It's impossible to assign a "true"/"fake" value to all news stories... especially with our increasingly biased and divided media.
Here's an example of what happens when we try: Politifact, a consistently liberal-biased source, didn't like that Trump took credit for a hard and proven fact. So they called it "mostly false" even though nothing he said was false.
The real world is vastly more complex than "true or fake". The Trump tweet you mentioned is a perfect example. His tweet was not a simple statement of fact:
> The media has not reported that the National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Obama first mo.
That's a claim: "I have lowered the debt in my first month while Obama raised it". While the facts are true (the debt did go down), the claim is false. Trump has taken no action that would cause the debt to be lowered; it's not unusual for the debt level to fluctuate in the short term.
The real problem we have is that most people aren't interested in this kind of nuance at all. A statement that makes your team look like the winners, or the other team look like the losers, is easy to accept without much thought or analysis.
The next level of nuance, of course, is separating Trump's propensity of associating everything positive he sees with himself and the completely true words of that tweet. The fact stated is a legitimate starting point for a policy discussion that is easily and cleanly distinct for the implied claim you referred to.
Isn't that the problem at hand? Layering this seemingly objective "fact" checking on top of a political statements ("the way he wants to spin it"). Then picking a side. If they don't like the side then "technically" true is not enough, now the fact checker has to agree with the politics and the intent to mark it as "true".
I am pretty sure if Clinton or Obama made that statement there would be very little discussion in marking it as "true" and claiming "yeah it is technically true, what she/he might have implied is up to interpretation, but statement on its own is a fact".
Yes. Isolated facts in and of themselves, without considering either the narrative into which they are embedded, or the world-views they invoke in recipients of those messages, are at best only a part of the much larger picture.
This is why fact-checking, at the very least alone, is not a total solution.
This is a good illustration of the problem of purported fact checking organizations using the supposed fact check actually as a headline for political/social commentary. If the product you're selling is commentary, don't claim you are a fact checking service.
No, it's neither. It's analyzing the consistency between the different levels of narrative. Meaning and understanding don't happen merely at the level of denotation. This is why we need to listen to the advice of poets.
Not saying it's true but an argument can be made (and I assume this is the one he's thinking) that growth was higher with his winning the election because the market is anticipating his policies. It is perfectly reasonable and a matter of opinion. You simply cannot write it off as factually incorrect.
But if you read the actual tweet he simply says debt when down in his first month vs. up in Obama's. Which is true. He doesn't say it was because of his policies. Politifact just found a way to try to spin it (which is what it is) as "false" so they could add it to the "Trump's a compulsive liar" column.
To paraphrase someone else: I didn't leave the liberals, the liberals left me.
I would say that you will return to the fold soon enough.
Firstly, no political speech is made for its truth value. Let us disabuse everyone of this notion.
1) all human beings have a very limited attention short term span which has to be managed and husbanded.
2) full technically and practically faithful statements of a problem easily crush those human neural limits.
3) emotional messaging subverts all rational checks and balances, and has a disproportion impact on the brain, and such messaging can be made to scale.
Given the 3 points above, without a constant third party or legal intervention to prevent abuse, political messaging will always devolve into emotional button pushing.
The people who deal in politics will be so far removed in skill and native talent in this field, that it would be like comparing a newbie high school graduate vs someone who writes and optimizes game engine code.
Simply put, most communication by politicians will be designed to take these considerations,at the minimum, into mind.
these are the functional limits of the world we live in.
It's true that Trump didn't claim it was a result of his actions or policies (enacted or planned), but that is clearly the intended unstated message. Otherwise, why did he tweet it?
For the reasons stated IN the tweet? To show how the media didn't report it because it could be conceived as something good that happened under his first month?
"Fake-news" was from the start a tool for censorship with a political agenda.
Now we can vote "disputed" if you do not agree with something. Great.
If it is fully democratic: "Any climate change news is fake".
Or if it is Technocratic (only certain scientists and companies are allowed to mark fake news): "Patents are great. Open source is bad. Monsanto never does any bad things."
Or a CIA echo chamber: "Iraq (or Syria or Iran) has Weapons of Mass Destruction." (Not really, but we don't know until we have invaded it).
We have a similar problem in the UK, the news has to give all parties a say. So we get almost equal air time to UKIP (who are tiny) as to the Tories (who are in power) ... it's a bit crazy.
Which leads us on to Brexit, the news gave equal air time to both sides. Now, I say both, but for something as complex as Brexit there are way more than two sides but the public didn't really get a view on Left-exit, right-exit, left-remain, right-remain and all the bits in the middle.
Fake news? Opinion? Not enough time to inform the masses? I don't envy Facebook, they're throw their hat into the ring. Nothing good can come of this for them. You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't.
> So we get almost equal air time to UKIP (who are tiny) as to the Tories (who are in power)
I don't like either of those parties, and they don't get even remotely equal airtime, but UKIP were the third most popular party in the 2015 election. Hardly "tiny", except by virtue of the bent UK electoral system which gave them only one seat.
Personally I'd prefer minor parties were given more exposure than bigger parties - that we all know about and are sick of already - than the reverse.
I don't agree with your analogy, but I still found it very interesting to consider.
I think the fundamental difference is that spam detectors are seen as acting on their users behalf. If I say an email isn't spam, then it isn't and that's the final word on the matter.
Fake news classifiers don't give one classification per user. They don't try to predict for every single user whether that user would find it credible. Instead, they output a single value for the whole community. They act on the community's behalf. Because of this, some people will always disagree, and they will feel that the system is imposing on them. That's why it's political when spam detectors are not.
That's a pretty naive view on spam detection. Haven't you ever found something filed in your spam box that you wanted, like this month's newsletter from your favorite club?
While you are right that the "ground truth" of spam vs ham comes from you, the process of classifying your mail relies on a lot of data provided by the community.
During the election, Trump Rally's always sold out of tickets(free so not sold) so as soon as they became available I requested the max per email(2) on several email accounts. They went to spam on my Google apps for business and Gmail accounts. I signed up to do campaign calls, they went to spam. Newsletters, spam. He became the president and sent updates - spam. (Whitehouse.gov) email. I manually whitelisted every single time. Parents inauguration invitation reminders - spam. Not to mention there are reports from all over the country of inauguration invitations showing up as much as a month after the event.(USPS) Weird. I guess the Gmail thing didn't really surprise me, seeing as Eric Schmidt was on Hillary's team and shared resources...
You realize that google 100% censors everything that supports Donald Trump or his policies. Let me give you an example.
In mid October, James O'Keefe releases his undercover videos. This is the video on Day 2. The video hits #1 on youtube 2 or 3 hours after release. The second it hits #1 spot, it is completely removed from youtube trending. Not demoted, but entirely removed from the list, taking the 1 and 2 spots are 2 pro-hillary videos with 1/10th the views and they are 8 times older.. The video's views then start counting backwards. There are dozens of archive.is on reddit if you'd like to see but that isn't what I want to show here.
The story, like all other stories, is completely absent from google news. The stories announcing Michael Moore's documentary were timed (fine, not for sure purposely), to coincide with the 2nd day of O'Keefe videos. Upon visiting trends.google.com, James Okeefe never even made the list. You can scroll down through the top several hundred queries, and it wasn't in the list at all. The #1 story was Michael Moore anti-Trump doc for the past 24 hours. However, if you clicked on the michael moore link, and click compare, and start to type in james okeefe, and click on the autocomplete, it shows the true story. James okeefe stories dominated those about michael moore for the entirety of the past 24 hours. If you click on the michael moore story (in the 3 spot in my screenshots with sports above it), you can see that search interest hits 100 at 5pm, meaning, there is nothing bigger then it. However, once you add in james okeefe stories manually, you realize it was fudged. The day before that issue didn't exist, but starting after the first day of the james okeefe undercover videos, all the big pro trump/anti hillary stories never ever made the trending list through the election.
In summary James okeefe videos werent trending at all, got totally hidden from the youtube trending page, every single day, along with just about every big pro trump video, and literally hundreds of hashtags were hidden from twitter. I will link some screenshots below. If you think they are somehow manipulated, they are taken from a 20 minute video of me explaining how to see all of this for a noob. If you were actually interested, please just say so, so i can re-upload to an anonymous youtube account (its private right now, was meant as an instruction for a friend in the media to replicate the comparison for news.) I didn't compare with the wrong michael moore, they are all from the same exact time, etc. Like i said if you really think i am messing with you, i will upload the video this afternoon.. However I am assuming this will just get downvoted and ignored, but who knows.
P.S. I know it doesn't say 'Michael Moore, Donald trump' as it does in the trending list, but the absolute figures correspond exactly, the ui just doesn't display the full combination of queries on the details page's chart title, again in the video if you don't believe.
http://imgur.com/a/TX0T2
What is spam and what is valuable mail is more or less unambiguous.
Even if it's not easy to know algorithmically, it is very easy to know a spam message when one sees the message.
News on the other hand, especially on political issues with differing opinions, are not that clear. And the underlying facts are not that major a factor either, because journalists can lie with statistics, be selective, omit things, put a false spin on the impact of real facts, etc.
And even who measures the "facts" can be political (e.g. a researcher paid by some mega-corporation, a government agency that wants to make the government look good, etc), and seemingly 100% accurate stats (e.g. on the "level of unemployment") cannot always be trusted and sometimes differ to reality by a huge margin (e.g. the level of unemployment can be manipulated in 100 different ways, based on the definition on unemployment, and various countries play all kinds of tricks with that.
I'd go ahead and say that a lot of ambiguous news will not be marked anyway. Although any news that says I've made alien babies should obviously be marked disputed.
> didn't like that Trump took credit for a hard and proven fact
Since you, yourself, note that Trump is trying to take credit for it, perhaps you should explain why their reasoning is wrong.
"The national debt fluctuates up and down depending on the day. While the debt is "down" after one month, experts say that trend will reverse and the debt will continue to rise.
This factoid is a gross misrepresentation of the state of the debt and the role the new president had in shaping the figure."
To clarify my reason for asking artursapek to explain
- the tweet isn't a "hard and proven fact", it is a claim - albeit an implicit claim, but a claim nonetheless
- as such, Politifact is evaluating the claim
If artursapek disagrees with the analysis, he should either
- explain why the Tweet is not a claim, or
- explain why Politifact's evaluation of the claim is incorrect, misleading or otherwise wrong
Otherwise, this is not an example of "a consistently liberal-biased source"
It's really a great approach that they're taking. I do think classification of "True" is very difficult, although "Disputed" seems reasonable. For instance, if I wrote an article saying I was a billionaire, I'd assume this would eventually receive the "Disputed" label. Articles not marked as "Disputed" are clearly not necessarily "True".
The main underlying "evil" of censorship is that it obscures the truth and rallies people behind ideas that aren't accurate, ideas that also have some upside to another party. It's weaponized information essentially.
That's where Facebook finds itself already. The utter amount of garbage facts that then color people's perspective -- falsely. Facebook is then left to choose their reality -- do they want to try to fight off this crap even if it means potential controversy, or do they want to endure ongoing controversy over what they could be doing. There's no winning so they have to choose how they lose.
They're also not a government, so, their duty in all of this is pretty minimal. If Facebook takes action and it's seen as less trustful in regards to news, I have to think they'd be okay with that. Who cares. At that point it's not their problem, go somewhere else for unbiased news. At least they don't have the active problem of being a clearinghouse for false facts.
Politifact is a consistently fact-biased source. What you're objecting to is their inclusion of the clear implications of a claim, not just the letter. Here Trump was clearly implying that his administration is more fiscally responsible than Obama's in the first month. That is mostly false. These things are not impossible.
> It's impossible to assign a "true"/"fake" value to all news stories... especially with our increasingly biased and divided media.
This is an absolutely irrational argument, which is not to say it is incorrect. It is possible to assign levels of truths to information - we do it all the time in infrastructure. OTOH, it matters not if biases exist in media - those biases can be "truths" as well to the groups of entities who share the biases.
Truths don't imply absolute labeling however, as you so well point out. We all knew Fox News was biased toward the Republican's views. In hindsight, Fox looks quaint compared to Breitbart. Supporting Breitbart or Infowars is another thing entirely, given they support continued, or self-referential irrationality. Irrationality that spreads itself, in other words. I consider this harmful to humans.
The only people who don't want truths to exist is people whose intent is to spread their irrationality to gain control over others.
What will happen, and you can mark my words on this, is that AI will be known primarily in assisting humans in their final effort to reduce the amount of damage those-who-speak-for-others cause the larger group, primarily by detecting their intent in FUCKING with the way we all communicate with each other in a trusted manner.
When, not if, this happens, those who played this game will learn the real price of dissonance.
I agree with everything you said, except, critically the last part.
I too believe that Intent identification is the holy grail of any algorithmic way of solving this.
I think the creation of such a system will be then of us. Not our savior.
All of the websites, tracking, micro targeting in current and future elections were ostensibly created to make the world a better place.
People believed that code would allow humanity to break the restraints of old nation states, and keep ahead of them.
But eventually nation states did catch up, and we see what that has resulted in.
I think AI is far too overused a term for statistical modeling and categorization. But creating any tool to "help" people understand each other will only result in its insights being used to target people open/vulnerable to having their opinions changed.
And that will result in MORE control. Not less.
Don't create a tool until you understand how it will be used against you.
> I think the creation of such a system will be then of us. Not our savior.
Absolutely. The intent to create rational transfer of information will result in creating a new type of life that is us, yet is not us. This will likely result in the "end" of us, but that's the nature of things anyway.
Nothing is forever, but it sure as hell seems it could have been put off so I didn't have to deal with it.
I imagine their hands are kind of tied- if they don't do anything, then people complain. If they do something, it is possibly not perfect, unless they can come up with some amazing spam reducing innovation which probably close to an AGI fake news bouncer.
The only thing to really do is throw some tools up, and adjust them as adversaries (fake news makers) get more tricky, until finally, after a long time, you get the big innovation.
In any case, deciding to take a stand is clearly better than doing nothing at all.
If the person who was supposed to win the election had won the election there wouldn't have been this huge fake news crisis. The system was working just fine until it wasn't doing what it was supposed to do. The tsunami like immune reaction of all the players in the political system to the incorrect person being elected president is certainly awesome to behold.
There are a set of inputs that go into the voters mind that produce a certain output: the voting decision. The technology inputs to produce the correct candidate choice has been somehow thwarted by a bug in the system. The bug has been identified as fake news. To restore the proper functioning of the system the bug has to be fixed by implementing AI systems, overseen by properly vetted quality control personnel, in order to detect and remove fake news. The quality control personnel should be properly vetted to make sure that they are not under the influence of fake news which may cause errors in voting behavior to leak through. You see, people having an incorrect voting decision is evidence that there is a bug in the system that feeds them information. That, or there is a fundamental flaw in their cognitive systems which is why they have been called "deplorables". /end of the movie evil guy speech
Incorrect opinion? Who gets to decide the incorrect opinion?
The side that thinks Trump is a racist/xenophobe/terrorist? Or the side that thinks Hillary Benghazi/Emails/Charity? Or the side that thinks Bernie Venezuela/Socialist/etc? Or the side that think Stein ... Or the side that think Johnson... or... or...
What makes a Trump Supporters opinion wrong and a Clinton supporters opinion right? Or Bern? Stein? Johnson?
We should absolutely work on getting rid of "Fake" news... but what is fake news? What is true news that is obviously biased (CNN/Fox/etc)? What is satire (Onion)?
Who is producing "Non" fake news? CNN? Fox? CBS? NBC? Politico? I can look at news stories on all of the above and see "True" information spun to make one side look good and the other bad...
I love how people think their opinion is OBVIOUSLY right... their opponents opinion is OBVIOUSLY wrong and anyone who doesn't agree with them is a Terrorist/Xenophobe/Islamaphobe/Racist/etc'ad'naseum.
As seen by a foreigner, me, it is quite clear that the status quo and the powers that be had chosen Hillary Clinton as the next US president. But Trump won, so the system has to be corrected so similar things do not happen again in the future. It has nothing to do with who is right or wrong.
Only if the status quo you are referring to is the political, which was the same as TPTB, and not the social. This country did not want more of the old administration and took option B.
I am distinguishing the TPTB from the masses. The TPTB failed and Trump was chosen. Now they need to ensure that a similar thing does not happen again in the future.
And the TPTB exceed the political leaders. I mean the ones that really run the country.
The person who won made repeated claims the system was rigged. I can't say if the correct person won. I can say it's clear to the winner there is a public system for show, and a secret system for actually selecting the president.
And the other side said the system was fair. We can trust the results. Anyone who challenges the results is a threat to Democracy.
BEFORE the election everyone was confident and trusting of the election. It wasn't until AFTER the Election that we all of a sudden started to care about Russia "hacking" the election.
I mean... which is it? it's fair and trustworthy if you win but it's not trustworthy and fair if you lose?
Honestly though... if there is a secret system for "actually" selecting the President... do you think those secret puppet masters would choose Trump?
There's also little to no mainstream doubt about the outcome of the vote (of course the President has raised concerns that the vote was not accurate, but most responses to that, for example from Secretaries of State, have tried to emphasize that there is no evidence of major issues with the election). The controversy is all about how Russia may have acted to influence voters.
Supposedly Obama knew for Months/Years... that Russia was trying to influence the election. And by his admission BEFORE the election, you could trust the results. Hillary has a well known quote that "If you don't trust the election results, you are a threat to democracy" (Paraphrased).
If the Obama Administration was worried about Russia influence in the election, why didn't we hear about it BEFORE the results that they didn't like? Why is all the outrage about Russia AFTER the election?
It's hard to hit such a large topic in a short blurb... but where is the anger about Obama influencing elections (Brexit, Israel, etc)? It's okay for Obama to do it but not Putin?
My main point is this: Why is the problem NOW everywhere when the issue was known BEFORE the election and the previous administration did nothing then?
Second point is this: Everyone is trying to influence each others shit. Why is Russia so much worse? Where is the outrage that Obama worked on influencing the elections of other democracies?
> Supposedly Obama knew for Months/Years... that Russia was trying to influence the election. And by his admission BEFORE the election, you could trust the results. Hillary has a well known quote that "If you don't trust the election results, you are a threat to democracy" (Paraphrased).
> If the Obama Administration was worried about Russia influence in the election, why didn't we hear about it BEFORE the results that they didn't like? Why is all the outrage about Russia AFTER the election?
There are two different things going on here, which the right likes to conflate.
Russia influenced the election by manipulating voters' opinions, with means that many consider illegitimate (hacking).
Nobody falsified the election results, by hacking or otherwise. When Clinton said not accepting the results was a threat to democracy, she was referring to that - specifically, Trump's claim that the election was "rigged" through voter fraud. And she did accept the results. Democrats today like to argue that Trump doesn't deserve to be president, but nobody credible is saying that the election was literally invalid and the courts should throw him out of office, or anything like that.
Obama did claim Russia was trying to influence the election before the election occurred - on October 7. [1] It's true that he didn't do more in part because he thought Clinton would win, but he also didn't want to seem to be unfairly influencing the election himself.
There are significant differences between Obama influencing the elections of other democracies and what Russia did: the Russian hacking was (1) covert, not overt, and (2) a violation of US law. Of course, you don't have to agree that those differences matter.
There is still plenty of question about the "mechanics". Plenty of places where people are registered who shouldn't (registered in multiple places, etc). People who shouldn't be voting that is (dead people, immigrants, etc).
The left says "There is no issue. at all. If you disagree, you are trying to subvert and you are a racist."
The right says "MILLIONS AND MILLIONS! ZOMG!"
The truth is somewhere in the middle as far as the "mechanics". There is plenty that can be done to insure the accuracy and veracity of the voting booth.
Sure, there are lots of people in a given year that move or die and are not immediately purged from their previous voter roll. There's no one serious suggesting that multiple registrations and fraud have impacted any election results.
The President and some of his followers have made baseless claims about millions of illegal votes. No evidence and lots of election officials contradicting them, but no retraction of the baseless statements.
You are (at length) confounding Trump's express statements prior to the election that he might not accept the results, with those of others to ensure that the results were trustable.
Verifying a process isn't casting doubt on it.
(Blocking attempts to verify it, as the GOP has repeatedly done, including the 2000 election's split and partisan SCOTUS decision, on the other hand, very much does.)
And the fact is that Clinton did not seek and did not assist the few election recount efforts which were made, at the insistence and initiation of Jill Stein. Clinton's campaign did provide observers to that process, but AFAIU didn't otherwise participate significantly.
(A category error on her part, in my opinion.)
You have (and repeat here) miscategorisation of the state of concern over Russian interference in the election process, though not in the election mechanics. Distinguishing process as propaganda, media manipulation, and voter manipulation through the media, and mechanics as the process of vote collection and tabulation itself.
There are numerous other ways in which votes and elections can be, and are, influenced, including gerrymandering (not a factor in US presidential or Senate elections, but very much so in US House, statehouse, and local elections), and voter suppression through elegibility (e.g., felons' loss of voting rights over their entire lifetime), suppression (ID and registration systems), and the location and outfitting of polling places (requiring hours of wait or miles of travel to vote), and support or rejection of automatic or late registration, or of voting by mail.
Your participation in this thread hasn't particularly enhanced your own credibility.
The results of the actual polling machines can be trusted. Nobody is claiming that Russia hacked into the polling stations and changed the results, which is what Trump supporters were going on about prior to the election.
That does not mean that Russia did not interfere in our election, which is what the left is angry about today. The evidence of ties between Russia and people involved in the Trump campaign was public knowledge during the campaign and connections between Trump and Russia were topics on the campaign trail and were even discussed in the debates.
I think one can have this attitude with a lot of things. The job which you were supposed to get is the one you got, etc. It must then be that 'supposed to' doesn't really have any meaning, or the opposite, that things are going according to whatever grand plan there exists for us. Who knows.
(Already mentioned it in another post below) I think companies like Google and Facebook perceived this vacuum created by the failure of the traditional news media to manufacture consent and control people's opinions. They want to send a strong message to those in power that they are better positioned at manufacturing consent in the future than those crusty old dinosaurs like CNN, NBC, etc.
There are obviously a lot of money to be made from campaigns and having powerful and wealthy candidates, or just companies marketing their products and ideas, rely on your platform. Think of it as their way to advertise the ability to "properly" (wink, wink) filter and bias news to suit their customers' demands.
I think they meant it sarcastically. You can't deny it that the majority of mass media has overwhelmingly picked one candidate. Even down to passing her debate questions in advance and so on.
I don't think anyone would be surprised to know that Hillary as far as the media was concerned was supposed to be the winner, not just because they simply wished it to be true, but because they went out of their way to make it so.
In the end they failed. The result of that was a backlash called "Fake News". It is a censorship system designed to bring the influence of media back on-line.
One interesting thing is that traditional media's failure to manufacture consent is perceived to be broken so that left a vacuum for social media to jump in. We saw how quickly Facebook and Google rushed in. I think deep down they want to signal to those in power that "we'll do a better job manufacturing consent for you than those old crusty news channels".
That's where facts are important. Those "fake news" are completely disconnected from reality. I mean North Korean government news agency type of disconnected from reality.
You really think they need to be treated as a better source of information than professional journalists with verifiable sources etc ?
I think biased information, whatever the bias is, as long as it is based on facts is way better than the random bat-shit crazy news we saw popping up all over the place.
Yeah? And I voted for her. Doesn't mean I turned off my critical faculties. Politifact is even less objective than an organization with obvious ideological commitments might be expected to be (given their explicit aim for objectivity).
> Doesn't mean I turned off my critical faculties.
If a media org whose entire claim to credibility is based around being impartial decided it was a good idea to publicly endorse a candidate, than they're pretty invested in that candidate.
From that point, they don't have to forgo critical thinking to manipulate public opinion if they choose to. They could just be selective about the "facts" they fact-check.
Won't people just mark disputed to stories and articles they don't agree with? There should be a penalty for doing this. Perhaps remove their ability to dispute stories after two or three confirmed offenses.
Even on Hacker News where the average user is much more responsible and thoughtful, I've gotten downvoted and flagged to death for opinions/comments/links that don't fall within the echo chamber.
I genuinely believe Facebook is a threat to society at this point. It's a website which is designed with decades of psychology in mind specifically to trigger animal-like instincts of immediacy and self-gratification with no real purpose other than to raise Facebook's market value.
It helps us stay connected sure (though it feels more like some kind of serfdom where you have to keep a Facebook account), but it also encourages narcissism, envy, and echo chambers. Don't like an opinion (or fact)? Scream, block, or dispute it and get that person out of your life so you've got a nice curated feed which fits all your preconceptions. What has its ecosystem created which is of lasting value?
I've never trusted Facebook from an ethical standpoint but as they exist longer, its hard to trust them from a social engineering standpoint either. They have more data available to them than anyone save god, better machine learning capabilities and stats than anyone else, and it takes them until after the election to recognize fake news is a problem? Of course, conveniently, the result of the election didn't fit Zuckerberg's political views.
You can get downvoted on HN for stating an opinion or fact that someone doesn't like for whatever reason. Some people are very spiteful. This is the solution?
Clarifying: I'm not agreeing because the point's unpopular, but rather, am publicly stating my agreement despite the status. My original wording bothers me.
So who gets to be the ultimate keeper of truth? If CNN spins a story to be police brutality, but you happen to be an eyewitness who saw that it was actually self-defense, can you mark the CNN story as disputed? Who decides if you are right or wrong?
To me, I think the veracity of individual stories aren't as important as the process of reporting and managing the life cycle of the story.
Are sources being double checked, did they attempt to contact the subject of the story for comments, do they have a process for reviewing bad stories and issuing retractions? That's really the difference between The NY Times and some random Macedonian blogger.
It's possible with all of that that the times can be wrong and somebody blogging from their moms basement can have the story right, but in the long run, you're better off getting your news from an organization that follows journalistic best practices.
Truth is the ultimate judge of truth -- world-views are tested against the world, and those which don't correspond, sufficiently, to reality, are shown wrong. It's an evolutionary process (in several deep senses).
There is a philosophical discipline devoted to establishing Truth: epistemology. "Criteria of Truth" describe how people can, and do, make judgements on the truth of propositions, in the face of information which is incomplete, confusing, and out-of-date. Correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic theories are the strongest, though other fallbacks, including authority, tradition or custom, and majority opinion are used, despite the fact that they are unreliable.
The ultimate keeper of truth isn't quite the right question, but in general, those who are trusted with distinguishing truths are those who have shown the capacity, ability, and integrity to serve in that role. That is: who judges truth? Someone who is very good at doing just that.
Authorities aren't absolute, they're not perfect, and they're not immune to bias or corruption. But, over time, they should show themselves to be sincere in their efforts to uncover the truth, inclusive of admitting their errors and changing their judgements in the face of new evidence.
The problem is a complex one, but not a greenfield.
This is why I consider places like Politifact/Factcheck useful. I don't always agree with their assessment, but they detail their reasoning and are generally fair. I can follow the logic, figure out where we diverge, and form my own opinion.
It's the same with SCOTUS rulings. They give a detailed account of their reasoning. Even conservative justices who I think routinely use backwards reasoning to make idiotic decisions at least tend to follow a logic absent in rulings from their conservative peers in lower courts (who tend more toward non-reasoning like "gay is bad" and "why do you hate capitalism").
I can at least follow a bizarre logic and understand how they came to the decision because there is a logic, even if the logic comes from a mindset that conflicts with my own.
News stories that are reported as fake by people on Facebook may be reviewed by independent third-party fact-checkers. These fact-checkers will be signatories of the non-partisan Poynter Code of Principles. A story may be marked as disputed if these fact-checkers find the story to be fake.
+1. In the end we all have to trust someone. Even Kyrie Irving thinks the world is flat because he chooses not to trust scientists or look out the window of an airplane. While I believe in human-driven climate change, it's because I choose to believe the integrity of the scientific community and the scientific process. But only 55 years ago there was segregation in the US and news reports of racial inferiority would have been controversial while today they would be racist and "disputed". Times change and this is a tough problem to solve.
> If the race of the victim isn't Caucasian, it's obviously police brutality because of the power and authority disparity between police as an institution and people of the victim's race.
I can't tell what you are tying to say here. I hope you are not saying if the person is not white then by default it's police brutality.
"You may see that certain news stories are marked as disputed on Facebook. News stories that are reported as fake by people on Facebook may be reviewed by independent third-party fact-checkers. These fact-checkers will be signatories of the non-partisan Poynter Code of Principles. A story may be marked as disputed if these fact-checkers find the story to be fake.
To see why a news story was marked as disputed on Facebook:
Hover and click underneath the disputed story.
Click About Disputed Stories, or go directly to the independent fact-checking website."
Really refers to the fact that Facebook is partnering with mainstream media in each individual country, and so they need time to roll this out internationally. Most countries don't even have a developed fact-checking infrastructure.
Now I'm curious - what countries do have a developed fact-checking infrastructure? For the public, I mean, so intelligence services don't qualify if they don't publish their findings ;)
What happens when I dispute The Onion? What happens when FAKENEWS_OUTLET gets disputed and claims it's The Onion? It feels like Facebook is taking us for a ride here...
1) When you dispute the Onion, Facebook should take no action because it's legitimate satire (well known, founded 30 years ago)
2) When you dispute FAKENEWS_OUTLET, Facebook should decide against the fake news outlet, because it's not The Onion. FAKENEWS_OUTLET should have a means of being notified and disputing the decision.
Further, Facebook should not allow anonymous disputes, track what individuals dispute, and should use something that looks a bit like PageRank to determine complainant credibility (credible complainant are ones that report many fake sites, fake sites are ones reported by good complainants) supplemented by social graph metrics (eg, lots of credible friends, or follower of sites known to be uncredible).
Or was that rhetorical? I'm glad Facebook is doing this.
Surely you can't be suggesting that an entity can only be considered a "legitimate" satirist if it's been around for a long time and there's a high amount of consensus regarding it?
Also, you cannot use network effects as an accurate proxy for critical thinking. Humans inherently defer a ton of thought to crowd consensus; this crowd consensus becomes less reliable as the subjects involved become more complex. The increasing complexity of modern society only further necessitates the need to train our critical thinking skills. Codifying network effects as a proxy for critical thinking, as FB is doing here, only accelerates the unreliability of groupthink.
I respectfully disagree with you on both counts. I have no illusion that FB cares what I think and will take my approaching and it's not perfect, but it would improve FB's situation. To address your other response, that is why I invoke the Pareto principle (you can solve 80% of malicious news feed entries with 20% of the effort).
Anyway, let me also note I find it strange that you are approaching this the way you are. FB is a proprietary, private platform. They will take actions that are best of the long term growth and profitability of the corporation on behalf of the owners (the shareholders). This whole epistemological/political element perplexes me, I think it entirely misses the mark of why FB is doing this.
edit: I should also mention, your comment about groupthink makes me think you misunderstand me. Gaming a PageRank like algorithm is certainly possible, but the eigenvalues of the Markov process on the adjacency matrix of complainants/news sources would take a away a large part of the human bias element. And counter-counter-measures are pretty well researched.
You express a vital misunderstanding of capitalism. Companies do not take the actions that are best for their long term health. They take the actions that are best for their health in the foreseeable future. Further, FB is a private company that owns largest forum for online socializing and public discourse. They are a private entity that controls the commons. I don't care about FB's profit motives; I care that their actions directly erode one of the core requisites of a healthily functioning complex society, so that is what I will talk about. It is not okay to make money by fucking shit up.
edit: I don't understand your stance on satire outfits. Was the Onion a satire publication in 1988? If so, how do you square that with your claim?
edit2: You refer to "malicious newsfeed entries." It's interesting that the only large scale activity that can even begin to consistently be considered such is the creation of "dark posts," which FB's censorship program does zilch to combat.
It's not one or two times when I've seen people take seriously some piece from Onion or equivalents (and then go ranting about Trump or whatever, even after pointing out it was satire, because it could be true).
Okay, but so what? People are always going to be stupid, but any reasonable person knows The Onion intends to entertain and there were a number of other sites that intended to mislead for money or other reasons. One thing we do kind of poorly as a field in software many times is we get to clever about counterexamples from the 20% side of the pareto principle and say, "well, nothing can be done". As far as fake, news, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it is usually fine.
When the media outlets first coined the term "fake news," http://nationalreport.net/ was their Exhibit A. Its current main headline is "Trump Reports World Record 39 Under Par, 12 Holes-in-One, During Golf Outing with Japanese Prime Minister." In November, one of its front page stories was "Chris Christie nominated to head of Supreme Food Court." That is the primary example people were using to make the case to create centralized "trusted news sources."
I'm not really sure what the Pareto principle has to do with this.
One of my favourite humour sites is Waterford Whispers News. (Among their classics is "North Korea Lands Man on the Sun".) I share their links on occasion, and often get one or two people exasperatedly saying how ridiculous so and so is for whatever position. Usually, they've based this purely on the headline.
Actually I think The Onion is a perfect candidate to be labeled, if not 'disputed' then another tag like 'satire'. That would hopefully help stop their Abortionplex articles from enraging certain people who may be gullible.
> Facebook isn’t quite targeting satire sites like The Onion, however, saying “we’ve found from testing that people tend not to report satirical content intended to be humorous, or content that is clearly labeled as satire.”
It might even help if Facebook had media accounts categorize (and clearly indicated the category of) posts. That way we could just point and laugh at people sharing satire or humor and claiming it as news.
I thought Facebook already did stick a "Satire" label automatically on The Onion. The problem of Facebook users taking The Onion seriously is something they had to confront years ago.
I would assume Facebook has a built in case for satire. Also if they're using machine learning to filter news then I'm also sure satire has a strong signature. At least the Onion which is very in your face satire.
Taking a long/high level view on this: When people are uncritical about that immediate reaction to share, repost, reblog, retweet anything that feeds into that dopamine high of "this coincides with my preconceived notions of n" regardless of how factual or accurate it is, how effective do we really expect Facebook-a site that actively encourages rabid sharing to be with something like this?
How effective will any tool, widget or service be at weeding out "fake news" when one can't counter a questionable news source in social media without being called "snowflake" or some other pointless pejorative for committing the cardinal sin of disagreeing?
It's absolutely valid to point out that the entire incentive structure, from advertising to outrage to virality to dopaminagenic, of the current state of online media, is antithetical to promotion of truth.
Yes, the systems themselves, and their incentives, are at fault. And must be changed. For the sake of the Liberal Democratic Experiment (referencing liberalism, not the similarly named political party).
What about "grey" things for which different groups can be correct in some way. Adding clarity to the information can improve things more than "disputing" it.
Some scientific articles are click-bait like: "Reality does not exist until we measure it".
http://www.sciencealert.com/reality-doesn-t-exist-until-we-m...
But it says: an atom can be in superposition state until it is measured. Which tells something about a single atom, not about reality.
Or things that are claimed by officials or experts, but for which there is not enough evidence, no evidence at all, or even contrary evidence? Like: Is Russian hacking disputed for which there was no real evidence? Or is wikileaks disputed who exposed quite some corruption? Is Snowden disputed? Is dirty wars (drone assassinations) disputed?
Or can we ask deeper questions, like: How much are we being spied on by Facebook? Is Facebook trying to change what we think? What organisations are behind Facebook?
I think that both sides should have a fair say in things. With the emphasis on fair. If we declare it disputed and only show one side, we push people apart and stop any deeper discussions. Stupidity is caused by knowing only one side of the story.
Adding a joke from the U.S. army: How can you tell if an official from the pentagon is lying?
Why aren't we focusing on the source of news instead of the truth of it?
Nothing is purely true or false because everything falls on a continuum. Words can be strictly true but the sentiment can be false or vice versa.
So, a better system is one that attempts to trace back to the source and then you let the reader decide if it's true. Lots of things happen along the way until a news story gets to you.
Even direct access to the POTUS twitter account isn't the original source, he's just reciting something he heard. Until there is a technological system that quickly and immediately traces news stories back to the source we will all just continue to be stuck in our own confirmation biases.
News outlets protect their sources? Fine. Then the endpoint is that news source. I can then use analytics to discern how true that source has proven to be in the past and/or if the person saying it is typically left/right etc.
Based on data you can decide what to believe.
I'd also like to see some data on why the POTUS may be lying and not just the fact that he is lying. Sometimes its ego but other times its a red herring.
I like John Oliver (in doses) but after watching a few shows it's clear that his show is full of cognitive biases. It is impossible that he doesn't know that he's cutting corners at a minimum.
It got me thinking after his show on Apple and encryption. It was pretty clear that in that show he definitely took some creative license. After I thought about it, it makes sense; his whole show is about how ridiculous something is and not to provide both sides of a story.
Here's how you know the media is biased. When was the last time you turned on MSNBC and heard them say anything positive at all about the POTUS?
Even by accident he must have done something they would normally consider good.
You will lie to yourself (cognitive bias). the media lies in a number of ways, politicians lie in many different ways for different reasons and all of that comes to you by way of massive corporations who, well, you get my point.
Forget trying to find the truth. Focus on the source of the story then tear apart that source with data and analytics until you can reach some kind of consensus about the degree of truth you are hearing.
Every media is biased, especially TV since it's so segregated by ideology.
The problem is people being emotionally invested and biased. Many Trump supporters will look at the Politifact rating posted higher in the thread, and call Politifact "fake news" whereas the reasoning they give is solid. They wouldn't give Politifact a chance, or build counterarguments, but just throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is on both sides, and many people.
No technology can fix that, unless it's really subtle and targeted (in other words, be mindful of your audience).
Your point about people being emotionally invested and biased is a valid one. There are a lot of smart people on both sides of the political spectrum, so, a while ago I decided to venture into the other side. I listened to all the popular talking heads and read what they read and spoke to many of them to find out what they believe and why.
I found it hard to believe that so many people are suffering from mass delusion, so, I asked friends and family what they believed. I tried, the best I could, to put myself in their shoes and remove my own biases.
In my very unscientific little, flawed study with a far too small sampling of people I found out a few things that everyone probably already knows:
1. Confirmation bias is real.
Yes of course people tend to read the news they agree with, but, they also live and work around people who they mostly agree with. You are the average of the 5 people you associate with most.
2. Social Proof is a big factor.
Is EXTREMELY difficult to change your viewpoint because you are fighting against social proof. Have you ever noticed that young people tend to dress the same as their friends. You'll see two young people walking along and wearing just a slight variation of the exact same outfit. Two 16 year old boys both wearing striped shirt, hat on backwards, ripped jeans and untied basketball shoes. That is social proof.
Now imagine coming into your job where you are among your peers saying the opposite of what all of us believed yesterday: you'd be rejected even if it was based on evidence.
3. They simply focus on different subject matter.
Not "alternative facts" different things all together; "Spin". "Yes my politician did do the horrible thing you are saying, BUT, look at THIS great honest thing he did."
4. Its exhausting.
You are attempting to fight against the belief system that you've trusted and your peers support possibly your whole life. You are hearing and reading things that you have a negative visceral reaction to and it's very, VERY hard to keep listening to or reading it.
--
The idea that an average person can spend the time to find out what is actually, objectively, completely true is unrealistic.
In my opinion a great first step is to give everyone a quick, free, way that simply points to the source of each story. That eliminates the echo chamber and cuts through a lot of bullshit.
At that point we can at least think about some sort of truth level indicator.
Great comment. Agree with you on the solutions (sourcing).
I don't have a clearly defined political identity, so, mostly by accident at first, I tried changing my own ideology. I discovered every ideology has a pretty much coherent worldview. Just frame the world in a way that's unjust, and threatens you personally in some way, assign low social status to opponents, and make it a part of my identity. It's crazy how I managed to identify with everyone from the social-justice-left to the alt-right, including the Clintonites, Trumpers and social conservatives in between). Fun to do if you want to learn about cognitive dissonance.
The only thing that determines which ideology you end up with isn't facts, but temperament (personality) and social circle.
All of these ideologies are coherent, and therefore don't provoke much cognitive dissonance (if they did these ideologies wouldn't be evolutionarily "fit", and the ideologies would die out). BTW, if Facebook wanted to be more evil/involved, they could change the political opinions of vast swathes of the population by deliberately triggering cognitive dissonance, and then exposing them to material from the other side when they're much more receptive to it. The only reason why that doesn't work so often currently is that cognitive dissonance hasn't yet been completely weaponized, but as we understand it more, it will be.
I like your suggestion to include reputation and attribution (and am actively campaigning for this to be included on news reporting and aggregation). Also on your suggestion that unattributed sourcing then bears on the reputation of those citing it.
"The reader decides" is ... problematic in multiple regards. Among them, the fact that it's been shown to work poorly in practice, witness the present situation.
Your example works for my idea too. If you are the source for "The Minnesota checkered sky theory" then the buck stops with you and an investigation of your credibility would be damaged.
I mean 'you' in the rhetorical sense of course.
The thing I'm talking about is something like a reputation score for news sources.
> Nothing is purely true or false because everything falls on a continuum.
That statement sure isn't purely true. (Therefore, there must at least kind of be something which is either purely true or purely false.) Though perhaps the sentiment behind it might not be totally wrong?
I'd expect they have a reasonably effective approach for A/B testing. Essentially, you want a uniformly random sample of your users, but you also want to enforce some properties about "connectedness" of the users in the sample, since user-user interaction might be an interesting metric to track. I think the buzzwords related to this sort of thing is "causal inference."
Based on the performance of some sample, you might decide to tweak the feature and release it to a new sample. The buzzwords for this would be "bandit algorithms."
It's launched in the US, Germany, and France so far. It started in the US, and Germany and France both have elections coming up. Launching depends at least on having factcheckers or mainstream media outlets doing factchecking active in that country and willing to join the scheme.
(I work for a factchecker in a different country).
Considering that anyone can publish anything online, and then collect money for advertising dollars on that topic, this seems like a very reasonable feature regardless of the political climate.
I think people will just mark anything they don't like as disputed. IMO they can try suggesting posts with different view points than the one users click 'share' or 'like' (combining ML and user provided data to pick the articles). Maybe that will help people have a bit more balanced view on the matter.
In my country the people who maintain facebook have a clear agenda which they are not afraid of showing. These people have already went as far as blocking the accounts of people who dared to question them in the guise of "verification" (that is, being forced to send your actual ID or having your account blocked).
Now they'll be able to decide which news are real and which ones are fake. I'm sure that absolutely nothing wrong will come out of this.
Perhaps just "The liberals are left of the conservatives. The ussr, Cuba and Venezuela were left and didn't work out. Hence liberals aren't always right."?
Third party "fact checkers"???-- factcheck[dot]org "FactCheck.org was launched in December 2003 by Brooks Jackson, a former Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, and CNN reporter" Just sayin.....
Here's an example of what happens when we try: Politifact, a consistently liberal-biased source, didn't like that Trump took credit for a hard and proven fact. So they called it "mostly false" even though nothing he said was false.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/feb/...
This thing Facebook is doing is bound to just end up becoming crowd-sourced echo-chamber censorship. And they probably know that.