Nearly all fact-checking organizations are considered to be biased and untrustworthy by a sizable percentage of the population. I'm skeptical that this will actually lead to change in people's critical thinking as applied to processing news and news sources.
A recent poll showed that more Americans trusted Donald Trump, someone who has not gone a day in his short tenure in office without him or someone on his staff telling a verifiable lie to the press, to tell them the truth compared to the U.S. media.
Yes, the problem is not a technical one, and the term 'fake news' is in itself gaslighting and part of the problem - as soon as you accept this term, you accept people just shouting fake news to shut down conversation (as Trump does frequently to shut down lines of questioning he doesn't like, notably in his press conference before he'd even heard the question). We should reject the premise of any argument that depends on some news being fake and some being real, and somehow if everyone just knew the one truth it'd be ok.
People start from different places (education, background, prejudices), so they interpret even the same set of facts differently. We don't have too much fake news, we have too little critical thinking.
"Fake News" was a term created to explain why Hillary didn't win the election. If she had won, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Ironically, Trump has successfully comandeered the term to criticize his enemies in the media.
The problem is that the mainstream has lost its influence to a lot of smaller players and they are doing whatever they can to get it back. Facebook and Google are having political problems because they are viewed as part of the cause of the mainstream media's lack of influence and they are trying to comply with pressure from somewhere. I don't think fake news really hurts their bottom line. In fact, Facebook and Google being viewed as politically biased might be a reason for people to switch to other search engines, especially since nearly 50% of the U.S did vote for Trump after all.
The majority of TV media routinely engages in "just honest enough so you can't sue me" reporting. They consistently misrepresent the facts and spin things to their agendas.
Now your university educated will call it filtering/magnifying/selective truth/implementation of propoganda models (see: Chomsky)
Your average person just says "they lie!" And "fake news".
When dealing with organizations as fundamentally dishonest as the corporate media this is the most you can expect from Joe public.
"Fake news" (along with Russia-panic) started its life as part of a propaganda offensive by the DNC and DNC affiliated media (CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, etc.) to justify why Hillary lost that didn't involve blaming her.
I think it was mainly targeted at Democrats/Hillary supporters rather than Trump supporters (they obviously didn't need to hear an excuse for why she lost).
> the term 'fake news' is in itself gaslighting and part of the problem
The term "fake news" is not gaslighting. It was coined to describe news that was, quite literally, intentionally made up with the intent to deceive and manipulate the reader using objectively false facts. For example, the fake electoral map that showed that Clinton only won the popular vote along the coasts, and that everywhere else (including Chicago!) voted uniformly for Trump.
The term has since been appropriated (one might argue intentionally, by progenitors of said fake news) to describe any news that has a perceived bias or slant differing from the one held by the person speaking, but that's not "fake news" - that's just... well, news.
> We don't have too much fake news, we have too little critical thinking
I agree with this. To a large degree, if people collectively possessed better critical thinking skills and demonstrated the interest in using them, actual fake news would be a non-issue. As I said, true "fake news" is trivially verifiable as false (e.g. Trump winning Chicago), but it's spread by people who either don't have the skills to think that deeply, don't want to think deeply, or simply don't mind blatantly lying in order to push their agenda.
But has the news gone a day without telling a verifiable lie? I read an article yesterday running down the list of organizations (quoted and linked) mocking Trump for referring to a terrorist attack the night before in Sweden. The full transcript shows Trump never mentioned a terrorist attack.
It's not that Trump is so trustworthy it's just that one person can't possibly lie as much as thousands.
He mentioned all cities and countries where terrorist attacks occurred. Then mentioned something happened in Sweden as well specifically the night before. It's not because he didn't put the word "terrorist attack" in the same sentence that he didn't mean that, it's clear from the transcript that it was exactly what he meant.
----
"Here's the bottom line, we've got to keep our country safe," Trump said. "You look at what's happening. We've got to keep our country safe. You look at what's happening in Germany. You look at what's happening last night in Sweden. Sweden! Who would believe this? Sweden! They took in large numbers, they're having problems like they never thought possible."
He continued, " You look at what’s happening in Brussels. You look at what’s happening all over the world. Take a look at Nice. Take a look at Paris. We’ve allowed thousands and thousands of people into our country and there was no way to vet those people. There was no documentation. There was no nothing. So we’re going to keep our country safe."
----
Trump didn't directly claim there was a terrorist attack in Sweden "last night", but by saying in the same breath as "look at Paris, look at Nice" where there was three very well known attacks in 2 years, he is implicitely saying "there was an attack in Sweden last night", and he knows it perfectly well. And he knows that a portion of his listeners will not hear the debunking and others will believe him rather than hard tangible facts. And he very consciouly said it in this way because he knew all this.
We live in a world where obama can get the number of US states wrong and get a pass, and trump mentioning a segment he saw last night on FOX is the end of the world.
Interestingly enough the media parroted the "debunked" claim when the article was using statistics from Sweden's own government. Rape is up 70% since 2005.
Grenade attacks are also a thing in Sweden now, which is absolutely unacceptable.
There are about 30% of the population that are totally ignorant not just about facts but about how to even ascertain what the truth is. I'm not sure we should throw up our hands and give up because a sizable percentage of people are hopeless. There are a lot of people who can be helped by that kind of thing.
We absolutely should not throw up our hands. To some extent, I appreciate that Google and Facebook are at least aware of the issue and want to act on it. My skepticism is that as a result of these efforts, Google and Facebook will be considered to be biased, inaccurate, and no longer trustworthy. There is already a lot of animosity towards Silicon Valley companies as it is.
I certainly hope that if there is 70% of the population this can still help, that it accomplishes that goal without making the other 30% even worse.
> I'm not sure we should throw up our hands and give up because a sizable percentage of people are hopeless.
I hope you're not excluding HN with 'we' and 'our'. I see a lot of tech people, actually most people in general (including myself), just as clueless and ignorant about the facts. The supporters of Linux and open source claiming "superiority" vs competing tech comes to mind.
To be fair, trump does tell _his_ truth. His statements are generally wrong not for any conniving purpose, but because he genuinely has no idea what is going on.
I think this is more about the low standards in journalism as opposed to high standards of honesty in the Trump adminstration.
A recent example: Salon just ran an article on Milo Yiannopoulos. He was sexually abused as a child and made claims a year ago that recently came to light that it was mostly his fault and he seduced the transgressor, somewhat excusing the behavior. At that very same moment they removed articles that seemed to support pedophilia that they had published previously.
My theory is that public opinion takes a long time to shift on these issues, and the media has been a fundamentally dishonest and deceptive industry for so long it's hard to outdo them in such a short time.
Sounds like you're a source of fake news, or a victim of conservative media lies.
The media nowadays covers a very wide spectrum from honest mainstream media (NYT, WP, BBC etc) to partizan sources that include a high proportion of lies (Fox News) to the totally dishonest and unreliable (Breitbart, Infowars etc).
Mainstream media reporting based on trained journalists and subeditors, fact checkers and ombudsmen (who publish corrections) is not "fundamentally dishonest and deceptive", despite the efforts of liars like Trump to undermine it.
The American tragedy is that a large proportion of the electorate has been corrupted by alt-right media lies to the point where people deny things that are provably, factually true.
As with anything, that poll is deeply party political:
"The results were vastly skewed along partisan lines, with 81 percent of Republicans trusting the administration over the media and 79 percent of Democrats deferring to news organizations over the White House."
IMO the poll doesn't reflect anything other than people's willingness to believe, against any and all evidence, that their "side" is correct. It feels like a very specific effect of the internet - with five seconds of googling you can find an opinion that reinforces yours, rather than confront the fact that you might be wrong.
"This sort of fact-checking data journalism mythology, which is really just political ideology masquerading as data-driven reporting" [1]
The speed with which the likes of Mr. Yannipoulous are pre-empting the rise of mainstream fact-checking/referencing is startling. It shows that who stand to lose from more effective veracity-detection tools will attempt to outpace the development of said solutions by rapidly deploying undermining rhetoric.
How will a system like this handle developing news stories after the fact? E.g. in the Québec mosque shooting there were initially two suspects, and many news articles that had accurate information at the time look incorrect in retrospect. Would those all be marked as BS retroactively by such a system, or is it enough that the news article used the best available facts at the time?
How will it handle granularity? It's very hard to write any news article that's 100% correct about everything. Will the entire article be marked as non-factually accurate due to the slightest mistake, or will they be highlighting specific factual inaccuracies in the content itself?
It's almost funny how the underlying premise is ignored: that there is really no such thing as "news" in terms of the information we consume -- all these sources are just a segment of the Entertainment industry. So-called News organizations make their money the same way a game show does: advertising. There is no built-in economic reward for being a great truth-teller. Attract more eyeballs and you make more in advertising, period. Especially in these days of so many forms/channels of communications, this all promotes echo chambers of bias, which is sad but true.
The idea of automated "fact checking" should be sending chills down everybody's spine.
Wasn't the whole point of Google replacing things like Yahoo directories, curated manually, with fully automated algorithms? Being able to find quality information on "Bill Clinton" algorithmically and not settle for the page "Bill Clinton Sucks" as their early paper discussed? And aren't we in the age of AI, everything is solved even more now with NNs than it was with PageRank?
Why then prop up human-chosen sources like snopes and politifact? Is the AI too dumb or does it hold the wrong political opinions?
>Why then prop up human-chosen sources like snopes and politifact? Is the AI too dumb or does it hold the wrong political opinions?
There's not much AI behind it.
I mean it's more complicated than that but a page's rank is based on number of incoming links.
What's interesting is that the net seems to be partitioning along various demographic lines: rural/urban, left/right etc, each creating their own subspace of 'credible' sites based on the pagerank algorithm.
In fact it's a self reinforcing cycle because of personalized searches. Once google gathers enough information about you based on your search history it will present you with results tailored to your opinions and tastes.
It's unfortunate because in the 90s we talked about the web breaking down barriers, but in some cases it's walling people in. Sometime in obvious ways like with actual walled gardens like facebook, but also in more insidious ways such as personalized searching.
I feel like this is something that maybe should be handled outside of search engines / aggregators themselves. I'm imagining some sort of community around a browser extension - the ability to vote for tags / add comments to any url, using the extension would allow you to see what others think. Would need moderation and would have to really get a critical mass before it would be useful. Perhaps the ability to have multiple "communities" you subscribe to with their own groups and ratings e.g. the "Fact Checkers" community rates this article one way, the "Reddit Politics" community rates it a bit differently, etc.
Some sort of community around a browser extension you say?
Check out https://hypothes.is/ it's a project to allow universal annotation of web content, which could conceivably enable just such a process of decentralized, community-moderated fact checking. Wouldn't that be nice! Of course, given what's happening on Wikipedia lately, I'm not totally convinced it could work, but hey, at least someone's trying.
very cool, thank you for pointing this out. I want to play with it some more, but I think one of the things that isnt fully thought out is that some url's will inherently change over time - the front page of the NYT for instance shows comments from over a year ago that obviously don't apply now - even comments from an hour ago may reference content that is no longer there. I don't have an answer for the problem but its something thats got to be thought about. Similar problem would be canonicalization of urls.
Introducing TaaS: Truth as a Service. Brought to you by your omniscient Corporate Overlords. Because you're not smart enough to find the Truth for yourself!
Imagine how much more persuasive this comment would have been if you'd just taken a few more seconds add and hand full of links to provide evidence and context to your statement.
Readit News
A recent poll showed that more Americans trusted Donald Trump, someone who has not gone a day in his short tenure in office without him or someone on his staff telling a verifiable lie to the press, to tell them the truth compared to the U.S. media.
People start from different places (education, background, prejudices), so they interpret even the same set of facts differently. We don't have too much fake news, we have too little critical thinking.
The problem is that the mainstream has lost its influence to a lot of smaller players and they are doing whatever they can to get it back. Facebook and Google are having political problems because they are viewed as part of the cause of the mainstream media's lack of influence and they are trying to comply with pressure from somewhere. I don't think fake news really hurts their bottom line. In fact, Facebook and Google being viewed as politically biased might be a reason for people to switch to other search engines, especially since nearly 50% of the U.S did vote for Trump after all.
Now your university educated will call it filtering/magnifying/selective truth/implementation of propoganda models (see: Chomsky)
Your average person just says "they lie!" And "fake news".
When dealing with organizations as fundamentally dishonest as the corporate media this is the most you can expect from Joe public.
I think it was mainly targeted at Democrats/Hillary supporters rather than Trump supporters (they obviously didn't need to hear an excuse for why she lost).
The term "fake news" is not gaslighting. It was coined to describe news that was, quite literally, intentionally made up with the intent to deceive and manipulate the reader using objectively false facts. For example, the fake electoral map that showed that Clinton only won the popular vote along the coasts, and that everywhere else (including Chicago!) voted uniformly for Trump.
The term has since been appropriated (one might argue intentionally, by progenitors of said fake news) to describe any news that has a perceived bias or slant differing from the one held by the person speaking, but that's not "fake news" - that's just... well, news.
> We don't have too much fake news, we have too little critical thinking
I agree with this. To a large degree, if people collectively possessed better critical thinking skills and demonstrated the interest in using them, actual fake news would be a non-issue. As I said, true "fake news" is trivially verifiable as false (e.g. Trump winning Chicago), but it's spread by people who either don't have the skills to think that deeply, don't want to think deeply, or simply don't mind blatantly lying in order to push their agenda.
It's not that Trump is so trustworthy it's just that one person can't possibly lie as much as thousands.
---- "Here's the bottom line, we've got to keep our country safe," Trump said. "You look at what's happening. We've got to keep our country safe. You look at what's happening in Germany. You look at what's happening last night in Sweden. Sweden! Who would believe this? Sweden! They took in large numbers, they're having problems like they never thought possible."
He continued, " You look at what’s happening in Brussels. You look at what’s happening all over the world. Take a look at Nice. Take a look at Paris. We’ve allowed thousands and thousands of people into our country and there was no way to vet those people. There was no documentation. There was no nothing. So we’re going to keep our country safe." ----
This is the Kuleshov effect of speeches.
Interestingly enough the media parroted the "debunked" claim when the article was using statistics from Sweden's own government. Rape is up 70% since 2005.
Grenade attacks are also a thing in Sweden now, which is absolutely unacceptable.
I certainly hope that if there is 70% of the population this can still help, that it accomplishes that goal without making the other 30% even worse.
I hope you're not excluding HN with 'we' and 'our'. I see a lot of tech people, actually most people in general (including myself), just as clueless and ignorant about the facts. The supporters of Linux and open source claiming "superiority" vs competing tech comes to mind.
Deleted Comment
It would take a couple of generations though.
A recent example: Salon just ran an article on Milo Yiannopoulos. He was sexually abused as a child and made claims a year ago that recently came to light that it was mostly his fault and he seduced the transgressor, somewhat excusing the behavior. At that very same moment they removed articles that seemed to support pedophilia that they had published previously.
https://mobile.twitter.com/stillgray/status/8338350313281249...
My theory is that public opinion takes a long time to shift on these issues, and the media has been a fundamentally dishonest and deceptive industry for so long it's hard to outdo them in such a short time.
The media nowadays covers a very wide spectrum from honest mainstream media (NYT, WP, BBC etc) to partizan sources that include a high proportion of lies (Fox News) to the totally dishonest and unreliable (Breitbart, Infowars etc).
Mainstream media reporting based on trained journalists and subeditors, fact checkers and ombudsmen (who publish corrections) is not "fundamentally dishonest and deceptive", despite the efforts of liars like Trump to undermine it.
The American tragedy is that a large proportion of the electorate has been corrupted by alt-right media lies to the point where people deny things that are provably, factually true.
For an informed account of the problem, see: http://uk.businessinsider.com/conservative-media-trump-drudg...
"The results were vastly skewed along partisan lines, with 81 percent of Republicans trusting the administration over the media and 79 percent of Democrats deferring to news organizations over the White House."
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/trump-media-trust-poll...
IMO the poll doesn't reflect anything other than people's willingness to believe, against any and all evidence, that their "side" is correct. It feels like a very specific effect of the internet - with five seconds of googling you can find an opinion that reinforces yours, rather than confront the fact that you might be wrong.
The speed with which the likes of Mr. Yannipoulous are pre-empting the rise of mainstream fact-checking/referencing is startling. It shows that who stand to lose from more effective veracity-detection tools will attempt to outpace the development of said solutions by rapidly deploying undermining rhetoric.
[1] https://youtu.be/PTxSAjXpnqo?t=1m40s
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2017/02/03/daniel-dales-d...
Of 26 checked statements, 20 were mostly false or worse.
[1] http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/stateme...
How will it handle granularity? It's very hard to write any news article that's 100% correct about everything. Will the entire article be marked as non-factually accurate due to the slightest mistake, or will they be highlighting specific factual inaccuracies in the content itself?
Or to put it in another way, it's "fact check", not "fact checked".
The idea of automated "fact checking" should be sending chills down everybody's spine.
Why then prop up human-chosen sources like snopes and politifact? Is the AI too dumb or does it hold the wrong political opinions?
There's not much AI behind it.
I mean it's more complicated than that but a page's rank is based on number of incoming links.
What's interesting is that the net seems to be partitioning along various demographic lines: rural/urban, left/right etc, each creating their own subspace of 'credible' sites based on the pagerank algorithm.
In fact it's a self reinforcing cycle because of personalized searches. Once google gathers enough information about you based on your search history it will present you with results tailored to your opinions and tastes.
It's unfortunate because in the 90s we talked about the web breaking down barriers, but in some cases it's walling people in. Sometime in obvious ways like with actual walled gardens like facebook, but also in more insidious ways such as personalized searching.
Check out https://hypothes.is/ it's a project to allow universal annotation of web content, which could conceivably enable just such a process of decentralized, community-moderated fact checking. Wouldn't that be nice! Of course, given what's happening on Wikipedia lately, I'm not totally convinced it could work, but hey, at least someone's trying.
Its highly suspicious its launching in france and germany while their populist movements are growing.
Like yes propaganda is a problem but so is the ministery of truth.
Fake news stories have always existed the problem now is that we don't get news anymore we get policy driven editorials.
Fixing fake news is a red herring I much rather get opinion pieces and corrected speech out of prime time news.
But that's what you get for decades or people being offended by factual headlines.