Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

Conventional Wikipedia-quality news outlets are doing well at present, btw - the NYT reported in November that subscriptions had skyrocketed since the election. http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/17/new-york-times-says-subscript...

I've been very pleased to see in the past couple of weeks that journalists have discovered actual journalism again, the sort that doesn't go for false balance and instead paints obvious BS as BS. Which is heartening to see, if a year late.

Having the customers be the readers, not random advertisers, appears to be a way to get the right things happening. So if you want to do a news startup, work out ramen profitability in the era of adblockers.

I might note also: my Facebook two weeks ago was "here's fun stuff your friends are doing, here's their funny cat pictures" and now it's 24/7 "LATEST DISPATCHES FROM THE WAR AGAINST THE INVADING HELL DEMONS". My wife boots her brain every morning reading Facebook on the tablet and I've asked her to keep it to only the worst news from overnight. (I used to read my Facebook to get a rest from that sort of thing on my Tumblr. I must admit I'm not doing so well at making my own FB anything other than LATEST HELL DEMONS news.) I mean, this is understandable - a lot of these people are seriously worried for themselves and their loved ones. So there's a market of pissed-off liberals who've newly discovered radicalism and would like it without BS, that present liberal-pandering outlets aren't quite feeding. What would something that works for that look like? How would you get their $3/month?

I want to take an alternative route. I want to start a company that generates fake news. I believe that AI could be used to analyze social media and determine the popularity of various threads or which stories get the broadest circulation in social media circles. Then analyze the content and wording to determine transmissibility; what makes something "go viral". Obviously a lot of this technology could be used to tag other fake news, but I'm in it to make money. Lies, deceit and deception; "Alternative Facts" and "Signaling" if you prefer, are the name of the game now. Nobody ever went broke underestimating the gullibility of the American public.

That being said, I think it would be a huge challenge for AI to comprehend all the nuances, inferences and subtle hints in many tweets or facebook posts and dig out both the explicit and implicit meanings.

> I provided a source that says there were more considerations than slavery.

You provided a source that does not address the motivations for the particular feature at issue at all, much less ascribe them to "more considerations than slavery".

All worthy suggestions.

TLDR: Replace current campaign managers, consultants, fund raisers, etc.

Which I totally support. But how?

Please ask candidates (past, present and future) about running for office. Better yet, run for office. See what it's like. I highly recommend the training from http://wellstone.org and http://democraticfuture.org. I'm sure there's others.

Also, join some local campaigns and do the grunt work. See how the game is played. Especially fund raising and endorsements.

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This is not a technical problem.

Like the nerdtopian legislative information systems (https://www.govtrack.us) before, geeks making fascinating tools without deep knowledge won't make a dent.

Source: ran for office, activist/lobbyist.

See, I hear techies grumble about education constantly. Our education system is teaching the wrong skills or not challenging students or just an elaborate babysitting racket.

I hear teachers, on the other hand, complain that after decades of trying everything they can, they've realized that they cannot help students unless those students have safe, stable, supportive home lives.

It's easy to say we should introduce children to programming early, even easy to do. It is easy to complain about critical thinking skills and kids these days. It is easy to see that overtesting schools and overreacting to those test scores wastes resources and the time of children and teachers.

It's hard to find a way to ensure one in six children in the US subject to food insecurity always get three good meals a day. It is hard to figure out how to provide stability in a single family, let alone all families. It is hard to say a child shouldn't drop out of school and work whatever job they can when their parents have been unable or unwilling to provide for them.

We have been talking about and trying to fix "education" my entire life; maybe we should try fixing some of the underlying problems first, even if they are hard.