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It is occasionally clear cut. But what if those same pictures are tweeted, with only a vague text like "This is how war looks like"? I've seen this in the last

It is occasionally clear cut. But what if those same pictures are tweeted, with only a vague text like "This is how war looks like"? I've seen this in the last week, specifically with 6-year old Syrian civil war pictures, and placed strategically among tweets about recent israel/palestine war. Some of the replies to the poster were "hey, this is old pictures" to which they replied "I never claimed otherwise". Is this fake news by any objective measure? If you somehow detect (and disallow) provably fake news, it just means that it will shift to deliberately vague statements, strategically placed among true statements, so that they cannot be faulted as "false". I think the problem is inherently unsolvable.

DangitBobby 5y ago
While this sort of "memeing" is unfortunate and probably unsolvable, the sort of fake news that invents or even heavily skews facts to match a narrative could be detectible.
CharlesW 5y ago
> I think the problem is inherently unsolvable. Most of the world's problems are inherently unsolvable if you treat solved/unsolved as a binary condition. That doesn't mean that there's no obligation to help mitigate at least some of the negative effects that technology (and I'm not singling out computing) enables or amplifies.
- beagle3 5y ago
  I don't consider this a binary condition. There's an inherent balance on information dissemination, much like any "true positive / false positive". We might not be at the optimum, but I don't think we're far off either. It also depends on your priors, of course. We might disagree on whether only "authority approved" data can be disseminated, and about specific authorities (gov, ny times, snopes, individuals, ...), and whether precision or speed is more important - you can delay any tweet for a year at which time it can be verified. That will considerably reduce the "fake" factor, but at a cost I am not willing to pay.
fortran77 5y ago
As we see from the downvotes, people feel that 100% fake pictures are fine if they feel their agenda is worth promoting. The fact that people here on Hacker News feel that way means there's no solution to this problem. When you're dealing with pure evil, no rational appeal to not spreading lies is going to help.

DangitBobby 5y ago

While this sort of "memeing" is unfortunate and probably unsolvable, the sort of fake news that invents or even heavily skews facts to match a narrative could be detectible.

CharlesW 5y ago

> I think the problem is inherently unsolvable. Most of the world's problems are inherently unsolvable if you treat solved/unsolved as a binary condition. That doesn't mean that there's no obligation to help mitigate at least some of the negative effects that technology (and I'm not singling out computing) enables or amplifies.

beagle3 5y ago
I don't consider this a binary condition. There's an inherent balance on information dissemination, much like any "true positive / false positive". We might not be at the optimum, but I don't think we're far off either. It also depends on your priors, of course. We might disagree on whether only "authority approved" data can be disseminated, and about specific authorities (gov, ny times, snopes, individuals, ...), and whether precision or speed is more important - you can delay any tweet for a year at which time it can be verified. That will considerably reduce the "fake" factor, but at a cost I am not willing to pay.

fortran77 5y ago

As we see from the downvotes, people feel that 100% fake pictures are fine if they feel their agenda is worth promoting. The fact that people here on Hacker News feel that way means there's no solution to this problem. When you're dealing with pure evil, no rational appeal to not spreading lies is going to help.