Daily News, Federalist, Economist, Breitbart, Daily Kos, RT, Times of Israel, BI, Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, MSNBC, AP, Daily Beast, TMZ, Splinter, Vice News, Forbes, LA Times, Time, and BBC) https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-web-browser-fake-news-how-it-works-2019-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-web-browser-fake-n... Looking over the results for those sites, it seems reasonably fair as far as left vs. right goes. I see both liberal and conservative sites covered, and in both groups see sites with perfect ratings and sites with terrible ratings and site in between. Edit: Implementation wise, this thing is really well done. I installed the Firefox version, and when I visit a site that it has info on, the green/red summary shows up, and clicking that gives details, as would be expected, and that was all I expected. What I didn't expect is that when I'm in Google news, it puts the indicator beside the source name on each story. It also does this on Google search results. It's also working with Bing search results.

aaron695 8y ago

NewsGuard is turned off by default. This seems missing from the conversation here and the "fake news" reporting on NewsGuard.

fawelo123 8y ago

How surprising NewsGuard runs fingerprinting scripts on their homepage. Very trustable.