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News Feed FYI: Addressing Hoaxes and Fake News

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Re: News Feed FYI: Addressing Hoaxes and Fake News

#141

Post by vivekd »

tyleraldrich wrote: post #97
r2dnb wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just posted on an another thread that the problem here is that Facebook positionning / PR is to be say that they are a neutral agent. "Share what you want with your friends / family etc." This is why this case is different. If I use ExxonMobilBook, I kind of know what to expect of Greenpeace related stories. Given their size, extra-precaution needs to be taken. They either need to rollback, or make their agenda mor…

"They either need to rollback, or make their agenda more appearent." That is an opinion. They, in reality, don't need to do anything, nor do they owe you anything. Just because their positioning/PR makes them seem neutral, that doesn't mean they are required to be. They don't need to take precaution, and I will eat my shoe if this decision is what causes Facebook to lose users. Fact of the matter is, 99.9% of users d…

To be fair, facebook can, if it wants, put full blown nazi propaganda on their network and delete anything anti-nazi. Of course just because it's legal for a company to do that doesn't mean it's ethical and okay and we should just accept it. Similarly, while it's perfectly legal or facebook to select news stories to try and politically influence it's users, that would be highly unethical.

To be fair to facebook though, reddit has been actively caught doing this repeatedly so I don't know why everyone is harping on facebook instead of reddit.

Re: News Feed FYI: Addressing Hoaxes and Fake News

#142

Post by dang »

morgante wrote: post #29
nostromo wrote: post #8

The timing of this makes it seem politically motivated. I've seen plenty of fake news on my liberal feed. Things like 9/11 conspiracy theories, anti-vaccination stories, stories about the dangers of genetically modified foods, etc.

Issues are often only addressed when they become important enough to have major consequences. That doesn't make reaction inherently political. The amount of conservative gaslighting out there today is really troubling. Any source which doesn't agree with their biased version of reality is "liberal." It's amazing to me how effectively the alt-right has taken over Hacker News to the point where fact-checking is conside…

That last bit isn't an accurate description. What's going on is that the societies from which HN users come are deeply divided, and those divisions are inevitably showing up here, as they would in any large enough sample.

Re: News Feed FYI: Addressing Hoaxes and Fake News

#143

Post by trashtoss »

dang wrote: post #137
halpiamaquark wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will restate my original comment more explicitly: "Because Politifact and Snopes are biased and opinion based, they are not credible to determine whether stories are 'fake'." I don't think I'm adding content to my original comment here (considering the content of the parent comment), but I admit I could have been more explicit to avoid misunderstanding. Then my reply to morgante was essentially "no! you!". Yes, I p…

Please stop, both of you. This kind of tedious back-and-forth degrades this site and adds nothing of value.

Done and noted moving forward.

I don't envy you your job.

I also don't like your odds here: the current site mechanics and moderation pace don't seem adequate to preserve the good parts of the site in the long run, but any significant overhaul would also risk the same.

I wish you luck, with sympathy.

Re: News Feed FYI: Addressing Hoaxes and Fake News

#144

Post by basch »

dabockster wrote: post #129
basch wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why cant facebook just go after blogspam clickbait in general? If a story is a copy of a copy, have the algorithm favor the original instead of the blogspam. If a local news agency copies an AP/Reuters story word for word, have the software suggest replacing the replica with the original. Treat local news duplicates the same as any wordpress+adsense blog. If journalists are adding commentary thats a different story (…

> Why cant facebook just go after blogspam clickbait in general? Hard to do with just a few algorithms. They would need human eyes reviewing sources. And since Facebook seems keen on eliminating its human workforce through AI/ML, I doubt that they would suddenly embrace human reviewers again.

I entirely disagree. You extract the content, and diff it against other extracted content. You dont need a human eye to determine that NBC11 republished an AP/Reuters story word for word. This should be somewhat basic pattern matching. We are talking about a company that can brute force vanity onion addresses!

Semantic analysis should be able to detect procedurally generated content farms. Human turking might be harder to detect, but once a site gets flagged, all its posts can be checked with stricter scrutiny.

It is extremely easy (from a computational standpoint) to rip a youtube embed out of a page and directly link to the source. If mashable and yournaturaldietnews are known content embedders, more aggressively deconstruct their pages.

There also has to be a way to crowd source content verification. They have 1.8 billion people, a subset of those people give good feedback. Maybe some peoples reports should be weighed more heavily than others, if they have a history of making valuable reports.

Maybe youre thinking fake news is mostly political. A lot of it is DIY and Health Tips, tech lifehacks etc. Rehosted videos with a banner added on the top and bottom. Animals. Any content taken from elsewhere can be easily detected, similar to Tineye or reverse image searching.

Re: News Feed FYI: Addressing Hoaxes and Fake News

#145

Post by coldpie »

dang wrote: post #139
coldpie wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the closest thing I can find on that list to an organization anyone not on the left is likely to regard as politically neutral The American right's association with reality is well known to be, uhh... tenuous. So it's not too surprising that they tend to disagree with people who verify facts. Edit for downvoters: The mainstream positions of the Republican party are, objectively, factually incorrect on the issues of…

Please keep partisan politics off HN.

I was explaining why fact checkers appear to be left-leaning, but OK.

Re: News Feed FYI: Addressing Hoaxes and Fake News

#146

Post by makomk »

pg314 wrote: post #22
throwanem wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politifact is one of the organizations on the approved list [1], and the closest thing I can find on that list to an organization anyone not on the left is likely to regard as politically neutral is the Associated Press. So I'm not really seeing what Facebook expects this to help. [1] http://www.poynter.org/fact-checkers-code-of-principles/

Maybe stop the spread of nonsense like 'pope endorses Trump' or pizzagate?

I wonder how this would affect, say, the claim that bulk marketing emails for Trump hotels were actually secret communications with Russia, as reported by Slate and repeated by a certain @HillaryClinton on Twitter. (And, for that matter, the associated belief that the FBI concluding they were a non-issue was proof that the FBI are backing Trump.)

Re: News Feed FYI: Addressing Hoaxes and Fake News

#147

Post by jessaustin »

lhnz wrote: post #46
SamBam wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you come to the conclusion that politifact is as sketchy as the sites that were churning out fake news during the election?

It's not but it is often very misleading. I don't think the fake news is actually what won the election anyway. If anything it was Wikileaks' extreme authenticity that won the election, and I'm struggling to understand how this is 'fake'. I'm assuming that they're trying to delegitimise it by association however. I also find it hard to believe that it was Russia that orchestrated the leaks with zero evidence shown. I…

I agree with this, but I suspect the bigger factor in the election result was that the "straight" news media had stopped going through the nonpartisan motions. They forgot that the tradition of the appearance of objectivity is more for the benefit of the news media than for the public. Once no one has a halo of open-mindedness, there's no reason to listen to Brian Williams over Ed Schultz or Sean Hannity. They could push a more conservative or independent public slightly to the left or to the center, but only slightly, and only when that's all they tried to do. This time they pushed too hard, and the whole edifice collapsed.

Frankly the news media seems not to have learned this lesson. If anything the last few weeks have seen them even further off the reservation. When in a decade it's clear that the institution of journalism is completely dead, this episode will loom large in explanation. "Journalists" are seriously arguing that providing relevant information about political candidates is an "attack on the nation". They're mortgaging all their credibility for the latest unsourced meta-analysis of months-old public information spoon-fed to them by petulant spurned spooks. Every day they come up with something goofier, and yet they can't escape the impression that we've heard this all before.

What stands out the most is the complete lack of objectivity. If a Republican candidate were crying about losing due to anonymous (even if vaguely Slavic...) revelations about her banal tawdriness, they'd be falling over themselves to laugh at her.

Re: News Feed FYI: Addressing Hoaxes and Fake News

#148

Post by throwanem »

coldpie wrote: post #145
dang wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please keep partisan politics off HN.

I was explaining why fact checkers appear to be left-leaning, but OK.

Many on the right consider theirs to be the only political tendency compatible with reality, too. They're incorrect in so considering, too.

I've vouched your prior comment because I believe its content should be visible. It would be a shame if anyone were to confuse that action with an endorsement.

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