Safe spaces for the Internet
Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
51–60 of 117 posts
Re: Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
#52There 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.
Exactly this. You are just abstracting the decision about "truth" to another set of observers. 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 t…
These aren't crowdsourced news aggregator sites. These are webspam sites, spun the same way any other webspam site is spun (with scripts and templates). The only thing that makes them interesting is that their payload is 1-2 carefully produced political stories, not a sales call-to-action.
Re: Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
#53Fake news = news we don't like. This is just another way to make secluded echo chambers. I see some people learned nothing from the election.
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.
This blocklist is ridiculously easy to extend to sources of information which upset many people but are not fake
Re: Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
#54There 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.
Fake news site are just the latest symptom of the two fold problem of anyone being able to put anything on the internet and people tending to like things that validate their existing views.
If its not news sites, its images with some text over them, videos, etc.
Re: Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
#55Nice! I love this idea. What happens when most sites that deliver news have at least some bullshit?
The idea isn't to target sites that occasionally run false stories; it's to target fakenews webspam sites.
Re: Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
#56Earlier 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.
This blocklist is ridiculously easy to extend to sources of information which upset many people but are not fake
I'm not in love with blocklists either, and don't use them. I'm not arguing that you should use this extension (though, if you do, more power to you). I'm saying that most of the arguments about how difficult it is to detect fakenews have faulty premises.
Re: Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
The example of "endingthefed.com" (appears to be an ultra-conservative platform, but nothing overly nonsensical) from the README implies otherwise.
EndingTheFed is exactly the sort of fake news site designed around ad dollars that we're talking about. I'm not sure if you even looked at the site beyond the top few stories, but here's a few examples just a little bit down the page: > 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 in…
I wouldn't say that it is entirely fake.
When I was in Sweden I was hanging out with several Iraqis which confirmed the existence of no-go zones where assaults and arson including car bombs are common in some suburbs of Stockholm. I take their advice with a grain of salt but they had no apparent incentive to be dishonest.
Instead of a crude block list, why not bayesian filtering?
Re: Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
#58Safe spaces for the Internet
I do not see how filtering spam is equivalent to "safe spaces", or who you thought you might persuade with this comment. Could you go into more detail?
Re: Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
#59How is the clustering analysis going to work? 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/tre…
Given two clusters, I can predict the class of a new article by choosing the cluster whose centroid is closest to the article.
So, given some training data that produced two reasonable clusters with respect to the ground truth, I have a model that I can expect to generalize well on new data.
Now, this is not what that notebook shows, because it's missing the evaluating on testing data! The main point of the notebook is that the Jaccard Distance of the tokens of the HTML of the page, despite being very simple, appears to generate a reasonable model.
Re: Show HN: Stop the Bullshit
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
EndingTheFed is exactly the sort of fake news site designed around ad dollars that we're talking about. I'm not sure if you even looked at the site beyond the top few stories, but here's a few examples just a little bit down the page: > 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 in…
I wouldn't say that it is entirely fake. When I was in Sweden I was hanging out with several Iraqis which confirmed the existence of no-go zones where assaults and arson including car bombs are common in some suburbs of Stockholm. I take their advice with a grain of salt but they had no apparent incentive to be dishonest. Instead of a crude block list, why not bayesian filtering?
When you were last in Russia did you happen to catch video of the Dalai Lama endorsing Trump and blaming Clinton and Obama for creating ISIS?
I don't think trying to rehabilitate this particular fakenews site is a good use of your time, because really you're just going to end up passionately defending a malign shell script.