61–70 of 131 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really not sure what kind of people are downvoting these kinds of comments. Anyone care to enlighten?
Usually the kind of people who esteem journalists as philosopher-kings, and the organizations who employ them as paragons of perfect, unassailable virtue. The Fourth Estate is not to be criticized.
I gave a talk at Denver startup week last year about the underlying profit incentives tied to fake news and how industry reforms in the way media companies do business could not only benefit the advertisers but also stop Fake news. At the end of the talk I had 3 people ask how they could make fake news to promote their startups. That this has turned into a booming industry surprises me 0%, though it is depressing.
My thought experiment for considering the moral limits of capitalism: If producing Soylent Green were legal and profitable, would there be actors willing to produce and sell it? If you answer no, see: Philip Morris, Lockheed, Beretta, etc.
I've been working on some algorithms I think can identify fake news easily and reliably. The key part is you have to have a massive dataset of historical information. With Datastreamer (my company) we have about 1PB of news, blogs, and social media from the last 4-5 years. I'm curious if it would make sense to ship an open/public API that would allow people both to report AND check on whether something is fake news.…
Hi I am interested in this sort of service. I have 2 concerns. First is I don't install browser extensions unless I really trust them. Too many are pumped up and then sold to some malware company, one update later and you're owned. My second concern is that if this works well eventually the fake news producers will become aware of it, reverse engineer it and then attempt to game the detection.
I gave a talk at Denver startup week last year about the underlying profit incentives tied to fake news and how industry reforms in the way media companies do business could not only benefit the advertisers but also stop Fake news. At the end of the talk I had 3 people ask how they could make fake news to promote their startups. That this has turned into a booming industry surprises me 0%, though it is depressing.
Fake news is how free speech is supposed to work. People get to say what they want and the populace decides for themselves what is right or wrong. Liable and slander are still in effect.
I've been working on some algorithms I think can identify fake news easily and reliably. The key part is you have to have a massive dataset of historical information. With Datastreamer (my company) we have about 1PB of news, blogs, and social media from the last 4-5 years. I'm curious if it would make sense to ship an open/public API that would allow people both to report AND check on whether something is fake news.…
False flagging, FUD based on groupthink and cognitive biases, accidental suppression of newly created websites in favor of older ones. Just to start off a list.
Not everything is solvable through algorithms. Especially if your initial goad is ill-defined. There are about half a dozen completely separate things that are being labeled as "fake news" today, from websites impersonating news agencies and pushing lies, to actual news agencies pushing lies, to viral hoaxes on social media.
Ultimately, whether a news article is fake or not is determined by its relation to reality. You could use context as heuristic to filter out complete garbage, but this is something that's actually being abused by many subcategories of "fake news" to begin with.
People should be able to use their own judgement to spot nonsense, without algorithms telling them what to think. If they can't, the first questions should be "why?" and "why now?", not "how do I make an app to fix it?".
Personally, I think the underlying assumption behind current social media are profoundly broken and can't be fixed just by sprinkling more tech on top of it all. Obvious example: if you release a news-checking app and someone else releases a fake news-checking app, how do you expect your users to choose the right one?
I gave a talk at Denver startup week last year about the underlying profit incentives tied to fake news and how industry reforms in the way media companies do business could not only benefit the advertisers but also stop Fake news. At the end of the talk I had 3 people ask how they could make fake news to promote their startups. That this has turned into a booming industry surprises me 0%, though it is depressing.
I liked to think that maybe they just assumed the influencer was going to mention it was paid or everyone understood that was the case but me .... but it never was actually spoken about.
I couldn't help but wonder if the people paying for these services think that they are ever exposed to other companies doing the same? Do they care?
The fake news phenomenon is something that worries me at a local level: friends and family. I'm constantly bombarded by forwarded messages from them that don't pass a simple cursory review and are 99% fake if you dig further. I've tried to combat this by researching what's forwarded to me and pointing that out (including how I discovered it was false) but people either don't reply back or get hostile, assuming I'm on…
This is the price society is paying for making social media "accessible" through phone apps and such.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My thought experiment for considering the moral limits of capitalism: If producing Soylent Green were legal and profitable, would there be actors willing to produce and sell it? If you answer no, see: Philip Morris, Lockheed, Beretta, etc.
Coca-Cola will likely kill more people than guns and organized crime, honestly. But I see your point. There is a lot of evidence that organized crime is a substitute for opportunities in legitimate society, so that example is perhaps not applicable. The opioid crisis caused by US pharma may be a bigger and better example.
The fake news phenomenon is something that worries me at a local level: friends and family. I'm constantly bombarded by forwarded messages from them that don't pass a simple cursory review and are 99% fake if you dig further. I've tried to combat this by researching what's forwarded to me and pointing that out (including how I discovered it was false) but people either don't reply back or get hostile, assuming I'm on…