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There have been a lot of these projects lately. It's clever, but I am not close to being convinced that fake news is a problem that we can engineer our way out of.
If it at least amplifies awareness in the general public about the problem, it's done it's job.
There have been a lot of these projects lately. It's clever, but I am not close to being convinced that fake news is a problem that we can engineer our way out of.
Every crowdsourced news aggregation site faces the same challenge, too. Digg had serious vote manipulation problems. Reddit's /r/politics section was overrun by pro-Clinton activists, etc. Concerted, concentrated effort can almost always overpower the consensus of average users.
EDIT: to be clear, my point is that if/when this becomes a powerful tool, the incentive to aim it at a broader or different set of goals is overwhelming.
How does it work? Is it just a blacklist? > "Also includes a clustering analysis that could lead to an algorithm to automatically detect Fake News." This implies that they want to do automatic fake news detection, but aren't quite there yet. Is that correct?
Looks like it's currently using a hard coded list of urls that are considered to be bad. For general requests: https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/blob/master/s... For facebook: https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/blob/master/s...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, fake news = spam sites built from scripts consisting largely of a backcatalog nonsense stories ("Pope endorses Putin for US Presidential Election") with a one or two carefully produced fake stories as a "payload", instead of a purchasing call-to-action like other webspam sites.
The example of "endingthefed.com" (appears to be an ultra-conservative platform, but nothing overly nonsensical) from the README implies otherwise.
From the backcatalog:
Putin Issues US Election Theft Warning, Orders Military To Protect Trump “At All Costs”
BREAKING: Putin Just Gave Obama 24 Hours Or His Ships Will Open Fire
Putin ally tells Americans: vote Trump or face nuclear war
Putin Warns Trump…ELITES PLANNING YOUR ASSASSINATION
Vladimir Putin Escapes New World Order Assassination Attempt
Putin Goes On LIVE TV And CONFIRMS That Obama And Hillary CREATED ISIS
and my personal favorite
Putin and Dalai Lama: Obama Is Responsible for ISIS, Along With Hillary
(and 23 more pages of stuff like this)
This is webspam.
The trick is: look past the front page. The front page is designed to look semi-sane. That's the point. Fakenews wouldn't work if you were just one click away from seeing that it's all a troll factory construction. You have to click a couple times to see that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it at least amplifies awareness in the general public about the problem, it's done it's job.
People read what they want to read. For instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning You can get rid of the fake news outlets, but you can't get rid of fake news as long as there is free speech.
Because the current hard coded list of URLs is a start, but it's not really a scalable solution to the issue.
However, from what I can see in this file:
https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/blob/master/d...
It just seems like it's going to compare examples of articles included in the source files, as found here:
https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/tree/master/d...
So how is it going to detect the difference between a real or fake piece from this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, fake news = spam sites built from scripts consisting largely of a backcatalog nonsense stories ("Pope endorses Putin for US Presidential Election") with a one or two carefully produced fake stories as a "payload", instead of a purchasing call-to-action like other webspam sites.
The example of "endingthefed.com" (appears to be an ultra-conservative platform, but nothing overly nonsensical) from the README implies otherwise.
> 60 Minutes Goes To Sweden To Show How Peaceful Refugees Are, Entire Crew Gets Assaulted By Refugees (video is actually of an altercation with a conservative news group, while their interview seems genial, the actual video is attempting to cast the immigrants in Sweden in as negative light as possible, even going so far as repeating the falsehood of "no-go zones" and failing to mention that the rioting they show is actually being perpetrated by Swedes themselves)
> German Scientists Prove There is Life After Death (So get back to church)
> UNREAL: Ground-Breaking Cancer Treatment Snubbed By Media Because THIS Country Made It (which country you ask? Israel of course! Because the leftist media hates Israel, duh!)
> BREAKING: Measles Outbreak Traced, Look at Sick Location it Originated From " For many months, conservatives and Republicans have been trying to warn the public that the incoming flood of immigrants"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People read what they want to read. For instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning You can get rid of the fake news outlets, but you can't get rid of fake news as long as there is free speech.
Eliminating it would be an overly ambitious goal. We only need to mitigate its effects.