4 ms·

Claas Relotius, the Der Spiegel journalist who won CNN's journalist of the year award who was revelead to be completely inventing stories about people to make e

Claas Relotius, the Der Spiegel journalist who won CNN's journalist of the year award who was revelead to be completely inventing stories about people to make enticing click bait. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/19/top-der-spiegel-journalist-resigns-over-fake-interviews https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/19/top-der-spiege...

99052882514569 8y ago
He either invented sources or made up quotes from real people he never met. How do you expect this platform to remedy that?
- ben_jones 8y ago
  Digital signatures from sources would be a nice feature, maybe some kind of trust system such that sources could be kept anonymous.
- matt4077 8y ago
  There were a few tells one could find, at least after the fact. For example, he described a women locking her door „with three turns of the key“. That’s something that works on German locks, where the bolt keeps advancing. But the incident was supposed to have happened in some southern US state. And in the US, most locks only allow a quarter turn. I asked specifically about the prevalence of different lock types in the state in a HN threat at the time. That said, this is a singular and decidedly rare event. The insinuation of widespread whole-cloth fabrication is almost certainly wrong, and probably more damaging to democracy than any actual fraud will ever be.
  - 99052882514569 8y ago
    The three turns is only a salient mess-up in light of other, much more damning evidence. On its own, it's credibly explainable as an honest mistake (I was there but who counts these things? I just assumed).
- 50656E6973 8y ago
  Yeah I don't know how well this tool could remedy that, or whatever else it hopes to solve. I don't see how this is hardly different than just sourcing your own facts with Google.
notahacker 8y ago
This is actually a very good example of press failure. But also possibly one which shows how difficult it would actually be for "open source" fact checking based on consensus voting to pick up blatant lies. Relotius got away with his spiel for a long time and won awards because none of the people he claimed to have interviewed read his articles (especially not the people who didn't actually exist!). It's also reasonable to imagine that Relotius wouldn't have volunteered to put his stories on a fact checking platform, but more importantly even if somebody else did, very few online volunteers would have been in a position to actually validate them. Most of the stuff he made up was personal details about individual ordinary people, and even the trivially falsified stuff like a town he visited not being surrounded by forest and not having a town sign emblazoned with "Welcome to Fergus Falls, home of damn good folks" isn't the sort of stuff fact checkers like to get their teeth into. And the latter would be the sort of thing you'd want to establish by asking one person who lived there, not getting a consensus of netizens.
- novok 8y ago
  How I see it playing out: 1. Individual journalists do not sign up for this, publications would, as an integration for every article. 2. A casual reader from Fergus falls would notice a few weird things, and start raising questions. 3. That would start the snowball into all the other things the 'fake journalist' would be doing, at least for the article. Once you get popular enough, the internet haters will follow through, since anyone with something of a following starts attracting internet haters into their life eventually. This will have all the general problems all internet comment sections do currently although, like twitter.
  - notahacker 8y ago
    A site would have to get quite big to have many casual readers from Fergus Falls (population ~13000) preapproving its German articles though, even taking into account some people remember meeting him and eventually got round to blogging about it. Actually, it's interesting how little attention internet haters paid to Relotius, considering he was writing on polarising subjects, winning awards and he was arrogant enough to throw in details that were trivially proven wrong like election results as well as random deniable lies about the individuals he interviewed or said he interviewed. Perhaps writing in German and on things happening overseas helped shield him. But yeah, agree that internet haters are the way forward for crowdsourced factchecking (at least on subjects a bit less partisan than politics or sport where the haters can generally be relied on to reach some sort of consensus)

99052882514569 8y ago

He either invented sources or made up quotes from real people he never met. How do you expect this platform to remedy that?

ben_jones 8y ago
Digital signatures from sources would be a nice feature, maybe some kind of trust system such that sources could be kept anonymous.
matt4077 8y ago
There were a few tells one could find, at least after the fact. For example, he described a women locking her door „with three turns of the key“. That’s something that works on German locks, where the bolt keeps advancing. But the incident was supposed to have happened in some southern US state. And in the US, most locks only allow a quarter turn. I asked specifically about the prevalence of different lock types in the state in a HN threat at the time. That said, this is a singular and decidedly rare event. The insinuation of widespread whole-cloth fabrication is almost certainly wrong, and probably more damaging to democracy than any actual fraud will ever be.
- 99052882514569 8y ago
  The three turns is only a salient mess-up in light of other, much more damning evidence. On its own, it's credibly explainable as an honest mistake (I was there but who counts these things? I just assumed).
50656E6973 8y ago
Yeah I don't know how well this tool could remedy that, or whatever else it hopes to solve. I don't see how this is hardly different than just sourcing your own facts with Google.

notahacker 8y ago

This is actually a very good example of press failure. But also possibly one which shows how difficult it would actually be for "open source" fact checking based on consensus voting to pick up blatant lies. Relotius got away with his spiel for a long time and won awards because none of the people he claimed to have interviewed read his articles (especially not the people who didn't actually exist!). It's also reasonable to imagine that Relotius wouldn't have volunteered to put his stories on a fact checking platform, but more importantly even if somebody else did, very few online volunteers would have been in a position to actually validate them. Most of the stuff he made up was personal details about individual ordinary people, and even the trivially falsified stuff like a town he visited not being surrounded by forest and not having a town sign emblazoned with "Welcome to Fergus Falls, home of damn good folks" isn't the sort of stuff fact checkers like to get their teeth into. And the latter would be the sort of thing you'd want to establish by asking one person who lived there, not getting a consensus of netizens.

novok 8y ago
How I see it playing out: 1. Individual journalists do not sign up for this, publications would, as an integration for every article. 2. A casual reader from Fergus falls would notice a few weird things, and start raising questions. 3. That would start the snowball into all the other things the 'fake journalist' would be doing, at least for the article. Once you get popular enough, the internet haters will follow through, since anyone with something of a following starts attracting internet haters into their life eventually. This will have all the general problems all internet comment sections do currently although, like twitter.
- notahacker 8y ago
  A site would have to get quite big to have many casual readers from Fergus Falls (population ~13000) preapproving its German articles though, even taking into account some people remember meeting him and eventually got round to blogging about it. Actually, it's interesting how little attention internet haters paid to Relotius, considering he was writing on polarising subjects, winning awards and he was arrogant enough to throw in details that were trivially proven wrong like election results as well as random deniable lies about the individuals he interviewed or said he interviewed. Perhaps writing in German and on things happening overseas helped shield him. But yeah, agree that internet haters are the way forward for crowdsourced factchecking (at least on subjects a bit less partisan than politics or sport where the haters can generally be relied on to reach some sort of consensus)