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Show HN: I made a platform for journalists to “open source” their fact checking

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Re: Show HN: I made a platform for journalists to “open source” their fact checking

#31

Post by jellicle »

So, your examples are all "reporting about court cases" and you use court documents as your citations for facts.

Court cases are as good as we have for determining facts, I suppose. (Though the error rate in court cases is quite high!) But 99.9999% of reporting isn't about court cases. Most reporting isn't about issues that will ever be litigated, and even those things that will be litigated, haven't been at the time of the reporting.

"Mitch McConnell had oatmeal for breakfast this morning, according to sources."

There, that's a fact. Now, tell me which court case I can refer to in order to verify that fact?

Fact-checking is an impossible endeavor. The essence of journalism is reporting things no one knows. That's what news is! This is completely at odds with "fact-checking". A good news story CANNOT be fact-checked by the public because if the public knew it, it wouldn't be news. There is an extremely limited genre of "news by trawling public but little-known documents", such as reporting on old court cases. Almost zero news fits into that category.

Re: Show HN: I made a platform for journalists to “open source” their fact checking

#32

Post by YazIAm »

teleclimber wrote: post #28

Nice to see more work in this area. However as others have said a reputation system for participants is absolutely key. Any platform like this has to assume it is going to be flooded by bots trying to influence opinion on behalf of corporations, foreign governments and activists. A reputation where users gain reputation slowly (through work, by verifying sources, etc..) become more able to influence opinion, but the…

I 100% agree that the reputation system will be they key to scaling this. I'm currently seeing promise with my experiments with reputation scoring.

As for "How do you create a platform that allows correct ideas to flourish even when they go against conventional wisdom?" Great question, however my goal here is a bit more modest, it's to create a platform that allows facts which are provable by public primary sources to stand out from everything else. I think a platform that focuses on simply that can add a lot of value to political discourse.

Re: Show HN: I made a platform for journalists to “open source” their fact checking

#33

Post by Fiahil »

ahnick wrote: post #7

IMHO reputation is important to build into the base level for a platform like this. Allowing anon registrations and commenting will eventually lead to a lot of noise and abuse of the platform for misinformation. I think some sort of verification of a person's qualifications on particular subject areas and then allowing them to only "fact check" on those qualified areas is required here to have an effective platform t…

Equally important : Don't display reputation to users other than themselves. Humans will attributes higher trust level to individuals with higher reputation, despite them occasionally dropping false claims.

Re: Show HN: I made a platform for journalists to “open source” their fact checking

#35

Post by YazIAm »

Vinnl wrote: post #27
YazIAm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Now that video deepfake is a thing, I currently only allow videos as primary sources in rare circumstances (such as the video being published by a verified account of the subject). 2) Only primary sources are accepted. Currently anyone can start contributing, but every claim is still reviewed by a team of verified fact checkers. I hope to scale this long term with a fact checking reputation score.

Aren't text and images more easily manipulated than videos?

Haha indeed, but you can't just submit any document and have it considered a primary source on the site. For example, if you're making an assertion about a piece of legislation, the primary source is that legislation hosted on that government's website. If your assertion is about a regulatory action, the primary source is that action hosted on that regulatory agency's website, etc.

Re: Show HN: I made a platform for journalists to “open source” their fact checking

#36

Post by adamsea »

YazIAm wrote: post #25
hamitron wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What credentials do you have to properly vet people?

Well first, the point of this type of open fact checking is you can always verify everything for yourself, so you don't need to trust my credentials. Working on this over the last few years though, I've personally fact checked over 500 assertions.

I would respectfully disagree. Introduce enough noise into the system and the cost of verification becomes so high that doing so is unrealistic for many or most people.

Also, on first glance the app looks great, well-polished, and the UX of reading an article and looking at sources for claim is nice :). Thanks for working on and sharing this!

Re: Show HN: I made a platform for journalists to “open source” their fact checking

#37

Post by deepstream »

I'm surprised that FAGAM haven't got into the crowd-sourced fact checking space. Seems like a great way to build a knowledge engine / AI, by getting humans to "connect the facts" while motivating (herding) them with the idea they are doing it to "preserve truth in an era of fake narratives", when actually they are just helping build an AI.

Re: Show HN: I made a platform for journalists to “open source” their fact checking

#38

Post by CoryG89 »

Fiahil wrote: post #33
ahnick wrote: post #7

IMHO reputation is important to build into the base level for a platform like this. Allowing anon registrations and commenting will eventually lead to a lot of noise and abuse of the platform for misinformation. I think some sort of verification of a person's qualifications on particular subject areas and then allowing them to only "fact check" on those qualified areas is required here to have an effective platform t…

Equally important : Don't display reputation to users other than themselves. Humans will attributes higher trust level to individuals with higher reputation, despite them occasionally dropping false claims.

Does it really make sense to call it "reputation" if you're the only one that can see it?
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