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Google admits citing 4chan to spread fake Vegas shooter news

arstechnica.com

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Re: Google admits citing 4chan to spread fake Vegas shooter news

#31

Post by astura »

KekDemaga wrote: post #28
kartan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's your responsibility as a reader I live in Sweden. How do I fact check what happens in a neighborhood in the USA? How do I know that a result of a clinical test is reliable? Do I check it on another on-line source? Do I spend millions on R&D and do my own analysis? Or just few thousands going to Las Vegas and gathering my own data? Or do I need to wait for a Newspaper that actually has fact-checking? > Even m…

> I live in Sweden. How do I fact check what happens in a neighborhood in the USA? I question the utility of you having any opinion on US politics, especially at the local level. You are certainly entitled to one but I don't know what it gets you without a vote.

Did we read the same comment? Being interested in world events and/or the results of clinical trials conducted overseas is in no way "having [an] opinion on US politics."

(Not to mention that a Swede can have a very legitimate, personal, vested interest in what's going on in the US, maybe the GP had family vacationing in Vegas. - I had family vacationing in France during the Paris bombings, my mother-in-law called me up frantically that day.)

Re: Google admits citing 4chan to spread fake Vegas shooter news

#32

Post by [deleted] »

kartan wrote: post #20
rightos wrote: post #3

I really don't like the "fact checks" being done by news sites these days - that's your responsibility as a reader, tech can't do it for you. Even more reputable sites like Snopes tend to draw absolutist conclusions about things which I find are certainly not absolute.

> that's your responsibility as a reader I live in Sweden. How do I fact check what happens in a neighborhood in the USA? How do I know that a result of a clinical test is reliable? Do I check it on another on-line source? Do I spend millions on R&D and do my own analysis? Or just few thousands going to Las Vegas and gathering my own data? Or do I need to wait for a Newspaper that actually has fact-checking? > Even m…

[deleted]

Re: Google admits citing 4chan to spread fake Vegas shooter news

#33

Post by eterm »

KekDemaga wrote: post #28
kartan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's your responsibility as a reader I live in Sweden. How do I fact check what happens in a neighborhood in the USA? How do I know that a result of a clinical test is reliable? Do I check it on another on-line source? Do I spend millions on R&D and do my own analysis? Or just few thousands going to Las Vegas and gathering my own data? Or do I need to wait for a Newspaper that actually has fact-checking? > Even m…

> I live in Sweden. How do I fact check what happens in a neighborhood in the USA? I question the utility of you having any opinion on US politics, especially at the local level. You are certainly entitled to one but I don't know what it gets you without a vote.

Well you've assumed they don't have a vote. US citizens are entitled to a vote while living abroad.

https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/legal-m...

Re: Google admits citing 4chan to spread fake Vegas shooter news

#34

Post by vkou »

rightos wrote: post #3

I really don't like the "fact checks" being done by news sites these days - that's your responsibility as a reader, tech can't do it for you. Even more reputable sites like Snopes tend to draw absolutist conclusions about things which I find are certainly not absolute.

Fact checking everything you read on the individual level is not scalable[1], or feasible. It's why we have the general expectation that journalists and Google won't feed us blatant untruths - and why we should have a conversation about it whenever it happens.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertar...

Re: Google admits citing 4chan to spread fake Vegas shooter news

#35

Post by doktrin »

KekDemaga wrote: post #29
tomjakubowski wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4chan has had useful research on a number of occasions. Like what?

They found a isis training camp: https://imgur.com/gallery/NpC7k

> They found a isis training camp

From the text : "These guys weren't ISIS, just opposing Assad and Russia."

Re: Google admits citing 4chan to spread fake Vegas shooter news

#36

Post by SloopJon »

I don't know whether these automated news aggregators rely on machine learning per se, but this kind of reminds me of recent ML fails like Microsoft's Tay bot turning into a Nazi, or Google Photos labeling black people as gorillas.

Andrew Ng interviewed Ian Goodfellow in the first course of his deep learning specialization on Coursera. Ian said that he's really interested in machine learning security, in part guarding against untrusted or adversarial inputs.

Whether they're poisoning your network in the first place, or your network is misclassifying them because they're too weird, it seems like you need to treat random inputs as potentially adversarial.

Re: Google admits citing 4chan to spread fake Vegas shooter news

#37

Post by [deleted] »

eterm wrote: post #33
KekDemaga wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I live in Sweden. How do I fact check what happens in a neighborhood in the USA? I question the utility of you having any opinion on US politics, especially at the local level. You are certainly entitled to one but I don't know what it gets you without a vote.

Well you've assumed they don't have a vote. US citizens are entitled to a vote while living abroad. https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/legal-m...

[deleted]

Re: Google admits citing 4chan to spread fake Vegas shooter news

#38

Post by threeseed »

KekDemaga wrote: post #28
kartan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's your responsibility as a reader I live in Sweden. How do I fact check what happens in a neighborhood in the USA? How do I know that a result of a clinical test is reliable? Do I check it on another on-line source? Do I spend millions on R&D and do my own analysis? Or just few thousands going to Las Vegas and gathering my own data? Or do I need to wait for a Newspaper that actually has fact-checking? > Even m…

> I live in Sweden. How do I fact check what happens in a neighborhood in the USA? I question the utility of you having any opinion on US politics, especially at the local level. You are certainly entitled to one but I don't know what it gets you without a vote.

Maybe I am moving to the town in question.

Maybe I have friends and family there.

Maybe I used to live and work there.

Maybe I have a long distance relationship with someone there.

There are millions of reasons why someone would be interesting in knowing what is happening in a place other than which they current live.

Re: Google admits citing 4chan to spread fake Vegas shooter news

#39

Post by fancyfacebook »

pilif wrote: post #25

>We are working to fix the issue that allowed this to happen This is not some issue that you can fix. This is not some color being off, or some chat message appearing out of order. This is about AI in its continued infancy that’s now being actively and maliciously targeted. It’s also about a huge responsibility of the worlds two greatest media outlets that both think they can have machines do a humans job and miserab…

"AI" hahaha. Hiding behind the "algorithm" is nothing new for corporate america, that's been happening since at least the 1930s, but rephrasing it as hiding behind "AI" is cute. I'm sure it will be a few years before people start getting called out on that.

Re: Google admits citing 4chan to spread fake Vegas shooter news

#40

Post by Karunamon »

devrelm wrote: post #19
Karunamon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That hypothetical score will just trend towards 50% as people who disagree with the slant of the story (or more realistically, the source, since people even here make knee-jerk judgments based on source without even reading the meat of the story) will vote it down and those who agree vote it up.

My thought would be that it would be at the source level. "98% of people find this source reliable", though that's certainly subject to the same biases. Better systems might require more work to mark a story as false (such as how reporting a story as false currently works in Facebook.) Over time, Facebook can see on their end which domains are pushing fake news and choose not to surface unreliable sources on people's…

That idea is also vulnerable. Conservatives will just flag off stories from MSNBC, liberals will just flag off stories from Brietbart, the truth of the actual article notwithstanding.
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