Very nice project, I will definitely be using it and will try to contribute in my spare time.
One recommendation I'd have is not to use the word 'safety' in this context, it feels kind of overprotective. Perhaps the link should read "Take me back to reality" instead?
That's really the issue. It's just a question of whose bullshit. Bullshit of the rich media mughals? Right wing conservatives? Liberal elite? Environmentalists? Alt-right nutters? At the end of the day, media has stopped being about objectivity, just as long as there is a semblance, anything goes. People tell lies, or next to lies in order to get people to see things their ways. It's just a question of the level of sophistication of those lies. Outright lies are the lowest level of sophistication, all the way up to manufactured consent.
How can you distinguish between news that pisses a lot of people off and news that is fake/spam?
If I write a blatant hit piece which is based entirely on factual information a lot of people will report it because they are upset over it but it doesn't change the fact that is truthful.
How do you prevent people from suppressing opposing view points by reporting them as fake?
I never used the word "occasionally." Some news outlets run outright false stories that _are as bad as_ "fakenews" sites daily/weekly. Impling that those stories aren't as bad as the "fakenews" schemes and that we can't automate hiding those is just false.
I was merely pointing out that there could be more to address this problem and that I love this idea so far (I read the readme).
No, fake news = spam sites built from scripts consisting largely of a backcatalog nonsense stories ("Pope endorses Putin for US Presidential Election") with a one or two carefully produced fake stories as a "payload", instead of a purchasing call-to-action like other webspam sites.
Front page of that site: "German Scientists Prove There Is Life After Death".
From the backcatalog:
Putin Issues US Election Theft Warning, Orders Military To Protect Trump “At All Costs”
BREAKING: Putin Just Gave Obama 24 Hours Or His Ships Will Open Fire
Putin ally tells Americans: vote Trump or face nuclear war
Putin Warns Trump…ELITES PLANNING YOUR ASSASSINATION
Vladimir Putin Escapes New World Order Assassination Attempt
Putin Goes On LIVE TV And CONFIRMS That Obama And Hillary CREATED ISIS
and my personal favorite
Putin and Dalai Lama: Obama Is Responsible for ISIS, Along With Hillary
(and 23 more pages of stuff like this)
This is webspam.
The trick is: look past the front page. The front page is designed to look semi-sane. That's the point. Fakenews wouldn't work if you were just one click away from seeing that it's all a troll factory construction. You have to click a couple times to see that.
>The front page is designed to look semi-sane. That's the point. Fakenews wouldn't work if you were just one click away from seeing that it's all a troll factory construction.
That didn't occur to me. Makes total sense. Thanks
EndingTheFed is exactly the sort of fake news site designed around ad dollars that we're talking about. I'm not sure if you even looked at the site beyond the top few stories, but here's a few examples just a little bit down the page:
> 60 Minutes Goes To Sweden To Show How Peaceful Refugees Are, Entire Crew Gets Assaulted By Refugees (video is actually of an altercation with a conservative news group, while their interview seems genial, the actual video is attempting to cast the immigrants in Sweden in as negative light as possible, even going so far as repeating the falsehood of "no-go zones" and failing to mention that the rioting they show is actually being perpetrated by Swedes themselves)
> German Scientists Prove There is Life After Death (So get back to church)
> UNREAL: Ground-Breaking Cancer Treatment Snubbed By Media Because THIS Country Made It (which country you ask? Israel of course! Because the leftist media hates Israel, duh!)
> BREAKING: Measles Outbreak Traced, Look at Sick Location it Originated From
" For many months, conservatives and Republicans have been trying to warn the public that the incoming flood of immigrants"
When I was in Sweden I was hanging out with several Iraqis which confirmed the existence of no-go zones where assaults and arson including car bombs are common in some suburbs of Stockholm. I take their advice with a grain of salt but they had no apparent incentive to be dishonest.
Instead of a crude block list, why not bayesian filtering?
When you were last in Russia did you happen to catch video of the Dalai Lama endorsing Trump and blaming Clinton and Obama for creating ISIS?
I don't think trying to rehabilitate this particular fakenews site is a good use of your time, because really you're just going to end up passionately defending a malign shell script.
Didn't see those videos. I'm more interested in an answer to my question.
I believe that the fake news problem is intractable. You cannot identify any news source as being fake or real objectively. You can only trust other people's interpretations of the information, and other people's interpretations are easily manipulated because people are emotional.
What world view do you think this website represents?
Furthermore, wherein do I censor and/or deny that an attack occurred? The title says "News crew goes to Sweden to show how peaceful refugees are" - yet the actual segment is the exact opposite of that. You can see the video yourself, as well as the context I point out - or lack thereof, as it were.
> No, fake news = spam sites built from scripts consisting largely of a backcatalog nonsense stories
That's great, but that's not what this project appears to be focused on. It currently has a hardcoded blocklist, some of which is clearly just right-wing news/opinion with little to no ads - clearly not what you've described as spam sites.
Which one from the list are you thinking of? The last one someone (a clearly reasonable commenter) picked out turned out to be a perfect example of the kinds of sites I'm talking about.
Incidentally: I have nothing to say about the utility of this particular project. I just know that there really is fakenews, and it's not subjective.
Exactly. Those are the only websites I'm interested in targeting with this extension.
For example, I would never blacklist Breitbart, because I'm not interested in censoring political opinions I disagree with. I just want to free us from the burden of these websites that add nothing to the world and leech attention from everyone.
> I just want to free us from the burden of these websites that add nothing to the world and leech attention from everyone.
The slope is very slippery. It is very easy to put forth an argument that some left/right wing media "[adds] nothing to the world and [leeches] attention from everyone"
Keeping the focus on blatant spam sites is a noble cause, but this tool is as easily misused as a firearm.
I disagree on this slope being slippery (or actually, this being a slope at all).
Let me be more precise, and use tptacek's words in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12999887: "fake news = spam sites built from scripts consisting largely of a backcatalog nonsense stories [...] with a one or two carefully produced fake stories as a "payload".
I think this definition is as objective as it gets, and clearly excludes things I might disagree with politically, but are not the target of this extension.
We don't have similar qualms about voluntary mass blocking of ads.
I think the reverse assumption - that everything should be considered a valid information source until conclusively proved otherwise - is probably a more dangerous bias than assuming that some media does add nothing to the world.
That logic suggests we should ban free speech and only allow certain people and organizations to be registered as valid information sources, preferably after passing some sort of test that shows they're legitimate and trustworthy.
I'm not in love with blocklists either, and don't use them. I'm not arguing that you should use this extension (though, if you do, more power to you). I'm saying that most of the arguments about how difficult it is to detect fakenews have faulty premises.
You can say that until you're blue in the face, but nobody believes it anymore. This sort of block list has already been used to justify the blocking of completely legitimate (albeit right wing) news sites from Google.
The fact of the matter is this isn't a spam filter, no matter how much you want to spin it that way. Anytime I see the phrase "fake news" I know for sure there's political bias at play. That phrase didn't exist in any real way before the election.
Are you saying people who believe odd things no longer have the right to say them? Would websites covering the million man march in the 70's have been considered 'fake news' back then?
Somebody saying the Dalai Lama endorsed both Putin and Trump is producing original content and by definition isn't spam (unless they stole that content from somebody else, of course). Whether nefarious, delusional or just misinformed, do you think merely being wrong is proof enough to label an entire site as 'fake news'? Are we applying this standard to Fox News and CNN? They aired quite a few inaccuracies during the election.
I'm saying that sites that report as news that the Dalai Lama joined Putin in condemning Obama and Clinton as progenitors of ISIS are not worth listening to.
We are not applying the same standard to Fox News and CNN, because neither of those organizations simply invented crazy stories out of whole cloth and ran them as news on multiple different sites.
Here's an exercise: take the craziest story you can find on ENDTHEFED.COM (the spam site), and search for the headline. You'll see it's not just on ENDTHEFED.COM, but on several other sites. That's because it's laundered, exactly the same way webspam is, across many sites to conceal its origin and lack of originality. This is 2005-grade spam technology.
You think you're arguing passionately in defense of open-minded political discourse. But you're not. You're defending webspam, run by cynical webspam farms. You should stop.
Webspam farms are spam and should be filtered as such. The fact is 'fake news' is a separate term and is using separate filters because it's a completely separate concept that is political in nature.
You claim this isn't a slippery slope, but we've already slid down it a bit. Infowars was delisted by Quantcast as 'fake news'. Whether you like Alex Jones or not, I think we can both agree his site isn't blogspam.
No, they are not separate concepts. Your argument is akin to the one that says "if we block cialis spam, what's to prevent us from blocking all of commerce".
Why are you defending spam? You just did it upthread, when you suggested that maybe we shouldn't be so hostile to people who believe that the Dalai Lama endorsed Trump. The authors of that story do not believe that. It's webspam.
Argumentum ad absurdum. I expected better from someone with your reputation here on HN.
And now you're not even reading what I said! Spam should be filtered as spam. 'fake news' applies to so much more than just spam, as I have already demonstrated.
No, it's not reductio ad absurdum. The reason r.a.a. is a fallacy is that it introduces the false premise that the opponent must believe something ridiculous (that they clearly don't believe) for their statements to hold. But you actually just did defend the Dalai Lama site.
Are we agreed that ENDTHEFED.COM should be filtered? Maybe we're just arguing past each other.
Exactly. Blocking sites doesn't solve the issues, if anything it makes things worse. We need to be able to respectfully debate people we disagree with, not shut them out.
This video pretty much outlines what I think about the recent US election and how I think we should look to move on from it:
There's no "debate" involved with these sites. They're webspam. When someone sends you cialis spam, do you reply with an email attempting to persuade them to stop sending unsolicited commercial email?
Yours is yet another comment arguing from the faulty premise that "fakenews" describes sites like Breitbart. Breitbart is a horrible site, but it's not webspam fakenews.
Ok, but let's be fair. There's also a lot of people blaming recent results on breitbart. You may not consider it fake news, but I know a lot of people who'd say it's "just as bad". So is it surprising somebody thinks that "faux news" may get swept up by a fake news banner?
> "Yours is yet another comment arguing from the faulty premise that "fakenews" describes sites like Breitbart."
No, that's not my argument. My argument is that what can start with filtering out spammy clickbait can easily evolve into filtering out sites that other people take seriously.
For example, Huffington Post is a news site that uses a lot of the same tactics as clickbait spammers, and tends to be fairly one sided in their worldview. To someone who disagrees with the worldview of the Huffington Post, why would they be less inclined to block it once the tools are in place?
In other words, once the tools are in place to block content everyone agrees is spammy, I can pretty much guarantee that those same tools will be used for semi-spammy content that some people treat as real news. This will almost certainly lead to increased political polarisation.
There's an alternative tool that works fairly well... if you see clickbait, remember that's what it is. We should aim to rise above low-information sites by providing better-thought-out counter-arguments.
As for your cialis example, if it was posted in a public forum like Facebook then responding to the article might not change the habits of those trying to sell you something, but it might make other people who read your comment think twice about signing up.
Consider that I built it this night for http://lauzhack.com/, so it's not intended to be a fully-featured solution to the problem.
The main issue I wanted to address is the fact that such a blocker must be widely installed to be useful. Therefore, the Facebook message is intended to prod current users of the extensions to ask that their friends install it as well.
I'm amused that long-running British newspaper the Daily Star has made the list. I mean, it's probably accurate as they do have a bit of a reputation, but still - surprising.
I was working on something similar, but with a database that would contain credibility ratings from users and users would rate the website. The extension was supposed to display the rating and ev. warnings on top of the website.
Sounds like an interesting concept, though it'll need some really careful moderation to stop it getting abused. I've seen sites get low WOT ratings because the staff banned a few members and said members then took it out on their WOT page.
You'll need a good way to stop these negative SEO type attacks from being weaponised against a news site's rating by its competitors.
You need a browser extension for this nowadays? Is the target audience so judgement-impaired that they can't, you know, not click on obvious clickbait and think about what they're seeing on Facebook?
As we've seen this last election, yes, they are. How else do you explain millions of shares on "news" stories that are immediately, obviously false to anyone looking past the headlines?
are we really pretending that those people would've changed their vote had they not seen the "fake" news?
I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of these shares were by people who wanted the news to be true anyway. I have friends who shared some stuff like that. they were never gonna change their vote/view. everyone else would just roll their eyes.
I'm with Zuckerberg on this one. fake news did not affect the election. people are just looking for an excuse to blame. I would love to see how many people will still be against fake news come April first
You seem to enjoy pretending that Hillary lost because of fake news and "clearly everyone else is just plain stupid" and not because she's the most corrupt politician possibly in our country's history, so why not pretend about more stuff?
There have been a lot of these projects lately. It's clever, but I am not close to being convinced that fake news is a problem that we can engineer our way out of.
People read what they want to read. For instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning You can get rid of the fake news outlets, but you can't get rid of fake news as long as there is free speech.
I'd argue it could end up backfiring for multiple reasons. The most obvious one is that it will undoubtedly end up strengthening filter bubbles.
The problems that face us will not be solved by siloing ourselves away from views we disagree with. It might take more effort to filter out bullshit in our current age, but if we're not even aware of the bullshit someone else is feeding off, how are we going to combat it? We need to bring more people into public debate, not isolate them.
Exactly this. You are just abstracting the decision about "truth" to another set of observers.
Every crowdsourced news aggregation site faces the same challenge, too. Digg had serious vote manipulation problems. Reddit's /r/politics section was overrun by pro-Clinton activists, etc. Concerted, concentrated effort can almost always overpower the consensus of average users.
EDIT: to be clear, my point is that if/when this becomes a powerful tool, the incentive to aim it at a broader or different set of goals is overwhelming.
Tools for analyzing information can work, but they need to help the person using them make their own judgements, rather than delegate the whole process to some third party or opaque model/algorithm.
This is the same basic difference that you can see between good and bad science lectures in schools. Bad lectures give students a bunch of formulas they have to trust and memorize. Good lectures describe how the world works, which they can confirm through their own observations and experiments.
Anything that relies on blind trust in some curator will eventually have the exact same problems news most media has right now.
These aren't crowdsourced news aggregator sites. These are webspam sites, spun the same way any other webspam site is spun (with scripts and templates). The only thing that makes them interesting is that their payload is 1-2 carefully produced political stories, not a sales call-to-action.
People need to stop using the word "fake news" as though people were seeing stories about "bat boy" in the grocery store checkout aisle and believing them. This is propaganda. It's inflammatory, it's knowingly false, and it has a political agenda. It's propaganda.
edit: if you're going to down-vote something which is plainly constructive and well thought-out, you should try to articulate a response.
[1] propaganda, noun, derogatory: information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.
His comment is claiming that fake political news should be distinguished from the fake tabloid style news (bigfoot sightings/alien abduction/etc. that we've become accustomed to in the grocery store checkout aisle). The former is propaganda, the latter is not.
This distinction is correct, in terms of everyday usage of the word.
Your claim that "everything is propaganda" is plainly false. An author having a political agenda is not sufficient to render an article propaganda. This would be similar to claiming that every article written by someone with sexual desire is "pornography." It's plainly ridiculous, unless you are operationally defining "pornography" to mean something other than it does in everyday written English.
Things that are propaganda:
1. fake news stories disseminated with the express intent of influencing elections, which are known to be false by the author of the article / editor of the publication / etc.
Things that are not propaganda:
1. stories about bat children in supermarket tabloids
2. your comments
Things that might be propaganda:
1. fake news stories about political figures that appear in tabloids that also produce bat-child news (the article is false, the article might publicize and promote a political cause, but it isn't clear that it is a tool deliberately crafted to do that). What would clearly be propaganda in this situation though, would be a liberal/conservative/etc. spin site republishing a fake tabloid news story about Clinton/Trump that they must in good faith know is false).
That statement isn't untrue, it is objectively observation with one's eyes or using spectrometers in the case of an individual who is colorblind. It isn't binary, statements can be rated on a range of truthfulness from false propaganda to very objective...and, arguments that are isomorphisms of "all sides do it" are harmful because they essentially justify parties who benefit from such propaganda.
That the Earth's average temperature has been rising is also not untrue and can also be observed and measured. Yet it is often denied in political context, e.g. Sen. Jim Inhofe brought a snowball into the Senate as evidence to the contrary.
"The sky is blue" is a non-political statement only because no one stands to make money convincing people otherwise.
I kind of lumped "non-propaganda" with "demonstrably true" which you are right about. A true statement becomes propaganda when spoken at certain times especially when communicated while omitting related details. I think the general point still applies, it isn't binary, some statements aren't propaganda at all, while some have some mixed in, and some are fully propaganda. On the continuum, I'd rate the statements under consideration from least propaganda-ish to most as
"sky is blue" < "here's a snowball"
< "avg temperature of Earth's surface is rising"
~ "${average_comment_on_HN}"
<< "This snowball demonstrates climate change is a hoax"
< "${fake_news_articles}"
Is is fair to put "${random_comments_on_HN}" in the same category as "${fake_news_articles}" because they are both "propaganda?" No.
This is a fundamentally intellectually dishonest argument. There is a difference between making an argument with an agenda, even reporting news with an agenda, and propaganda. You can't just wash everything in shades of gray and shrug while saying "who knows what is truth? or what is false? oh well, guess we'll never know". Truth exists, and it is possible to determine what is true and what is not. Propaganda is passing off knowingly false reports in order to advance a political goal. It's a real thing, which is why there's a word that people created to describe it. Pretending that it's not propaganda has as much claim to legitimacy as any other news is not only wrong it's incredibly dangerous.
Fake news site are just the latest symptom of the two fold problem of anyone being able to put anything on the internet and people tending to like things that validate their existing views.
If its not news sites, its images with some text over them, videos, etc.
Given two clusters, I can predict the class of a new article by choosing the cluster whose centroid is closest to the article.
So, given some training data that produced two reasonable clusters with respect to the ground truth, I have a model that I can expect to generalize well on new data.
Now, this is not what that notebook shows, because it's missing the evaluating on testing data! The main point of the notebook is that the Jaccard Distance of the tokens of the HTML of the page, despite being very simple, appears to generate a reasonable model.
Interesting project, Is censorship the best coarse of action? Bare with me for a second, would it not be better to somehow overlay a meter or light indicating that this story is likely false. Even better, some sort of indicator that showed the # of sources (if any) and devised some sort of rating of quality/truthfulness.
I'm against all the fake news in Facebook et all but if we dont teach people to be good at detecting it we're just putting a bandaid over a broken bone so to speak. Am I being overly optimistic of society, that learning how to detect bullshit is better than doing the hard work for them?
The whole point of fakenews spam is that the effort it takes to evaluate individual stories exceeds the capacity of the reader. It's a little like asking for a "truth meter" for cialis resellers.
The analysis that shows you whether a site is fakenews or not is structural (and simple: go through the backcatalog, see if the Dalai Lama or the Pope is endorsing both Putin and Trump). Once you've accomplished that, there is no point to wasting any energy on any of the stories on the site.
I hear what you're saying about the spam/fake news. However it is not black and white. Sometimes even the 'good guys' make mistakes.
The fake news/spam thing might be straightforward. But what people are objecting to is the black list. Who decides what is one that blacklist?? That is the problem. What happens if the developer goes rogue/gets hacked/sells to a shady interest?? What happens if the developer is in favor of a certain parties biased news? Or even more insidious, what if they dont recognize their bias??
And in anticipation of the crowd sourced/decentralized argument I have heard elsewhere: lets talk about bitcoin. It is decentralized, under no one's control, right? A while back there was talk of increasing the block size to make transfers go faster. (the technical details are irrelevant, sorry if I made a mistake). One developer resigned because the other couple wouldn't make the change. Who controls bitcoin? ~4 people. This is why people are worried about blacklists.
As a side note, the book Fahrenheit 451 is super relevant right now. This is what we are scared of. FWIW, it was the only book I read in school that I remember/had an influence on me. Please read everyone! Thanks
> Bare with me for a second, would it not be better to somehow overlay a meter or light indicating that this story is likely false. Even better, some sort of indicator that showed the # of sources (if any) and devised some sort of rating of quality/truthfulness.
This is an interesting idea. Perhaps we need a public PageRank algorithm and database of pages and domains that could evolve over time. Then the browser addon could just overlay the score of the current page's public rank (and perhaps have a menu showing a list of known outside pages/domains that link to the current page/domain).
Censorship is not the best way forward. People need to adjust (read: acquire) critical thinking skills. But let's start with the media. For example, quoting unvetted tweaks should be grounds for shaming, or worse.
In addition,it should be not that this tool can be used to apply any prejudice, bias, etc. I certainly empathize with the sentiment here but this can quickly becomes a case of be careful what you wish for.
I do not see how filtering spam is equivalent to "safe spaces", or who you thought you might persuade with this comment. Could you go into more detail?
Yes, computers are good at things like that. For my part, I'm worried that they might choose to blacklist Pitchfork, and then I won't know whether to buy the next Animal Collective album.
I find it fascinating how paternalistic this whole topic is, and "Stop the Bullshit" is part of this. The goal is not developing independent thinkers, but merely ensuring that blind trust is given to the "enlightened people".
The whole idea behind this sort of filtering and vetting is not about teaching people how better to reason about the world and judging the truth of those that would tell you what is happening and why, but rather it says that most people are incapable of making those types of decisions for themselves and that an informed elite should be in control of what information is available to the plebs. Once you concede this, how far is it before we make "fake news", or rather unapproved news, simply illegal? How long until news simply becomes propaganda?
There absolutely is a problem with "fake news" from all quarters and it is nothing new at all: whether that was "bat boy" at the grocery checkout, the sinking of the Maine, or the news and characterizations during the recent campaign. "Stop the Bullshit" and filtering efforts is not a solution to the problem, merely the creation of new problems such an even less thoughtful populous and a new set of arbiters of the truth that I for one won't trust any more that the current ones.
While I like the friendly notification/explanation, any tool targeting fake news should do a little better in establishing its own credibility. You want to persuade, not block. I'm not sure the dollar amount is enough. We see it in these very comments: show the user a sample of obvious falsehoods they published. This way you could probably come up with a threshold where you just give up.
That's an excellent idea. I wrote the copy on that page trying to convey "can I get your help against these bad people?", rather than something blaming the user, or a scary looking warning.
But showing them the _reason_ why a certain website is blocked can become an opportunity to teach people critical thought, something that other comment threads point out.
Fake news isn't the problem. People willing to think critically is. The problem is, no one wants to know their baby is ugly. So the bury their heads in their person echo chamber.
To people who believe this kind of project is "paternalistic" or that filtering out noise is somehow weak or irresponsible, I disagree.
Time is finite. It is impossible to consume all of the information that is published in the world. It's not just a little impossible: the fraction of information that an individual can consume is very near zero. Most people who have worked in an academic or scientific field know that it is impossible to consume even a fraction of the domain-specific publications in their field, much less "all the news that's fit to print."
It makes sense, therefore, to have a strategy for selecting a subset of information that one trusts as "worth considering," which might include a spam filter (just as email has, for good reason).
I personally very seldom read news articles shared online, because my experience has been that they are consistently of very low quality. Speaking for myself, I get big world event news from the Economist, which has earned some trust, and the rare nytimes/wsj article that is about something it can't possibly fuck up (anything outside the borders of the United States is generally beyond NYT/WSJ).
Would I be wrong for filtering all of the shared news articles from my feed? The only reason I keep them there is that I skim Facebook to get a feel for what people are thinking about and feeling on a given day (to stay slightly "in touch" with people, even if I think they wallow in a world of self-serving garbage information and would be better served by finding something more interesting to occupy their minds).
A better criticism of this kind of filtering might that it is intrinsically arrogant, but I don't think it is any more paternalistic or irresponsible than a spam filter for email.
If you're every curious if something is true or not, just ask me. I know what is true and what's not, and I'll always tell you the truth about what is true, don't think about any of it, let me do that.
Happy news reading everyone, remember, don't do your own thinkin.
116 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadOne recommendation I'd have is not to use the word 'safety' in this context, it feels kind of overprotective. Perhaps the link should read "Take me back to reality" instead?
I chose "safety" because I think I copied Chrome's message when visiting a website with an invalid certificate.
If I write a blatant hit piece which is based entirely on factual information a lot of people will report it because they are upset over it but it doesn't change the fact that is truthful.
How do you prevent people from suppressing opposing view points by reporting them as fake?
I was merely pointing out that there could be more to address this problem and that I love this idea so far (I read the readme).
From the backcatalog:
Putin Issues US Election Theft Warning, Orders Military To Protect Trump “At All Costs”
BREAKING: Putin Just Gave Obama 24 Hours Or His Ships Will Open Fire
Putin ally tells Americans: vote Trump or face nuclear war
Putin Warns Trump…ELITES PLANNING YOUR ASSASSINATION
Vladimir Putin Escapes New World Order Assassination Attempt
Putin Goes On LIVE TV And CONFIRMS That Obama And Hillary CREATED ISIS
and my personal favorite
Putin and Dalai Lama: Obama Is Responsible for ISIS, Along With Hillary
(and 23 more pages of stuff like this)
This is webspam.
The trick is: look past the front page. The front page is designed to look semi-sane. That's the point. Fakenews wouldn't work if you were just one click away from seeing that it's all a troll factory construction. You have to click a couple times to see that.
That didn't occur to me. Makes total sense. Thanks
> 60 Minutes Goes To Sweden To Show How Peaceful Refugees Are, Entire Crew Gets Assaulted By Refugees (video is actually of an altercation with a conservative news group, while their interview seems genial, the actual video is attempting to cast the immigrants in Sweden in as negative light as possible, even going so far as repeating the falsehood of "no-go zones" and failing to mention that the rioting they show is actually being perpetrated by Swedes themselves)
> German Scientists Prove There is Life After Death (So get back to church)
> UNREAL: Ground-Breaking Cancer Treatment Snubbed By Media Because THIS Country Made It (which country you ask? Israel of course! Because the leftist media hates Israel, duh!)
> BREAKING: Measles Outbreak Traced, Look at Sick Location it Originated From " For many months, conservatives and Republicans have been trying to warn the public that the incoming flood of immigrants"
When I was in Sweden I was hanging out with several Iraqis which confirmed the existence of no-go zones where assaults and arson including car bombs are common in some suburbs of Stockholm. I take their advice with a grain of salt but they had no apparent incentive to be dishonest.
Instead of a crude block list, why not bayesian filtering?
I don't think trying to rehabilitate this particular fakenews site is a good use of your time, because really you're just going to end up passionately defending a malign shell script.
I believe that the fake news problem is intractable. You cannot identify any news source as being fake or real objectively. You can only trust other people's interpretations of the information, and other people's interpretations are easily manipulated because people are emotional.
What do you think?
Furthermore, wherein do I censor and/or deny that an attack occurred? The title says "News crew goes to Sweden to show how peaceful refugees are" - yet the actual segment is the exact opposite of that. You can see the video yourself, as well as the context I point out - or lack thereof, as it were.
That's great, but that's not what this project appears to be focused on. It currently has a hardcoded blocklist, some of which is clearly just right-wing news/opinion with little to no ads - clearly not what you've described as spam sites.
Incidentally: I have nothing to say about the utility of this particular project. I just know that there really is fakenews, and it's not subjective.
For example, I would never blacklist Breitbart, because I'm not interested in censoring political opinions I disagree with. I just want to free us from the burden of these websites that add nothing to the world and leech attention from everyone.
The slope is very slippery. It is very easy to put forth an argument that some left/right wing media "[adds] nothing to the world and [leeches] attention from everyone"
Keeping the focus on blatant spam sites is a noble cause, but this tool is as easily misused as a firearm.
Let me be more precise, and use tptacek's words in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12999887: "fake news = spam sites built from scripts consisting largely of a backcatalog nonsense stories [...] with a one or two carefully produced fake stories as a "payload".
I think this definition is as objective as it gets, and clearly excludes things I might disagree with politically, but are not the target of this extension.
I think the reverse assumption - that everything should be considered a valid information source until conclusively proved otherwise - is probably a more dangerous bias than assuming that some media does add nothing to the world.
The fact of the matter is this isn't a spam filter, no matter how much you want to spin it that way. Anytime I see the phrase "fake news" I know for sure there's political bias at play. That phrase didn't exist in any real way before the election.
Somebody saying the Dalai Lama endorsed both Putin and Trump is producing original content and by definition isn't spam (unless they stole that content from somebody else, of course). Whether nefarious, delusional or just misinformed, do you think merely being wrong is proof enough to label an entire site as 'fake news'? Are we applying this standard to Fox News and CNN? They aired quite a few inaccuracies during the election.
We are not applying the same standard to Fox News and CNN, because neither of those organizations simply invented crazy stories out of whole cloth and ran them as news on multiple different sites.
Here's an exercise: take the craziest story you can find on ENDTHEFED.COM (the spam site), and search for the headline. You'll see it's not just on ENDTHEFED.COM, but on several other sites. That's because it's laundered, exactly the same way webspam is, across many sites to conceal its origin and lack of originality. This is 2005-grade spam technology.
You think you're arguing passionately in defense of open-minded political discourse. But you're not. You're defending webspam, run by cynical webspam farms. You should stop.
You claim this isn't a slippery slope, but we've already slid down it a bit. Infowars was delisted by Quantcast as 'fake news'. Whether you like Alex Jones or not, I think we can both agree his site isn't blogspam.
Why are you defending spam? You just did it upthread, when you suggested that maybe we shouldn't be so hostile to people who believe that the Dalai Lama endorsed Trump. The authors of that story do not believe that. It's webspam.
And now you're not even reading what I said! Spam should be filtered as spam. 'fake news' applies to so much more than just spam, as I have already demonstrated.
Are we agreed that ENDTHEFED.COM should be filtered? Maybe we're just arguing past each other.
Is CNN blacklisted? They were a major source of fake news this election.
This video pretty much outlines what I think about the recent US election and how I think we should look to move on from it:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GLG9g7BcjKs
Yours is yet another comment arguing from the faulty premise that "fakenews" describes sites like Breitbart. Breitbart is a horrible site, but it's not webspam fakenews.
No, that's not my argument. My argument is that what can start with filtering out spammy clickbait can easily evolve into filtering out sites that other people take seriously.
For example, Huffington Post is a news site that uses a lot of the same tactics as clickbait spammers, and tends to be fairly one sided in their worldview. To someone who disagrees with the worldview of the Huffington Post, why would they be less inclined to block it once the tools are in place?
In other words, once the tools are in place to block content everyone agrees is spammy, I can pretty much guarantee that those same tools will be used for semi-spammy content that some people treat as real news. This will almost certainly lead to increased political polarisation.
There's an alternative tool that works fairly well... if you see clickbait, remember that's what it is. We should aim to rise above low-information sites by providing better-thought-out counter-arguments.
As for your cialis example, if it was posted in a public forum like Facebook then responding to the article might not change the habits of those trying to sell you something, but it might make other people who read your comment think twice about signing up.
> "Also includes a clustering analysis that could lead to an algorithm to automatically detect Fake News."
This implies that they want to do automatic fake news detection, but aren't quite there yet. Is that correct?
For general requests: https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/blob/master/s...
For facebook: https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/blob/master/s...
The main issue I wanted to address is the fact that such a blocker must be widely installed to be useful. Therefore, the Facebook message is intended to prod current users of the extensions to ask that their friends install it as well.
Nice project. I may use it :)
Sounds like an interesting concept, though it'll need some really careful moderation to stop it getting abused. I've seen sites get low WOT ratings because the staff banned a few members and said members then took it out on their WOT page.
You'll need a good way to stop these negative SEO type attacks from being weaponised against a news site's rating by its competitors.
As we've seen this last election, yes, they are. How else do you explain millions of shares on "news" stories that are immediately, obviously false to anyone looking past the headlines?
I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of these shares were by people who wanted the news to be true anyway. I have friends who shared some stuff like that. they were never gonna change their vote/view. everyone else would just roll their eyes.
I'm with Zuckerberg on this one. fake news did not affect the election. people are just looking for an excuse to blame. I would love to see how many people will still be against fake news come April first
Wait, but then we would need Stop the Stop the Stop-the-Bullshit.... um... but what if?!!
The problems that face us will not be solved by siloing ourselves away from views we disagree with. It might take more effort to filter out bullshit in our current age, but if we're not even aware of the bullshit someone else is feeding off, how are we going to combat it? We need to bring more people into public debate, not isolate them.
Also, confidence in the press is at an all time low, so there is already awareness. [1]
1. http://www.gallup.com/poll/192665/americans-confidence-newsp...
Every crowdsourced news aggregation site faces the same challenge, too. Digg had serious vote manipulation problems. Reddit's /r/politics section was overrun by pro-Clinton activists, etc. Concerted, concentrated effort can almost always overpower the consensus of average users.
EDIT: to be clear, my point is that if/when this becomes a powerful tool, the incentive to aim it at a broader or different set of goals is overwhelming.
This is the same basic difference that you can see between good and bad science lectures in schools. Bad lectures give students a bunch of formulas they have to trust and memorize. Good lectures describe how the world works, which they can confirm through their own observations and experiments.
Anything that relies on blind trust in some curator will eventually have the exact same problems news most media has right now.
[1] propaganda, noun, derogatory: information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.
His comment is claiming that fake political news should be distinguished from the fake tabloid style news (bigfoot sightings/alien abduction/etc. that we've become accustomed to in the grocery store checkout aisle). The former is propaganda, the latter is not.
This distinction is correct, in terms of everyday usage of the word.
Your claim that "everything is propaganda" is plainly false. An author having a political agenda is not sufficient to render an article propaganda. This would be similar to claiming that every article written by someone with sexual desire is "pornography." It's plainly ridiculous, unless you are operationally defining "pornography" to mean something other than it does in everyday written English.
Things that are propaganda:
1. fake news stories disseminated with the express intent of influencing elections, which are known to be false by the author of the article / editor of the publication / etc.
Things that are not propaganda:
1. stories about bat children in supermarket tabloids
2. your comments
Things that might be propaganda:
1. fake news stories about political figures that appear in tabloids that also produce bat-child news (the article is false, the article might publicize and promote a political cause, but it isn't clear that it is a tool deliberately crafted to do that). What would clearly be propaganda in this situation though, would be a liberal/conservative/etc. spin site republishing a fake tabloid news story about Clinton/Trump that they must in good faith know is false).
[1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/propaganda
That statement isn't untrue, it is objectively observation with one's eyes or using spectrometers in the case of an individual who is colorblind. It isn't binary, statements can be rated on a range of truthfulness from false propaganda to very objective...and, arguments that are isomorphisms of "all sides do it" are harmful because they essentially justify parties who benefit from such propaganda.
"The sky is blue" is a non-political statement only because no one stands to make money convincing people otherwise.
If its not news sites, its images with some text over them, videos, etc.
Because the current hard coded list of URLs is a start, but it's not really a scalable solution to the issue.
However, from what I can see in this file:
https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/blob/master/d...
It just seems like it's going to compare examples of articles included in the source files, as found here:
https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/tree/master/d...
So how is it going to detect the difference between a real or fake piece from this?
So, given some training data that produced two reasonable clusters with respect to the ground truth, I have a model that I can expect to generalize well on new data.
Now, this is not what that notebook shows, because it's missing the evaluating on testing data! The main point of the notebook is that the Jaccard Distance of the tokens of the HTML of the page, despite being very simple, appears to generate a reasonable model.
I'm against all the fake news in Facebook et all but if we dont teach people to be good at detecting it we're just putting a bandaid over a broken bone so to speak. Am I being overly optimistic of society, that learning how to detect bullshit is better than doing the hard work for them?
I like this approach, big, bold and in your face. We need to call out all the fake, garbage news out there.
You can't teach people to be on full alert all the time.
The analysis that shows you whether a site is fakenews or not is structural (and simple: go through the backcatalog, see if the Dalai Lama or the Pope is endorsing both Putin and Trump). Once you've accomplished that, there is no point to wasting any energy on any of the stories on the site.
The fake news/spam thing might be straightforward. But what people are objecting to is the black list. Who decides what is one that blacklist?? That is the problem. What happens if the developer goes rogue/gets hacked/sells to a shady interest?? What happens if the developer is in favor of a certain parties biased news? Or even more insidious, what if they dont recognize their bias??
And in anticipation of the crowd sourced/decentralized argument I have heard elsewhere: lets talk about bitcoin. It is decentralized, under no one's control, right? A while back there was talk of increasing the block size to make transfers go faster. (the technical details are irrelevant, sorry if I made a mistake). One developer resigned because the other couple wouldn't make the change. Who controls bitcoin? ~4 people. This is why people are worried about blacklists.
As a side note, the book Fahrenheit 451 is super relevant right now. This is what we are scared of. FWIW, it was the only book I read in school that I remember/had an influence on me. Please read everyone! Thanks
This is an interesting idea. Perhaps we need a public PageRank algorithm and database of pages and domains that could evolve over time. Then the browser addon could just overlay the score of the current page's public rank (and perhaps have a menu showing a list of known outside pages/domains that link to the current page/domain).
In addition,it should be not that this tool can be used to apply any prejudice, bias, etc. I certainly empathize with the sentiment here but this can quickly becomes a case of be careful what you wish for.
The whole idea behind this sort of filtering and vetting is not about teaching people how better to reason about the world and judging the truth of those that would tell you what is happening and why, but rather it says that most people are incapable of making those types of decisions for themselves and that an informed elite should be in control of what information is available to the plebs. Once you concede this, how far is it before we make "fake news", or rather unapproved news, simply illegal? How long until news simply becomes propaganda?
There absolutely is a problem with "fake news" from all quarters and it is nothing new at all: whether that was "bat boy" at the grocery checkout, the sinking of the Maine, or the news and characterizations during the recent campaign. "Stop the Bullshit" and filtering efforts is not a solution to the problem, merely the creation of new problems such an even less thoughtful populous and a new set of arbiters of the truth that I for one won't trust any more that the current ones.
But showing them the _reason_ why a certain website is blocked can become an opportunity to teach people critical thought, something that other comment threads point out.
Time is finite. It is impossible to consume all of the information that is published in the world. It's not just a little impossible: the fraction of information that an individual can consume is very near zero. Most people who have worked in an academic or scientific field know that it is impossible to consume even a fraction of the domain-specific publications in their field, much less "all the news that's fit to print."
It makes sense, therefore, to have a strategy for selecting a subset of information that one trusts as "worth considering," which might include a spam filter (just as email has, for good reason).
I personally very seldom read news articles shared online, because my experience has been that they are consistently of very low quality. Speaking for myself, I get big world event news from the Economist, which has earned some trust, and the rare nytimes/wsj article that is about something it can't possibly fuck up (anything outside the borders of the United States is generally beyond NYT/WSJ).
Would I be wrong for filtering all of the shared news articles from my feed? The only reason I keep them there is that I skim Facebook to get a feel for what people are thinking about and feeling on a given day (to stay slightly "in touch" with people, even if I think they wallow in a world of self-serving garbage information and would be better served by finding something more interesting to occupy their minds).
A better criticism of this kind of filtering might that it is intrinsically arrogant, but I don't think it is any more paternalistic or irresponsible than a spam filter for email.
If you're every curious if something is true or not, just ask me. I know what is true and what's not, and I'll always tell you the truth about what is true, don't think about any of it, let me do that.
Happy news reading everyone, remember, don't do your own thinkin.