51–60 of 233 posts
So who decides what organisations are credible? Or orders them by their credibility? Someone has to create the list. Someone with obvious human biases towards one view or another.
It makes me sad to see yet another tech team go down the road of "machines will help us filter the truth" They will not, and the reason has to do with language. Ludwig Wittgenstein tackled this 100 years ago. The best that machines will do for you is to label something as true or not as if you had consumed the article and decided on your own That is a completely different thing from identifying fake news or truth The…
Wittgenstein wasn't around when a president used Twitter to both control the media and get elected. Maybe news could rely on first principles approach. Quantify things like political stability, information availability, cultural problems, etc. and maybe apply a first principles approach and maybe an algorithm could tell use what the hell is going on at any given moment and maybe give us some insight into what may go…
Good luck. It's a worthy goal, but we are very far away from being able to do this in a rigorous fashion. There is a reason academia has the distinctions of "hard science", "soft science", and "not science". Cultural and political dynamics, by their inherent nature, might never be objectively quantified.
If you don't like the way your local bakery makes their bread you go somewhere else. Now if the media reports on something you don't like someone else will tell you what you want to hear.
This issue happens on both sides of the political spectrum BUT it does seem to be a lot worse on the conservative side of things. All the "liberal" news sources like the NYT and The WashPo seem to be doing lots of reporting on Trump supporters, discussing their fears and hopes, concerns and motivations. Even more conservative sources like the WSJ, not including their editorial page, are trying to take a bigger view of the world.
On the other hand my Apple News feed seems to perpetually have a FOX News story. The one this morning was "Is Trump Bashing the new Celeb nude selfie?"
All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories also believe global warming is a hoax and Obama was not born in this country. A significant portion of the electorate has been drinking from the well and cannot be reached.
It seems like Wikipedia would be familiar with a lot of the same challenges that come with identifying fake news articles. Anyone more familiar than I am with Wikipedia care to comment?
Quoting Wikipedia policy itself:
>If Wikipedia had been available around the sixth century B.C., it would have reported the view that the Earth is flat as a fact and without qualification. And it would have reported the views of Eratosthenes (who correctly determined the earth's circumference in 240BC) either as controversial, or a fringe view. Similarly if available in Galileo's time, it would have reported the view that the sun goes round the earth as a fact, and if Galileo had been a Vicipaedia editor, his view would have been rejected as 'originale investigationis'.
After that, you can build an engine to crawl news articles or have them submitted, and detect the claims being made. Those claims can be either auto-matched to existing ones or create new ones (deduplication) and then the site has a fresh new stream of claims to fact check.
StackOverflow could build this site on their existing engine. If someone here knows them, can you reply and put me in touch?
Q: Why did you choose the stance detection task rather than the task of labeling a claim, headline or story True/False, which seems to be what the fake news problem is all about?
A: (...) Our extensive discussions with journalists and fact checkers made it clear both how difficult "truth labeling" of claims really is, and how they'd rather have reliable semi-automated tool to help them in do their job better rather than fully-automated system whose performance will inevitably fall far short of 100% accuracy. (...)
Q: OK, but what does stance detection have to do with detecting fake news?
A: (...) From our discussions with real-life fact checkers, we realized that gathering the relevant background information about a claim or news story, including all sides of the issue, is a critical initial step in a human fact checker's job. One goal of the Fake News Challenge is to push the state-of-the-art in assisting human fact checkers, by helping them quickly gather the information they need to make their assessment.
In particular, a good Stance Detection solution would allow a human fact checker to enter a claim or headline and instantly retrieve the top articles that agree, disagree or discuss the claim/headline in question. They could then look at the arguments for and against the claim, and use their human judgment and reasoning skills to assess the validity of the claim in question. Such a tool would enable human fact checkers to be fast and effective. (...)
This means they're very much aware that 'solving the fake news issue' in a fully-automated way is a folly, so they are instead looking for tools to classify and retrieve corroborating or dissenting reports about the same topic. I feel this approach demonstrates an awareness of the problem, addresses some of the criticisms raised in this thread, and could lead to useful tools and datasets down the road.
It makes me sad to see yet another tech team go down the road of "machines will help us filter the truth" They will not, and the reason has to do with language. Ludwig Wittgenstein tackled this 100 years ago. The best that machines will do for you is to label something as true or not as if you had consumed the article and decided on your own That is a completely different thing from identifying fake news or truth The…
"re-transmit" sounds neutral but "re-re-transmit" sounds passive aggressive. This would be very hard for a machine to interpret