Unfortunately, it's how most people, on both sides, define it.
Far too many people are unwilling to recognize that news that confirms their world view might be fact. They cannot or will not challenge it, and simply accept it as fact.
The right believes Obama is from Kenya, the left believes Trump just signed an order that banned Muslims. Both claims upon inspection fall apart immediately. The fact that both of these are so widely believed shows you how little critical thinking and research the average person does. They really just want "their team" to win, it's really a instinctual reaction more than a intellectual one.
He did bomb Muslims BUT not because they were Muslims. Get the difference? Trump has said many times he wants to ban Muslims from the USA, even that Muslim with a MIT PHD.
Only on Google cache since he removed it:
"December 07, 2015 -
Donald J. Trump Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration
(New York, NY) December 7th, 2015, -- Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on. According to Pew Research, among others, there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population. Most recently, a poll from the Center for Security Policy released data showing "25% of those polled agreed that violence against Americans here in the United States is justified as a part of the global jihad" and 51% of those polled, "agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah." Shariah authorizes such atrocities as murder against non-believers who won't convert, beheadings and more unthinkable acts that pose great harm to Americans, especially women.
Mr. Trump stated, "Without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life. If I win the election for President, we are going to Make America Great Again." - Donald J. Trump"
"December 07, 2015 - Donald J. Trump Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration
(New York, NY) December 7th, 2015, -- Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on. According to Pew Research, among others, there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population."
It may be gone from the location you were looking at, as happens with all kinds of stuff on the web. I believe this is the same document, available from the DJT campaign site.
It seems you care more about intent than outcome. I'm more pragmatic and concerned about what someone does not why they did it.
The reason I don't believe the "concern" coming from Democrats is if they actually cared about the Syrian people they would have been protesting in capitol hill while Obama was dropping bombs on their villages and hospitals. I was there, the Quakers were there, even some Republicans were there. Sadly the Democrats were not to be found in any significant number any of the dozen or so times I visted.
> prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual's country of nationality.
You're right. It's not an order that bans Muslims, explicitly. It's an order that bans them implicitly. The NPR annotation:
> If you CTRL+F this document, you won’t find the words “Christian” or “Muslim.” But if you read closely, this is the section that indicates prioritizing Christians. How so? Because the seven countries affected by this order are all Muslim-majority countries. Also note that Trump himself indicated a preference for prioritizing Christians in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network. And former Trump campaign surrogate Rudy Giuliani told Fox that Trump first called it a “Muslim ban” but asked him to come up with a legal framework for it. Giuliani said he did, one based on “danger,” not religion.
99% of the time when I see "fascist" being thrown around its name calling. Now days I just read it as "something a left winger doesn't like". Antifa movements make a lot more sense in that context too.
That's definitely something that needs to be said. I've seen way too many instances where people immediately label someone a fascist for giving even an inkling of support for something Trump did. I wish people could calm down just long enough to have something resembling useful discourse.
How do you debate a person that denies objective reality, and embraces their very own alternative reality?
I don't think you can. For the same reason you can't negotiate with terrorists. They aren't playing by the same rule book. You hold out a hand to shake, they stab you in the face with a knife.
"Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete, and they regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties. Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society. Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature, and views political violence, war, and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation. Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the principal goal of achieving autarky through protectionist and interventionist economic policies."
When I read that I see elements of fascism in many governments around the world, with very few of them coming close to the definition.
Even so, you could fairly easily set up a number of points to check off on and score a government (and by extension) it's supporters on a scale from 'definitely not fascist' to 'definitely fascist'.
The question then becomes at what point on that scale it becomes reasonable to call a government fascist and to call a support of that government a fascist. I'm pretty sure we're not there yet but I am also pretty sure that we are slowly but surely sliding in that direction.
Using the term fascism is like a shot in the arm, it tries to wake up the organism that it is directed at that it is getting ill and needs to fend off some viral element. Unfortunately usually the opposite happens and instead the recipient will wall themselves off from the provider of the message. Even so, I guess that even fascism light is dangerous and ugly enough that plenty of people would not be caught dead being labeled a fascist, especially not when there is some hard evidence that it is so.
As far as I can tell, this is a serious project that's likely to have sincere community interest. They define the problem in concrete terms and have created a framework to objectively measure the success of submitted solutions.
When we start with something substantive like this and take it straight up to generic ideological soundbites, we cheat ourselves of the kind of intellectually interesting discussion that we might've had instead.
I would like to see a test/quiz that shows you headlines or how they would be shared on facebook news feed and asks you to identify which you think are real/fake.
>It should be possible to build a prototype post-facto “truth labeling” system [...] Such a system would tentatively label a claim or story as true/false based on the stances taken by various news organizations on the topic, weighted by their credibility.
And of course nobody would love this technology more than the Chinese and Russian governments. Is a system aimed at quickly identifying obscure blogs that disagree with "high-credibility" sources supposed to help democracy?
Because they are a lot less covert about their censorship practices and they are quick at adopting new technologies. There are of course a lot of Western countries who claim to be free societies who would love to have those tools and capabilites too.
Machine Learning technology is immensely powerful and will absolutely be used to both the detriment and benefit of the people at large. This is something we as technologists need to understand.
It's one of the reasons why our employment choices and our decisions around who to work with must be taken in the context the impact it will cause on the world around us. As we begin to automate more and more of traditionally human jobs, we're going to find our work inextricable from the political landscape our systems are creating.
"Media Matters has already secured access to raw data from Facebook, Twitter...
Predictive Technology
Bringing this data analysis to scale will also allow Media Matters to identify which individuals and outlets are the most destructive forces driving fake news, misinformation and harrasment.
Cutting-edge advances in cloud computing and machine learning will enable us to identify patterns and connections that would otherwise go under the radar.
...
Media Matters' core budget for 2017 is $13.4 millions which covers a staff of 81. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
This budget allows us to create a 34 person research deparment engaged in media monitoring, research, deep dive analysis and rapid response...
this budget also alows us to invest in technological innovations like the creation of an early warning system to identify in the profilerationof fake nws more efficiently and to create cutting-edge predictive technology that allows us to identify patterns and connections in order to asses how misinformation will move and how we can neutralise it. "
I agree. The problem is the only thing Democrats or Republicans hate more that each other nowadays is people who are nonpartisan. Very few sane voices can be heard over the screaming of partisan hacks lately.
This is not solvable by humans or machine learning.
For example "leonardo dicaprio charity linked to 3 bil money laundering scandal", "raport says trump spent night with hookers in Russia", "angelina jolie divorcig brad pitt", "terrorist attack in Paris, 200 dead" etc. Some of those headlines seems like clickbait and false news but they are not, good luck with classifying those and similar.
This effort is immensely scary to me as an objective observer. There is an inherent bias in the self-righteous "majority" that blinds it to its own flaws, fallacies, and "fake news". It's akin to asking corporations or dictators to regulate themselves. There is a precedent and model on how to provide a structure to combat "fake news" and it's called the American Constitution with it's various means for separating and balancing powers in addition to the breakdown into three branched of government. What is overlooked is that the very nature that we have two distinct parties is a core function of this leveling and balance and regulation of powers.
The effort to combat "fake news", the solution looks ever more like thought police and authoritarian propaganda machine than it looks, let alone would even be able to provide some sort of accurate and precise filter of "fake news".
What a lot of ... basically everyone on the left ... doesn't realize is that CNN was precisely set up after Carter's thumping, with specific and deliberate effort to manipulate people's minds and perceptions for political purposes, i.e., propaganda. Now, will it be accepted that given its history and its rather regular intentional manipulative and false news reporting that CNN will be labeled "fake news"? There is no chance in hell that would happen even if they came out and said "we are fake news". Just let that sink in; this is not a scientific or principled endeavor, it is purely a political one to weed out "fake news" the left disagrees with, while promoting "legitimate news" the left agrees with.
It goes to the very core and purpose of the freedom of speech in the USA, for which many foreign and ever increasingly even American people don't have a deep enough appreciation for. The vulnerabilities one party of people cunningly and in a self-satisfactory manner so slyly put in place so that they can misuse it one day, may very well fall into the "wrong" hands the next. It is precisely what happened with the oh so righteous Weimar Republic and it's emergency measures that were meant to be used for "good". Well, the National Socialists used it for "good" too, just not the "good" their ideologically opposite expected it to be used for.
Fake news is generally identified by the reputation of its author (New York Times vs Alt-Right Patriot Freedom Observer). Nothing published by the Times or Wall Street Journal (despite any editorial bias) is fake, simply because we know (except in the rare circumstance) that they apply journalistic integrity in sourcing and writing articles. Much of what's published on "fringe" sites, especially if no mainstream outlets cover it, is likely fake (i.e. if it's making a factual claim about the world, not just expressing an opinion).
Obviously followers of these sites will fight back against any "fake" labels, by arguing there is a "cover-up" by organized opposition, that their truth is being suppressed, that any fake news classifier intrinsically has a liberal bias, and so on. The difficulty for me is not identifying what's fake, but convincing anyone else that it is.
I put it in another comment on this subthread, but Friedman is an opinion writer, on the opinion page, not the news page. He's supposed to make controversial statements.
No I think he means... Articles that are not sourced (citations, reports, interviews, journals).... etc have a higher likelihood of being false, than those that do.
Mainstream news orgs tend to be better about including citations, and sources. They are also better about publishing retractions, when they are caught saying something factually wrong.
No I think he means... Articles that are not sourced (citations, reports, interviews, journals).... etc have a higher likelihood of being false, than those that do.
Mainstream news orgs tend to be better about including citations, and sources. They are also better about publishing retractions, when they are caught saying something factually wrong.
It's not clear to me which is more of a problem. With obviously fake news you can at least use well-researched facts to argue against it. When CNN keeps pushing the narrative (i.e. relentlessly talking about Hillary "winning" the debates when in hindsight she obviously didn't) it's a much more subversive, subtle kind of fake.
CNN winning is merely them echoing the majority sentiment of the polls, maybe with a dash of hope thrown in.
Ironically this may have done Clinton in with people thinking well, if she's won already then I don't need to go and vote.
Hindsight is always 20/20, it is very easy to see Clinton winning as a 'narrative' pushed with an agenda whereas based on the data available to them that simply made good sense.
See also: Trump expecting fully to lose (in his own words at some point).
A dash? From CNN all the way to FOX it was 23x7 schilling for the global government faction. Usually it's not so difficult because both candidates are in it. Trump ruined that technique and two parasitic political dynasties with it. Polls of AZ with a ~+15% Dem sample (when R turnout and D crossover was already off the charts) were used to run stories about how Clinton could win AZ... and TX! Attributing it to incompetence ignores the other obvious and well tested reason.
Using "reputation" alone is a dangerous and naive standard -- the most powerful form of "fake news" is the selection/omission of stories and crafting of narratives around those stories, which is just as prevalent on "real news" sources like WaPo/CBS/CNN/NYT as it is on Fox/Breitbart and even 'fringe' sources.
With the issue of opinions derived from factual events, which fit the bill of being 'misleading' (to some groups, at least) -- how do you draw the line? The NYT is certainly not exempt from that (see: half of Paul Krugman's articles).
The only thing you can possibly check for with any reliability is the validity of the base, source event, if there is one. Any higher derivation in the wrong hands (Facebook, for example) is systemic censorship. How can we safely do that? Recursive link tracking, perhaps, to a "primary source," which relies on the AI matching the factual claim to an appropriate source, either a video, image, or text that can be considered the legitimate source based on context (for example, an article about Apple's earnings could link to a primary source of their press release).
Just to nitpick: Krugman is on the opinion page, this is what he is supposed to be doing. David Brooks does the same thing, but usually on the conservative side of the arguments.
Yep very fair, but it would have to be assumed the AI could differentiate, which is not necessarily trivial.
All of this would be much easier if there was some "standard" for writing news, sectioning off opinions that derive 'non-obvious' conclusions, linking primary sources, etc. But there isn't, and you would have to censor those who did not conform if there was one, which is not a good solution.
Consider the sensationalist headline "Trump Facing Impeachment for Muslim Ban".
Okay, a lot of people (including politicians) are saying "yeah we should maybe impeach that guy", and a lot of Muslims are affected by the order. But there's no impeachment trial and it's not a direct ban on all Muslims.
I don't think it's appropriate to shift all the blame to the publishers but, when people just read the title, nod approvingly, and close their browser, it's the same effect.
I am I missing something or is this challenge to produce a system which determines if the headline agrees with a body of text? Many so called "fake news" sites would pass this test with flying colors as their fake headlines are supported by equally fake stories. This seems more like a test against clickbait.
Also somehow CNN shows in the front page of result for "fake news" image search on Google. It wouldn't be totally wrong, depending on how the term is defined.
Probably because the trump subreddit does that super annoying "Upvote this post so that people see CNN when they search for fake news!" thing every few weeks.
It makes me sad to see yet another tech team go down the road of "machines will help us filter the truth"
They will not, and the reason has to do with language. Ludwig Wittgenstein tackled this 100 years ago. The best that machines will do for you is to label something as true or not as if you had consumed the article and decided on your own
That is a completely different thing from identifying fake news or truth
There's some value here. There are also some hard stops. You'll find them :) Best of luck, guys!
Wittgenstein wasn't around when a president used Twitter to both control the media and get elected.
Maybe news could rely on first principles approach. Quantify things like political stability, information availability, cultural problems, etc. and maybe apply a first principles approach and maybe an algorithm could tell use what the hell is going on at any given moment and maybe give us some insight into what may go on in the future as well.
I would assume intelligence agencies have something similar to the above. The problem is things happen in realtime and if a regime falls or a state fails or whatever, we have to adjust our models immediately.
Throwing out hands up and saying Wittgenstein solved it seems lazy but idk.
> Quantify things like political stability, information availability, cultural problems, etc
Good luck. It's a worthy goal, but we are very far away from being able to do this in a rigorous fashion. There is a reason academia has the distinctions of "hard science", "soft science", and "not science". Cultural and political dynamics, by their inherent nature, might never be objectively quantified.
An anecdote on language that happened to me earlier today: I wrote an email and said I would re-transmit something. I made a typo and wrote re-re-transmit.
"re-transmit" sounds neutral but "re-re-transmit" sounds passive aggressive. This would be very hard for a machine to interpret
As an example, the fake news about the guy that found the warehouse full of fake ballot boxes for Clinton:
A Google Image Search of the picture in the fake article would have found the picture is much older, and isn't what the caption described.
If I'm tech-savvy and skeptical, I might have done that when consuming the article, and decided on my own it was fake. Machines can do that automatically for people that aren't tech-savvy, or that don't start reading it with a skeptical mindset.
I don't think it has to do with language (unless by "language" you mean what I mean, in which case sorry for duplicating). I think it has to do with that a lot of what people call "truth" is a product of their opinions, feelings, hopes, desires, etc.
There are facts of course - like such and such event happened or not, such and such statistical data is showing this number of not. But it is never served raw, it is always garnished with opinion. E.g. the fact is that Trump signed certain executive order. But you can say it's "Muslim ban" or "temporary restriction on admittance of nationals from terror-ridden countries". Not the same.
And various "factchecking" sites are fully complicit in this and inject opinion as often as not - to the point exactly the same thing said by two different people can be deemed "mostly true" or "mostly false", moreover, exactly the same thing said by the same person can be "mostly true" and "false".
You can't hope to have robots make sense of it if we can't. You can, of course, build a neural network and train it, but it would just put "robot approved" stamp on biases of whoever trained it.
How about a challenge to try and educate people better, to get them "immunized" against propaganda and fake news?
We need more cynical takes on things.
It's utterly appalling that on one side we have right-wing extremists yelling "FAKE NEWS" about CNN because CNN might get something wrong one time in ten, implying it's no different than Breitbart or Fox News which are wrong nine times in ten, and on the other we have left-leaning people beating up CNN for making mistakes and suggesting their trust is completely eroded.
News organizations offer a view. You should be prepared to vet everything you read from anyone. We need to give people a toolkit to help verify stories, to develop their bullshit instinct.
Say what you want about Breitbart, it's highly biased in what it chooses to report and the opinions it injects into its stories, but it usually cites and links to its sources. Something I can't say for CNN or Fox News.
I don't think they're going about this the right way.
The first step to identifying 'fake news' (even in NYT or WSJ!) is to be able to pull out attributions from the source text.
This would give you some idea of where the information in an article actually came from. "Fake news" will tend to be either unattributed or misrepresent the thing it's quoting.
But a good first step toward better media literacy would just be giving people a representation of who actually said the the things in an article, and that seems much easier.
As long as Google still puts Russia Today and plenty of other sites of questionable plumage on display this is a futile effort. It only works if the big names in news aggregation start by culling the worst offenders.
Is anyone else put off by this obsession with "solving" fake news? As if we can simply throw technology at such a contentious and controversial issue and then trust the results. It reads to me like the goal is censorship, where only "approved" articles/authors are allowed, all in the name of "fact checking". Never mind that it's incredibly easy to cherry-pick facts or exaggerations to target "offensive" articles (by both/all sides).
> Never mind that it's incredibly easy to cherry-pick facts or exaggerations to target "offensive" articles (by both/all sides).
Exactly. I'd argue that disingenuous news from mainstream news organisations is worse than dedicated "fake news" websites because they exploit legitimacy and reader-trust to peddle falsehoods. They are our port in a storm of bullsh*t, and they're failing us.
Engineers often operate under the false belief that they can solve social problems with technology. And the systems they build rely on participants being rational actors that subscribe to a shared system of values. They end up devolving into censorship of opposing viewpoints.
In fact, I would go as far as saying that the internet, itself, was designed and built in the naive belief that humans would better themselves by instant access to knowledge. This past decade and a half has completely shattered our 1980s and '90s vision of the promise of the internet.
We have few means of combating propaganda that threatens our values, reclaiming our privacy, or maintaining our remaining sanity. When a shared objective reality no longer exists, we're all loons.
How about a 'subjectiveness' ranking instead, with notations for "unable to find link to a source of factual claims"? That's the best we could ever safely do, and we would likely find interesting results (WaPo might be labeled more subjective than Fox News, for example, even though both would generally have low numbers of notations for 'unable to find link to source of factual claim').
As I said in another post: The only thing you can possibly check for with any reliability is the validity of the base, source event, if there is one. Any higher derivation in the wrong hands (Facebook, for example) is systemic censorship. How can we safely do that? Recursive link tracking, perhaps, to a "primary source," which relies on the AI matching the factual claim to an appropriate source, either a video, image, or text that can be considered the legitimate source based on context (for example, an article about Apple's earnings could link to a primary source of their press release).
Regardless, the most dangerous form of "fake news" is by the selection/omission of stories, and that seems pretty impossible to quantify with today's technology (and of course the most prevalent on all of our 'real news' sources).
It's even worse, selection of stories is the whole point of news, they exist for the sole purpose of influencing people's opinions. And the fight against "fake news" looks nothing more than the fight for censorship in the space those in power not yet control.
Your arguments are strong, however have you considered an algorithm based on the laziness and cheapness of humans? Consider that a lot of propaganda is heavily coordinated and not creative in the sense of being centrally created and issued.
An algorithm could watch, say, 50 sources and see if they simultaneously start using identical phrases, given access to a thesaurus aren't those odds a little unusual? This happened a couple times in the last election. You'd have a much simpler task of quote analysis of course, to exclude directly quoted content.
Then factor in something to detect press releases and video news releases where the verbiage of large sections is identical, this strategy is almost too easy.
Another factor is "large known propaganda sources" simultaneously releasing the story but small propaganda sources don't operate at all because fundamentally there is a size cutoff. The Wash Post will be in every propaganda operation because they are huge, but the "nowheresville register" certainly will not. Real news would of course be covered by both, so it should be very easy to detect organic self organizing behavior vs small scale conspiratorial behavior.
Now algo-proof propaganda could emerge much like handwritten letters to your congressional representative, before being inevitably ignored, are considered more impressive than mere form letters or signing a list. But it would detect at least some fake news based on fake news being part of a coordinated centralized mass produced campaign rather than trying to detect fake news based on its inherent fake-ness itself. Sorta like swatting bugs that bite you or try to, rather than identifying each individual bug then swatting only the mosquitos. Its very difficult to detect if something is a Walmart product, but its easy to detect if its mass produced, if the quality is very low, if it was made in China, if it contains chemicals banned in the USA for safety reasons, and in the long run works just as well.
> How about a 'subjectiveness' ranking instead, with notations for "unable to find link to a source of factual claims"?
What would that mean? Let's say I write an article where I claim White House is controlled by reptiloids from planet Nibiru. Would it check that I have any links in my article at all? Or that the links actually prove my claims? Or that these proofs can be trusted (I may just link to my own website or one created by my friend)? I could insert a hundred links to a most respectable austronomy sites to prove that planet Nibiru exists, but how would you know whether these links actually prove it? I could refer to a lot of actual news content as the proof White House occupants can't actually be human. How you evaluate if these links actually support my claim?
At the source, you do need some form of verification, similar to "trusted certificates." For example, there could be a database of known mappings, such that apple.com and subdomains are authorized to make statements cited as press releases about Apple, Inc. A link would have to be intelligently interpreted as a citation, perhaps involving a search for similar stories (or it just results in 'unable to find link to primary source' even when it's legitimate, i.e. false positives). Subjectiveness is another area that's quite difficult, but would likely result in percentage of 'unique claims' that the AI was not able to derive from the source material.
It's more difficult than just blindly blocking any stories that aren't covered on 'major, trusted sources', and probably only a couple of organizations could implement anything close to this right now, but it's the best we can strive for. All the other 'solutions' I've heard involve censorship of unpopular opinions.
Edit: But yes, to the point, my envisioned implementation would not find any referenced sources in your article or through a search, and if it did, those sources would not be authorized to make the claims about the Whitehouse reptiles, so it would get the notation that indicates 'could not verify.'
At first, most real news stories would be unable to be verified, but over the time, there would be fewer false negatives. The important thing to recognize, though, is that the notation just means the reader has to make his own judgment; it does not state whether or not it's fake.
And "real stories" should also probably have a notation with a direct link to what the algorithm thinks is the base source.
Have to admit, something like this could be useful as a simple way to improve journalism in general. Yeah, it wouldn't exactly 'detect fake news', but it would help by:
1. Encouraging journalists to actually link to a source at all. Because at the moment, a depressing number of them don't even bother sourcing anything. So you end up just having to 'trust' the organisation that the story has been checked out beforehand.
It's an especially big problem with web versions of printed newspaper articles, and is a general problem with print newspapers as a whole (since due to space limits, they don't publically source/cite anything).
2. Getting journalists to link to the original source. Because at the moment, you'll see news sites sourcing other news sites which then source other news like a lengthy game of Chinese Whispers or Telephone. It's how a lot of 'fake news' makes its way in the media food chain.
So yeah, something like this would be useful just to get publications to cite their sources better. Or to make them look for the real source rather than one of a million middlemen.
Just encountered an article from AP, which purports to "fact check" some Trump statements. The whole article did not contain even a single link. Not even to the statements they are checking. I went back to look at another "fact checks" from AP - yep, not a single link to the source at any of them. Sigh. And these people probably think Wikipedia is unreliable and poorly sourced.
I find it quit ironic considering this discussion, that I just realizes YC shadow bans for things that are countervailing views and perspectives.
It precisely encapsulates the very problem with trying to identify anything but the most rudimentary and obvious and deliberate "fake news", that you will inherently impart your bias and your perspective.
The problem too, and maybe even the worst part, is that those advancing this "fake news" hunt agenda are the very types who have no self-awareness that would suggest they could at all be trusted to even attempt having an objective perspective. The Stanford Prison Experiment comes to mind in how self-righteous and justified feeling people commit abuses in the name of doing "right" and "good".
American free speech is absolute and it is one of the basis of our society's success where others falter and perpetually under-perform us. I know foreigners don't necessarily have an ability to fully appreciate absolute free speech as there is simply no other society that is so principled about free speech (although certain people are trying to curtail freedoms of speech when they don't agree with it), but it is necessary in order to not allow any group, no matter how much they claim they are the "good guys", to control speech. You may not like something someone says, but just because you don't, does not give you the right to censor or stifle or shadow ban their speech as a matter of principle. YC doing so is quite troubling, because it really highlights the fact that the not only feel supremacist in their views, but that they have no regard for people's freedom or liberties. Only approved propaganda may apply. Am I right YC mod goons?
function isFakeNews(news_piece){
var list_of_legit_sources = _get_current_approved_sources(); // makes synchronous http request to illuminati.com/api
if list_of_legit_sources.inArray(getSource(news_piece)) return false; else return true;
}
^---- Sadly this is the reality for how fake news is going to play out
It seems like Wikipedia would be familiar with a lot of the same challenges that come with identifying fake news articles. Anyone more familiar than I am with Wikipedia care to comment?
Wikipedia has a policy to only accept reliable secondary sources on controversial political articles. What comprises a "reliable source" is loosely defined, and what sources are considered reliable is ultimately decided by the editors in a somewhat per-article basis, with some global definitions which are not centrally listed anywhere but are enforced by senior editors and their admin friends. Because of the systematic bias that Wikipedia suffers from there is strong partisan bias in this selection, which resulted in a number of wiki clones with their own bias (e.g. Conservapedia), forums dedicated to show how bad this is (e.g. /r/wikiinaction) and has - among other things - been leading to a steady decline in the number of editors in the last couple years - everyone eventually gets bullied away from that place by a clique of editors + admins.
Quoting Wikipedia policy itself:
>If Wikipedia had been available around the sixth century B.C., it would have reported the view that the Earth is flat as a fact and without qualification. And it would have reported the views of Eratosthenes (who correctly determined the earth's circumference in 240BC) either as controversial, or a fringe view. Similarly if available in Galileo's time, it would have reported the view that the sun goes round the earth as a fact, and if Galileo had been a Vicipaedia editor, his view would have been rejected as 'originale investigationis'.
My personal rule is Wikipedia is very reliable in non-controversial topics, and should be trusted only as much as source of links and search keywords and information about some of the existing opinions for controversial topics. Which is something, but definitely not a full solution of a problem.
>Such a system would tentatively label a claim or story as true/false based on the stances taken by various news organizations on the topic, weighted by their credibility.
Oh right, because we can all agree on which news organizations are credible. /s
Obviously the ones that run a news program at 6:30 pm with a heavy introductory drumbeat and lots of fanfare playing while a camera zooms in to a concerned-looking anchor person.
Mainstream media and their corporate backers have already lost this battle. This whole fake news attempt to remain relevant has backfired already, since it's much easier to prove that the peddlers of fake news are those who uncritically backed and still excuse the Iraq war, Libya catastrophe, attempted overthrow of the Syrian government just to name a few recent adventures.
They've been beaten at their own game by an opponent better at using modern/popular methods of disseminating information.
> It should be possible to build a prototype post-facto “truth labeling” system from a “stance detection” system. Such a system would tentatively label a claim or story as true/false based on the stances taken by various news organizations on the topic, weighted by their credibility.
So who decides what organisations are credible? Or orders them by their credibility? Someone has to create the list. Someone with obvious human biases towards one view or another.
The problem is not "fake news". The problem is people are treating the news like a product in the capitalist paradigm.
If you don't like the way your local bakery makes their bread you go somewhere else. Now if the media reports on something you don't like someone else will tell you what you want to hear.
This issue happens on both sides of the political spectrum BUT it does seem to be a lot worse on the conservative side of things. All the "liberal" news sources like the NYT and The WashPo seem to be doing lots of reporting on Trump supporters, discussing their fears and hopes, concerns and motivations. Even more conservative sources like the WSJ, not including their editorial page, are trying to take a bigger view of the world.
On the other hand my Apple News feed seems to perpetually have a FOX News story. The one this morning was "Is Trump Bashing the new Celeb nude selfie?"
All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories also believe global warming is a hoax and Obama was not born in this country. A significant portion of the electorate has been drinking from the well and cannot be reached.
> A significant portion of the electorate has been drinking from the well and cannot be reached.
How is that any different than people in the Bible Belt who believe the earth was made in 7 days ? Or elderly people who become vulnerable and fall prey to exploitation (because they believe phone scams, or sob stories from strangers, etc) ? (Edit: or young people who think they're going to grow up and be an astronaut or NBA star). There will always be a sizable proportion of the population who believes wacky stories.
I know you weren't implying this, but NYT and WaPo's hands aren't clean either. I really didn't appreciate how they pushed the "Russia HACKED the election" narrative. That's predatory on the same level: take advantage of the nebulous word "hacking" and misapply it to something that doesn't even rely on computers, do some hand-waiving, and voila, there's some "fake news" to dish up to the masses [which is ironic when your other stories are about the spread of "fake news"].
> I see no difference there but I'm not sure that I get the point.
my point is that there have always legions of people who believe ridiculous things. They've been around for every single previous election. So we shouldn't be surprised when the scientific community says "civilization has changed the climate" but people still don't believe it (even when the claim is supported by evidence).
The point is that "election hacking" is an intentionally misleading phrase. A Pew poll found that, after this media circus, half of Hillary voters believed that Russia had tampered with vote tallies.
The NYT and WaPo (among others) are incredibly biased, and much of the problem is that their support base is too sheltered to understand how. I've said more on this in previous comments.
I found the Pew poll regarding Russian involvement in the email hack but not one involving direct hacking of tallies. Do you have a link?
I followed the election from a variety of sources (WaPo and NYT included) and never got that impression. But I agree that it was a circus from all angles.
It looks like it was from The Economist and YouGov - I falsely remembered it being Pew. Here's a WaPo article with a summary and a link to the raw data:
Misleading mainstream media, IMO. I'm conservative and the headlines about "election hacking" actually duped me until I had the time to read a thorough article about it.
I totally agree with you there. Most online news articles use those annoying click-bait titles and try to make the story seem bigger than it is (in a misleading way). Even weather.com does that crap with weather stories.
I agree with the parent but I began reading the New York Times every morning at the age of 12, wondering to myself "why is there so much speculation going on around Iraq and WMDs? We haven't found anything so why does everybody want to invade?"
I still like the Times to an extent, but they like many other papers get it wrong from time to time. Doesn't mean I should leave and never look back, but instead I have taken to critically thinking about every story I read from every source to come to a conclusion about an issue.
I don't think fake news or poor journalism is a problem. The problem is people and their lack of critical thinking, often substituted for blind acceptance of a narrative that fits their preferred reality.
The difference is that when NYTimes gets something wrong, it is not out of sheer malice and desire to mislead people. It's because their sources were wrong and the journalists didn't do a good enough job verifying the information.
Fake news on the other hand are literally made up lies. The overwhelming majority of fake news articles have no basis in reality, period. They tend to be written by people who want nothing other than to get page views.
You're getting downvoted for this and I don't think you should be. The recent flood of fake news is very different to honest reporting that fails, and even very different to opinion-led reporting that presents a side. It is deliberately factually incorrect news, created and promoted simply to get clicks and profit from advertising. There is absolutely no journalistic merit to it.
I didn't downvote, but one can agree that the two approaches are very different, without accepting the presumption of the intentions behind the NYT approach. Are they more honest, or do they just happen to serve a different audience?
After all, telling outright lies is just amateurish; the NYT has been shaping society's perspective on facts for over a century.
> The difference is that when NYTimes gets something wrong, it is not out of sheer malice and desire to mislead people
That's right, because when Wikileaks revealed high levels of collusion between media outlets and the DNC/Clinton campaign, placing and pulling articles/stories to present a specific narrative, it wasn't out of desire to mislead, rather it was only a desire to 'correct the record'. /s
Which is still business as usual and has solutions elsewhere.
America and the world have a situation where advertisers need to prey on the Id and emotions of users in order to sell widgets. The advent of the internet crushed the ability of media firms to stay afloat and replaced the ecosystem with many upstarts who also faced the same pressure.
In short there's an overheating attention grabbing system when it comes to the media, which is its own issue that needs to be solved.
Unfortunately there's a new hitherto unbelievable problem, where people fabricate complete and utter lies/fiction and can sail it down the streams of social media.
This is different from the older issue in that these are not major news agencies, but websites masquerading/camouflaging themselves as a news outlet and fabricating stories designed to directly press emotional buttons without having to deal with facts.
If you really want to know how it works, please take a look at a recent a paper co-authored by Alessandro Bessi. It came out a week ago. It should be accessible for most people on HN.
Classification is still very needed. I'm interested to see what comes out of this. Especially with regard to eliminating biases of a classification system.
Capitalism isn't going anywhere obviously and shouldn't. On the other end is state-run media, e.g. North Korea. We wouldn't want things to swing in that direction or even toward RT or many other examples.
I think we should be looking to replicate whatever magic is and has been in PBS, early BBC, ITN, and other earlier UK and French programming.
> On the other hand my Apple News feed seems to perpetually have a FOX News story. The one this morning was "Is Trump Bashing the new Celeb nude selfie?"
> All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories
It goes both ways I think. Consider the possibility that there are more people that believe that other 'stupid' people believe these stories than there are 'stupid' people who actually believe these stories.
> The problem is not "fake news". The problem is people are treating the news like a product in the capitalist paradigm.
I would say a huge part of the problem is that news is no longer news. It's all commentary. News organizations are not only incentivized to to sensationalize stories to make money but they are also ran by people who have extreme political views and want to essentially mind control the population. They don't want to report the facts of a story. They want to make you accept their interpretation of the facts.
A great example is how different news organizations cover the recent executive order on immigration. Depending on where you get your news you were told there was a Muslim ban, a ban from 7 Muslim majority countries, only accepting Christian refugees from the Middle East, 7 countries that harbor terrorists were banned, etc.
Wherever you fall on that issue there is a news org trying to force you into a certain viewpoint one way or the other.
> They want to make you accept their interpretation of the facts.
Please, describe to me how someone can convey pure unadulterated facts in language, without imposing an "interpretation" on them.
It's an absurd fantasy. There's no possibility for a disembodied, perfectly objective voice conveying facts. So yes, in a sense, every news org favors a certain interpretation of the facts. But these subtle variations used to be accepted as par for the course.
The root cause of the widespread distrust of media is the turn on the right towards a form of Orwellian doublespeak in their media outlets, beginning in the 90s and ramping up heavily in the Bush years. You see it's most virulent expression in the way Trump speaks: he accuses the interim AG of "betrayal" for acting on her conscious. Or the way he talks about returning government "to the people" while staffing his cabinet with billionaires. It badly subverts the ability of people on the left and the right to meaningfully speak to one another, because our words no longer signify the same thing.
I'm personally opposed to almost everything Trump is trying to do, but don't act like it's only a problem on the right. Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago that the left wing newspapers were reporting wild unsubstantiated rumors of a full-on Moscow piss orgy?
> Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago that the left wing newspapers were reporting wild unsubstantiated rumors of a full-on Moscow piss orgy?
You mean the ones contained in a dossier which accurately predicted several Trump related events that were not publicly known to be in planning at the time it was written, but were verifiable to have occurred as predicted before it was published?
Seems to me that it was plenty newsworthy.
BTW, it also reported that part of the carrot side of the carrot-and-stick blackmail and bribery by Russia was that Trump was promised a bribe of a share of Rosneft coincidentally the same size that was just sold off, on credit, to buyers concealed by various cutouts.
If I was Putin and I was trying to interfere in US politics, then after seeing that dossier I would have done this anyway just to mess with people, setting up a bunch of shell companies and essentially selling a 19% share of the company to itself.
Gonna need more hard evidence before being concerned about this.
This fails ~~occasion~~ occam's razor. By that logic, Putin could also dress up as an orange ballerina while announcing a 15% sale of the company, just to screw with people.
Occam's razor, but I'm guessing that was autocorrect.
Anyway, no, because there is no incentive for him to do what you are suggesting.
If however you believe his goal is to destabilise U.S. politics, then there is large incentive and zero downside for him to fake a sale of 19% of the company.
Many, and I mean MANY, of the people relaying/pushing the story did it with the caveat 1) it's completely unsubstantiated and 2) this is EXACTLY what the right did to the Clintons for 2 decades.
When did the people pushing the N Clinton conspiracies every say "this may or not be true..."???
> Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago that the left wing newspapers were reporting wild unsubstantiated rumors of a full-on Moscow piss orgy?
Well, that's actually a pretty interesting example to look at. For one, the dossier concerned contained a lot of accusations to do with members of Trump's team travelling to Eastern Europe to meet with Russian contacts, suspect financial transactions and the like - you yourself are doing it a disservice by describing it only as rumours of a "piss orgy".
But irrespective of that, the dossier had been known about for months. But the media organisations didn't report on it, specifically because they couldn't verify the information contained within it. But then Buzzfeed decided to publish it anyway, and at that point any responsible news organisation is left in a pretty impossible position - either don't report on the thing everyone is talking about, or report unsubstantiated accusations.
If any story includes a presidential piss-orgy everything else is filler. The journalists who ran that story did a lot of damage by running it the way they did.
I think it is at least more complicated than you are painting it. If it's something that is widely known in media circles as well as political ones (at least one Democratic senator alluded to it on one of the many occasions Hillary's e-mails were brought up), the media holding it back from the public isn't really a fantastic look either.
Sometimes it feels like the media is damned if it does, and damned if it doesn't. Report unsubstantiated rumour? You're biased! Hold back information because it isn't verified? You're biased!
If you apply the same standard you have displayed here to fake news on the other side of the political spectrum, then almost none of it would be fake news either.
That's not true. The dossier exists. It was prepared by a respected former intelligence officer. It was ordered by Jeb Bush's campaign. None of these facts are in disrepute. And the vast majority of news reports accurately stated that the contents of the dossier cannot be verified. It's miles more credible than the stories found on fake news sites.
> It's miles more credible than the stories found on fake news sites.
1000 * 0 is still 0.
If the Trump campaign had ordered a dossier of dirt on Hillary Clinton, and paid a respected former intelligence officer to provide it, would the claims made in it be credible?
Let's take one of the big 'fake news' items from the recent election, the one regarding Hillary's health. What do you make of this article by a former secret service agent on Hillary Clinton's health:
The definition of fake news is getting stretched to include controversial news.
"Fake news" is fiction being sold as news on websites that look credible.
Flat out making stuff up, and polluting the media stream with it in order to manipulate people.
This is the easy case to solve. As people actually try to grapple with this, "fake news" will evolve, it will add parts of the truth to it dodge this 0th level definition.
A dossier actually compiled but unverified is still not fake news - it's a shady bad practice circa 1990. Unfortunately we're dealing with much worse problems today.
Ok, so if I compile a dossier of unverified stories regarding Hillary, and package them up then it suddenly makes otherwise fake claims not fake news?
I mean that's the whole sub-prime mortgage problem all over again. Take a shitty product and wrap it in layers of respectability until people don't know any better.
When there is also evidence to suggest much of the contents of the dossier came from a 4-chan prank, it's hard to see where the difference is.
I think you need to clarify 2 concepts/definitions, agnostic of real world events.
1) fake news: a recent phenomenon where fraudulent/fictional/completely made up literature is peddled as legitimate news. This is then distributed on steroids via social media. It uses unsuspecting people to transmit this.
Bias in news. This is an older problem and involves how news is presented and what spin is put. In the worst case it is deliberate in order to support an agenda.
For the second one, he was not mocking the reporter's disability. He was mocking the reporter for pulling a story and the impersonation he did is Trump's standard impersonation for a flustered, bumbling person. There is multiple video of him doing the exact same action to able bodied people - from Ted Cruz to military generals, and all sorts of others.
Not only that, but the reporter's disability is nothing like the action Trump did. The reporter actually has frozen/locked up joints e.g. almost the exact opposite of what Trump did.
So, either Trump knew of the reporter's disability and wasn't mocking it (completely different actions), or he didn't know of the reporter's disability (and therefore couldn't have been mocking it).
In either situation, Trump wasn't mocking the reporter's disability.
Unfortunately a freeze frame from the video of Trump's movement matches a still photo of the journalist, hence the belief that he was mocking the reporter's disability.
And this is why people say the media has a well known Trump bias.
I wouldn't describe this as fake news at all, but I'd say that one person's view on a video they have watched isn't comparable to that dossier, which was (apparently) compiled from numerous in-person visits and interviews. Not to mention, reporting on the dossier always clarified that it was not verified, while this opinion piece is making broader conclusions.
I agree with you broadly, though. To me, fake news has absolutely no mooring in reality whatsoever and is pure clickbait - usually without political motive beyond getting angry people to click.
I saw that story as being similar to the "Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer" meme going around. It was less that people thought it was true and more that it was funny.
I'm not arguing to remove all interpretation from the facts. That's impossible with our language. But what we are experiencing from the news every single day is a far cry from objective journalism. We are almost only getting the interpretation without many facts (or facts that are taken out of context or edited to fit a narrative).
Yes you can convey information much more objective than today. For example, on the more recent migration ban story:
"The White House has announced today at 7h30, through speaker ..., a piece of legislation that, quote: ~first paragraph summary of the legislation~.
You can read the full text here.
On the opinion of Bla bla, this legislation is innefective etc etc.
Disclaimer: Bla bla is not related to any of the mentioned organizations, though he declares he tends to agree with the opinion of former president Obama on most issues. You can read more about this commenter here."
Leading with a verbatim reproduction of the text describing the purpose of a bill (almost invariably a statement carefully crafted to make a political point) and adding a disclaimer to any points made in opposition is anything but an objective approach to news reporting.
I'm not arguing for or against the executive order. It's just a very recent and big example of news organizations shaping how the population thinks. Every news organization is spinning this to fit their narrative.
There is no spin as far as I can tell. I read New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate and Salon. They are simply reporting the facts, along with how the EO is affecting travelers.
Apple News does try to increase visibility of sources/topic you read a lot. If you swipe the story tile to the left, you can see more actions for that source.
Forgive me if I exercise a brand new buzzword but this project might better be classified as an exercise in "computational journalism" ?
A fake news detector isn't going to do anything by itself to solve the problem. Fake news consumers are going to guzzle the junk regardless of warning tags, scores, or nutritional labeling.
In the hands of a skilled journalist/activist/thought-leader whose abilities are "augmented" by this tool, however, it could really be a powerful antidote.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r_6hBIX71Y&t=111s
I saw an interesting talk the other day (talks at google); Often there is a problem with misrepresentation of facts; (i think the general standard of journalism is quite low); amazing how a subtle editorial slant can twist things... Will Moy is speaking for an organization that does some fact checking and is giving some examples in the talk.
I think people start to notice these old editorial tricks more these days so that there is an impression that all news are fake - at least to some extent.
That doesn't really work very well. News as a product means you give the customers what they ask for, not what they need. If they ask for lies, it's not fraud.
However, news as a public service has standards of liability to the public in general, not just to your own customers. It is an obligation to society, not to the buyer.
Most consumers don't sign an agreement to receive fake news that fits their beliefs when they purchase cable -- if that was the case, then it would be fine (it can also be fraud to have something hidden in the fine print, although it usually requires a class action).
Now if the media reports on something you don't like someone else will tell you what you want to hear.
I don't see the problem. I don't want to hear lies, therefore I create a demand for true news. I don't need a nanny facebook/google/state telling me what news I like, and neither does the rest of the population.
Interesting that his propaganda model [1] actually breaks a bit with the age of internet. Social media, news aggregators, small independent bloggers and small independent news outlets don't have the described biases. Algorithmic filters are somehow unbiased. Independent person/outlet can question the government, capitalism, doesn't have to trust government's spokesmen, doesn't have to publish them, doesn't even have to make money. In a way all those "news bubbles" and "fake news" are actually anti-bubbles and make "democracy" more "democratic".
No it doesn't work that way. It's a nice theory, but I've been a mod on a national sub for a while, and I've been on forums since around/before slashdot.
You can very easily overwhelm the signal with noise. The plethora of independents means nothing if only a few of them get heard.
Matter of fact, with some pushing, you can have one "independent" dominate a large portion of the channel. At some juncture the network effect takes over and the process becomes self sustaining, you just need to play on people's/your target markets biases well.
This is a people problem, and people are getting way too good and understanding and manipulating the biases of other people.
I don't know if I'd class that as a capitalism-paradigm problem. If the press is free, choices exist and you can find news that tells you what you want to hear.
I think if we compare today's new to a decade ago's, the change is not more capitalism (ie, for-profit, corporate, quarterly-report focused...). The change is more choice, more information, more volume and the chaotic, many-to-many distribution systems of the social internet.
The clickbait imperative has got a quasi-capitalist single mindedness to it, but I think we'll be chasing down the wrong culprit by characterising the problem as a capitalist one.
In fact, I think it's best if we try not to jump to conclusions at all. We're hitting some problems with the way our democracies work and I haven't really heard a narrative yet that feels satisfying. Lets not jump to conclusions. We need to be right about it.
> Lets not jump to conclusions. We need to be right about it.
Is a great justification for doing nothing, ever.
It feels like we are entering a very much unprecedented era in America, where the President freezes out news organisations that do not report on him favorably, and is actively attacking the media with the aim of establishing the official government narrative as the only one voters should listen to.
This is extremely dangerous. I'm not saying that we should rush to judgement, but we shouldn't just sit back and wait to see how it all unfolds either. This is an issue to be investigated and worked on, urgently.
> All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories also believe global warming is a hoax and Obama was not born in this country
Really, because not more than a few weeks ago I remember a whole bunch of people believing the "we can't verify, but we're going to press anyway" stories about Trump and golden showers in Russia, not to mention a whole bunch of other similar fake news regarding Trump and Trump supporters.
I think you (and many others) are selectively applying a bias to what is and isn't fake news and the type of people who believe it based on your own political preferences.
There's a marked difference between those statements
1) media agencies on all sides had the dossier and didn't publish it since t was unverifiable
2) when buzfeed or whomever linked the dossier, it forced other firms to do so as well or lose out on a critical story.
3) the adaptation to deal with this is to not report the dossier as fact, but as claims. And of course, it spiraled downhill from there,
In this scenario it's important to note that media firms avoided reporting on this issue because it was crap.
For global warming, ah man where do we start.
Firstly, it's unfair to lambast people for believing it's a hoax.
Since the 80s and before, a long, intelligent and concerted effort to spread FUD has been active in America. It is today successful enough to spread around the world.
If people were old enough, they would remember that initially scientists would not give the time of day to global warming conspiracist/deniers.
It was correctly believed that doing so actually gave cranks and loons the patina of credibility, when they should be allowed to die out.
Unfortunately, these cranks and loons were cultivated and nurtured, and given airtime. In particular there is one news network that I recall had a more active role in this and it was not CNN.
Eventually scientists were forced to engage, and by engaging they lost.
Scientists, (and people on HN) are constantly making the error that this is about facts.
It's about entertainment and playing with human emotions.
Scientists walked in expecting a debate, when it was about showmanship, with one side reporting things unevenly.
As a result there are people today who will be anti global warming because they are being manipulated.
Global warming wasn't part of my argument. That was just me quoting the parent who appears to believe only one side of the political spectrum is susceptible to fake news.
Personally I trust the science, and think that even if you don't there are enough other compelling reasons to move on to renewable energy sources that we'd be stupid not to anyway.
There was plenty of science going against 'smoking causes cancer'. Fake news has been around for quite some time, just not in its current more virulent form.
If you don't pay for the news, who does the news agency have a responsibility to? Certainly not you.
You can see this right now. The mainstream media falsifies or omits the truth on behalf of their backers or the organizations they fear: major political parties, subsidiaries of their parent companies, major investors, etc. I would argue that they do this because the public is not their customer, it's their target demographic.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 363 ms ] threadFar too many people are unwilling to recognize that news that confirms their world view might be fact. They cannot or will not challenge it, and simply accept it as fact.
He did ban Muslims, just not all of them (yet.) And he did talk about banning all Muslims on the campaign.
Now the Kenyan thing requires to believe that a lot of people and countries are on it, and have been decades before Obama was anyone of note.
When Obama bombed those very same countries was he bombing Muslims? Isn't that genocide?
Only on Google cache since he removed it:
"December 07, 2015 - Donald J. Trump Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration
(New York, NY) December 7th, 2015, -- Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on. According to Pew Research, among others, there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population. Most recently, a poll from the Center for Security Policy released data showing "25% of those polled agreed that violence against Americans here in the United States is justified as a part of the global jihad" and 51% of those polled, "agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah." Shariah authorizes such atrocities as murder against non-believers who won't convert, beheadings and more unthinkable acts that pose great harm to Americans, especially women.
Mr. Trump stated, "Without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life. If I win the election for President, we are going to Make America Great Again." - Donald J. Trump"
"December 07, 2015 - Donald J. Trump Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration (New York, NY) December 7th, 2015, -- Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on. According to Pew Research, among others, there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population."
It may be gone from the location you were looking at, as happens with all kinds of stuff on the web. I believe this is the same document, available from the DJT campaign site.
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-...
The reason I don't believe the "concern" coming from Democrats is if they actually cared about the Syrian people they would have been protesting in capitol hill while Obama was dropping bombs on their villages and hospitals. I was there, the Quakers were there, even some Republicans were there. Sadly the Democrats were not to be found in any significant number any of the dozen or so times I visted.
> prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual's country of nationality.
You're right. It's not an order that bans Muslims, explicitly. It's an order that bans them implicitly. The NPR annotation:
> If you CTRL+F this document, you won’t find the words “Christian” or “Muslim.” But if you read closely, this is the section that indicates prioritizing Christians. How so? Because the seven countries affected by this order are all Muslim-majority countries. Also note that Trump himself indicated a preference for prioritizing Christians in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network. And former Trump campaign surrogate Rudy Giuliani told Fox that Trump first called it a “Muslim ban” but asked him to come up with a legal framework for it. Giuliani said he did, one based on “danger,” not religion.
https://i.redd.it/jh4nz1fm48dy.png
How do you debate a person that denies objective reality, and embraces their very own alternative reality?
I don't think you can. For the same reason you can't negotiate with terrorists. They aren't playing by the same rule book. You hold out a hand to shake, they stab you in the face with a knife.
"Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete, and they regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties. Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society. Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature, and views political violence, war, and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation. Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the principal goal of achieving autarky through protectionist and interventionist economic policies."
When I read that I see elements of fascism in many governments around the world, with very few of them coming close to the definition.
Even so, you could fairly easily set up a number of points to check off on and score a government (and by extension) it's supporters on a scale from 'definitely not fascist' to 'definitely fascist'.
The question then becomes at what point on that scale it becomes reasonable to call a government fascist and to call a support of that government a fascist. I'm pretty sure we're not there yet but I am also pretty sure that we are slowly but surely sliding in that direction.
Using the term fascism is like a shot in the arm, it tries to wake up the organism that it is directed at that it is getting ill and needs to fend off some viral element. Unfortunately usually the opposite happens and instead the recipient will wall themselves off from the provider of the message. Even so, I guess that even fascism light is dangerous and ugly enough that plenty of people would not be caught dead being labeled a fascist, especially not when there is some hard evidence that it is so.
Probably because it often feels like that's the intent of people name-calling others "fascists."
The best quote about fascism is and remains: "In Italy, fascists divide themselves into two categories: fascists and antifascists."
When we start with something substantive like this and take it straight up to generic ideological soundbites, we cheat ourselves of the kind of intellectually interesting discussion that we might've had instead.
And of course nobody would love this technology more than the Chinese and Russian governments. Is a system aimed at quickly identifying obscure blogs that disagree with "high-credibility" sources supposed to help democracy?
It's one of the reasons why our employment choices and our decisions around who to work with must be taken in the context the impact it will cause on the world around us. As we begin to automate more and more of traditionally human jobs, we're going to find our work inextricable from the political landscape our systems are creating.
Friederich Nietzsche
Does anyone know if this challenge has anything to do with Media Matters / Shareblue?
"Media Matters has already secured access to raw data from Facebook, Twitter...
Predictive Technology
Bringing this data analysis to scale will also allow Media Matters to identify which individuals and outlets are the most destructive forces driving fake news, misinformation and harrasment.
Cutting-edge advances in cloud computing and machine learning will enable us to identify patterns and connections that would otherwise go under the radar. ... Media Matters' core budget for 2017 is $13.4 millions which covers a staff of 81. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
This budget allows us to create a 34 person research deparment engaged in media monitoring, research, deep dive analysis and rapid response... this budget also alows us to invest in technological innovations like the creation of an early warning system to identify in the profilerationof fake nws more efficiently and to create cutting-edge predictive technology that allows us to identify patterns and connections in order to asses how misinformation will move and how we can neutralise it. "
If you scroll to the "About" section you can see who's who and do some digging to see if connected.
http://www.fakenewschallenge.org#about
Or just contact them and ask (info@fakenewschallenge.org).
The effort to combat "fake news", the solution looks ever more like thought police and authoritarian propaganda machine than it looks, let alone would even be able to provide some sort of accurate and precise filter of "fake news".
What a lot of ... basically everyone on the left ... doesn't realize is that CNN was precisely set up after Carter's thumping, with specific and deliberate effort to manipulate people's minds and perceptions for political purposes, i.e., propaganda. Now, will it be accepted that given its history and its rather regular intentional manipulative and false news reporting that CNN will be labeled "fake news"? There is no chance in hell that would happen even if they came out and said "we are fake news". Just let that sink in; this is not a scientific or principled endeavor, it is purely a political one to weed out "fake news" the left disagrees with, while promoting "legitimate news" the left agrees with.
It goes to the very core and purpose of the freedom of speech in the USA, for which many foreign and ever increasingly even American people don't have a deep enough appreciation for. The vulnerabilities one party of people cunningly and in a self-satisfactory manner so slyly put in place so that they can misuse it one day, may very well fall into the "wrong" hands the next. It is precisely what happened with the oh so righteous Weimar Republic and it's emergency measures that were meant to be used for "good". Well, the National Socialists used it for "good" too, just not the "good" their ideologically opposite expected it to be used for.
Obviously followers of these sites will fight back against any "fake" labels, by arguing there is a "cover-up" by organized opposition, that their truth is being suppressed, that any fake news classifier intrinsically has a liberal bias, and so on. The difficulty for me is not identifying what's fake, but convincing anyone else that it is.
I'm as anti-Trump as it gets, but the idea that NYT or WSJ are bastions of reputable journalism is ridiculous.
See, for example, the list of controversies associated with the output of Pulitzer prize winner Thomas Friedman.
Mainstream news orgs tend to be better about including citations, and sources. They are also better about publishing retractions, when they are caught saying something factually wrong.
Mainstream news orgs tend to be better about including citations, and sources. They are also better about publishing retractions, when they are caught saying something factually wrong.
Ironically this may have done Clinton in with people thinking well, if she's won already then I don't need to go and vote.
Hindsight is always 20/20, it is very easy to see Clinton winning as a 'narrative' pushed with an agenda whereas based on the data available to them that simply made good sense.
See also: Trump expecting fully to lose (in his own words at some point).
http://i.imgur.com/VUdcIou.jpg
With the issue of opinions derived from factual events, which fit the bill of being 'misleading' (to some groups, at least) -- how do you draw the line? The NYT is certainly not exempt from that (see: half of Paul Krugman's articles).
The only thing you can possibly check for with any reliability is the validity of the base, source event, if there is one. Any higher derivation in the wrong hands (Facebook, for example) is systemic censorship. How can we safely do that? Recursive link tracking, perhaps, to a "primary source," which relies on the AI matching the factual claim to an appropriate source, either a video, image, or text that can be considered the legitimate source based on context (for example, an article about Apple's earnings could link to a primary source of their press release).
All of this would be much easier if there was some "standard" for writing news, sectioning off opinions that derive 'non-obvious' conclusions, linking primary sources, etc. But there isn't, and you would have to censor those who did not conform if there was one, which is not a good solution.
Consider the sensationalist headline "Trump Facing Impeachment for Muslim Ban".
Okay, a lot of people (including politicians) are saying "yeah we should maybe impeach that guy", and a lot of Muslims are affected by the order. But there's no impeachment trial and it's not a direct ban on all Muslims.
I don't think it's appropriate to shift all the blame to the publishers but, when people just read the title, nod approvingly, and close their browser, it's the same effect.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/its-time-to-r...
Also somehow CNN shows in the front page of result for "fake news" image search on Google. It wouldn't be totally wrong, depending on how the term is defined.
Heh, I think need an explicit meta-fake news category.
They will not, and the reason has to do with language. Ludwig Wittgenstein tackled this 100 years ago. The best that machines will do for you is to label something as true or not as if you had consumed the article and decided on your own
That is a completely different thing from identifying fake news or truth
There's some value here. There are also some hard stops. You'll find them :) Best of luck, guys!
Maybe news could rely on first principles approach. Quantify things like political stability, information availability, cultural problems, etc. and maybe apply a first principles approach and maybe an algorithm could tell use what the hell is going on at any given moment and maybe give us some insight into what may go on in the future as well.
I would assume intelligence agencies have something similar to the above. The problem is things happen in realtime and if a regime falls or a state fails or whatever, we have to adjust our models immediately.
Throwing out hands up and saying Wittgenstein solved it seems lazy but idk.
Good luck. It's a worthy goal, but we are very far away from being able to do this in a rigorous fashion. There is a reason academia has the distinctions of "hard science", "soft science", and "not science". Cultural and political dynamics, by their inherent nature, might never be objectively quantified.
I imagine if we had this tool when George W invaded Iraq, this AI would have said Weapons Existed, being all the CIA, and Politicians said so.
Isn't that how your filter works? Anti alternative media, pro establishment?
This comes up often and is untrue. The Intelligence Community did not have confidence in the WMD claim.
Good read regarding this: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/05/12/selective-intel...
"re-transmit" sounds neutral but "re-re-transmit" sounds passive aggressive. This would be very hard for a machine to interpret
A Google Image Search of the picture in the fake article would have found the picture is much older, and isn't what the caption described.
If I'm tech-savvy and skeptical, I might have done that when consuming the article, and decided on my own it was fake. Machines can do that automatically for people that aren't tech-savvy, or that don't start reading it with a skeptical mindset.
There are facts of course - like such and such event happened or not, such and such statistical data is showing this number of not. But it is never served raw, it is always garnished with opinion. E.g. the fact is that Trump signed certain executive order. But you can say it's "Muslim ban" or "temporary restriction on admittance of nationals from terror-ridden countries". Not the same.
And various "factchecking" sites are fully complicit in this and inject opinion as often as not - to the point exactly the same thing said by two different people can be deemed "mostly true" or "mostly false", moreover, exactly the same thing said by the same person can be "mostly true" and "false".
You can't hope to have robots make sense of it if we can't. You can, of course, build a neural network and train it, but it would just put "robot approved" stamp on biases of whoever trained it.
We need more cynical takes on things.
It's utterly appalling that on one side we have right-wing extremists yelling "FAKE NEWS" about CNN because CNN might get something wrong one time in ten, implying it's no different than Breitbart or Fox News which are wrong nine times in ten, and on the other we have left-leaning people beating up CNN for making mistakes and suggesting their trust is completely eroded.
News organizations offer a view. You should be prepared to vet everything you read from anyone. We need to give people a toolkit to help verify stories, to develop their bullshit instinct.
The first step to identifying 'fake news' (even in NYT or WSJ!) is to be able to pull out attributions from the source text.
This would give you some idea of where the information in an article actually came from. "Fake news" will tend to be either unattributed or misrepresent the thing it's quoting.
But a good first step toward better media literacy would just be giving people a representation of who actually said the the things in an article, and that seems much easier.
Exactly. I'd argue that disingenuous news from mainstream news organisations is worse than dedicated "fake news" websites because they exploit legitimacy and reader-trust to peddle falsehoods. They are our port in a storm of bullsh*t, and they're failing us.
In fact, I would go as far as saying that the internet, itself, was designed and built in the naive belief that humans would better themselves by instant access to knowledge. This past decade and a half has completely shattered our 1980s and '90s vision of the promise of the internet.
We have few means of combating propaganda that threatens our values, reclaiming our privacy, or maintaining our remaining sanity. When a shared objective reality no longer exists, we're all loons.
As I said in another post: The only thing you can possibly check for with any reliability is the validity of the base, source event, if there is one. Any higher derivation in the wrong hands (Facebook, for example) is systemic censorship. How can we safely do that? Recursive link tracking, perhaps, to a "primary source," which relies on the AI matching the factual claim to an appropriate source, either a video, image, or text that can be considered the legitimate source based on context (for example, an article about Apple's earnings could link to a primary source of their press release).
Regardless, the most dangerous form of "fake news" is by the selection/omission of stories, and that seems pretty impossible to quantify with today's technology (and of course the most prevalent on all of our 'real news' sources).
This. Very true, and woefully absent from most discussions regarding "fake news".
An algorithm could watch, say, 50 sources and see if they simultaneously start using identical phrases, given access to a thesaurus aren't those odds a little unusual? This happened a couple times in the last election. You'd have a much simpler task of quote analysis of course, to exclude directly quoted content.
Then factor in something to detect press releases and video news releases where the verbiage of large sections is identical, this strategy is almost too easy.
Another factor is "large known propaganda sources" simultaneously releasing the story but small propaganda sources don't operate at all because fundamentally there is a size cutoff. The Wash Post will be in every propaganda operation because they are huge, but the "nowheresville register" certainly will not. Real news would of course be covered by both, so it should be very easy to detect organic self organizing behavior vs small scale conspiratorial behavior.
Now algo-proof propaganda could emerge much like handwritten letters to your congressional representative, before being inevitably ignored, are considered more impressive than mere form letters or signing a list. But it would detect at least some fake news based on fake news being part of a coordinated centralized mass produced campaign rather than trying to detect fake news based on its inherent fake-ness itself. Sorta like swatting bugs that bite you or try to, rather than identifying each individual bug then swatting only the mosquitos. Its very difficult to detect if something is a Walmart product, but its easy to detect if its mass produced, if the quality is very low, if it was made in China, if it contains chemicals banned in the USA for safety reasons, and in the long run works just as well.
What would that mean? Let's say I write an article where I claim White House is controlled by reptiloids from planet Nibiru. Would it check that I have any links in my article at all? Or that the links actually prove my claims? Or that these proofs can be trusted (I may just link to my own website or one created by my friend)? I could insert a hundred links to a most respectable austronomy sites to prove that planet Nibiru exists, but how would you know whether these links actually prove it? I could refer to a lot of actual news content as the proof White House occupants can't actually be human. How you evaluate if these links actually support my claim?
It's more difficult than just blindly blocking any stories that aren't covered on 'major, trusted sources', and probably only a couple of organizations could implement anything close to this right now, but it's the best we can strive for. All the other 'solutions' I've heard involve censorship of unpopular opinions.
Edit: But yes, to the point, my envisioned implementation would not find any referenced sources in your article or through a search, and if it did, those sources would not be authorized to make the claims about the Whitehouse reptiles, so it would get the notation that indicates 'could not verify.'
At first, most real news stories would be unable to be verified, but over the time, there would be fewer false negatives. The important thing to recognize, though, is that the notation just means the reader has to make his own judgment; it does not state whether or not it's fake.
And "real stories" should also probably have a notation with a direct link to what the algorithm thinks is the base source.
1. Encouraging journalists to actually link to a source at all. Because at the moment, a depressing number of them don't even bother sourcing anything. So you end up just having to 'trust' the organisation that the story has been checked out beforehand.
It's an especially big problem with web versions of printed newspaper articles, and is a general problem with print newspapers as a whole (since due to space limits, they don't publically source/cite anything).
2. Getting journalists to link to the original source. Because at the moment, you'll see news sites sourcing other news sites which then source other news like a lengthy game of Chinese Whispers or Telephone. It's how a lot of 'fake news' makes its way in the media food chain.
So yeah, something like this would be useful just to get publications to cite their sources better. Or to make them look for the real source rather than one of a million middlemen.
It precisely encapsulates the very problem with trying to identify anything but the most rudimentary and obvious and deliberate "fake news", that you will inherently impart your bias and your perspective.
The problem too, and maybe even the worst part, is that those advancing this "fake news" hunt agenda are the very types who have no self-awareness that would suggest they could at all be trusted to even attempt having an objective perspective. The Stanford Prison Experiment comes to mind in how self-righteous and justified feeling people commit abuses in the name of doing "right" and "good".
American free speech is absolute and it is one of the basis of our society's success where others falter and perpetually under-perform us. I know foreigners don't necessarily have an ability to fully appreciate absolute free speech as there is simply no other society that is so principled about free speech (although certain people are trying to curtail freedoms of speech when they don't agree with it), but it is necessary in order to not allow any group, no matter how much they claim they are the "good guys", to control speech. You may not like something someone says, but just because you don't, does not give you the right to censor or stifle or shadow ban their speech as a matter of principle. YC doing so is quite troubling, because it really highlights the fact that the not only feel supremacist in their views, but that they have no regard for people's freedom or liberties. Only approved propaganda may apply. Am I right YC mod goons?
Quoting Wikipedia policy itself:
>If Wikipedia had been available around the sixth century B.C., it would have reported the view that the Earth is flat as a fact and without qualification. And it would have reported the views of Eratosthenes (who correctly determined the earth's circumference in 240BC) either as controversial, or a fringe view. Similarly if available in Galileo's time, it would have reported the view that the sun goes round the earth as a fact, and if Galileo had been a Vicipaedia editor, his view would have been rejected as 'originale investigationis'.
Oh right, because we can all agree on which news organizations are credible. /s
They've been beaten at their own game by an opponent better at using modern/popular methods of disseminating information.
So who decides what organisations are credible? Or orders them by their credibility? Someone has to create the list. Someone with obvious human biases towards one view or another.
If you don't like the way your local bakery makes their bread you go somewhere else. Now if the media reports on something you don't like someone else will tell you what you want to hear.
This issue happens on both sides of the political spectrum BUT it does seem to be a lot worse on the conservative side of things. All the "liberal" news sources like the NYT and The WashPo seem to be doing lots of reporting on Trump supporters, discussing their fears and hopes, concerns and motivations. Even more conservative sources like the WSJ, not including their editorial page, are trying to take a bigger view of the world.
On the other hand my Apple News feed seems to perpetually have a FOX News story. The one this morning was "Is Trump Bashing the new Celeb nude selfie?"
All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories also believe global warming is a hoax and Obama was not born in this country. A significant portion of the electorate has been drinking from the well and cannot be reached.
How is that any different than people in the Bible Belt who believe the earth was made in 7 days ? Or elderly people who become vulnerable and fall prey to exploitation (because they believe phone scams, or sob stories from strangers, etc) ? (Edit: or young people who think they're going to grow up and be an astronaut or NBA star). There will always be a sizable proportion of the population who believes wacky stories.
I know you weren't implying this, but NYT and WaPo's hands aren't clean either. I really didn't appreciate how they pushed the "Russia HACKED the election" narrative. That's predatory on the same level: take advantage of the nebulous word "hacking" and misapply it to something that doesn't even rely on computers, do some hand-waiving, and voila, there's some "fake news" to dish up to the masses [which is ironic when your other stories are about the spread of "fake news"].
I see no difference there but I'm not sure that I get the point.
> I really didn't appreciate how they pushed the "Russia HACKED the election" narrative.
I never got the impression that those news orgs were saying that actual voting counts were being hacked. But the emails were hacked and leaked.
They jumped the gun on blaming Russia, but that wasn't fake news (provided you believe prominent members of US intelligence).
Even Trump seemed to think it was plausible... At least plausible enough to publicly ask Russia to hack Hilary's emails [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa2B5zHfbQ
my point is that there have always legions of people who believe ridiculous things. They've been around for every single previous election. So we shouldn't be surprised when the scientific community says "civilization has changed the climate" but people still don't believe it (even when the claim is supported by evidence).
The NYT and WaPo (among others) are incredibly biased, and much of the problem is that their support base is too sheltered to understand how. I've said more on this in previous comments.
I followed the election from a variety of sources (WaPo and NYT included) and never got that impression. But I agree that it was a circus from all angles.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2016/12/28/am...
Do you think it's mostly from misleading mainstream news stories? Or from smaller outlets (social media, celebrities, memes, etc)?
I'm sure one of these anti science boogeymen you've created would think you are equally brainwashed and they are equally correct in their views...
I still like the Times to an extent, but they like many other papers get it wrong from time to time. Doesn't mean I should leave and never look back, but instead I have taken to critically thinking about every story I read from every source to come to a conclusion about an issue.
I don't think fake news or poor journalism is a problem. The problem is people and their lack of critical thinking, often substituted for blind acceptance of a narrative that fits their preferred reality.
Fake news on the other hand are literally made up lies. The overwhelming majority of fake news articles have no basis in reality, period. They tend to be written by people who want nothing other than to get page views.
After all, telling outright lies is just amateurish; the NYT has been shaping society's perspective on facts for over a century.
That's right, because when Wikileaks revealed high levels of collusion between media outlets and the DNC/Clinton campaign, placing and pulling articles/stories to present a specific narrative, it wasn't out of desire to mislead, rather it was only a desire to 'correct the record'. /s
America and the world have a situation where advertisers need to prey on the Id and emotions of users in order to sell widgets. The advent of the internet crushed the ability of media firms to stay afloat and replaced the ecosystem with many upstarts who also faced the same pressure.
In short there's an overheating attention grabbing system when it comes to the media, which is its own issue that needs to be solved.
Unfortunately there's a new hitherto unbelievable problem, where people fabricate complete and utter lies/fiction and can sail it down the streams of social media.
This is different from the older issue in that these are not major news agencies, but websites masquerading/camouflaging themselves as a news outlet and fabricating stories designed to directly press emotional buttons without having to deal with facts.
A closer model is conspiracy theories.
I agree this is a problem. It also happened rather equally on both sides.
If you really want to know how it works, please take a look at a recent a paper co-authored by Alessandro Bessi. It came out a week ago. It should be accessible for most people on HN.
The day the printing press was invented was the day print journalism was subverted to push agendas.
Capitalism isn't going anywhere obviously and shouldn't. On the other end is state-run media, e.g. North Korea. We wouldn't want things to swing in that direction or even toward RT or many other examples.
I think we should be looking to replicate whatever magic is and has been in PBS, early BBC, ITN, and other earlier UK and French programming.
> All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories
It goes both ways I think. Consider the possibility that there are more people that believe that other 'stupid' people believe these stories than there are 'stupid' people who actually believe these stories.
I would say a huge part of the problem is that news is no longer news. It's all commentary. News organizations are not only incentivized to to sensationalize stories to make money but they are also ran by people who have extreme political views and want to essentially mind control the population. They don't want to report the facts of a story. They want to make you accept their interpretation of the facts.
A great example is how different news organizations cover the recent executive order on immigration. Depending on where you get your news you were told there was a Muslim ban, a ban from 7 Muslim majority countries, only accepting Christian refugees from the Middle East, 7 countries that harbor terrorists were banned, etc.
Wherever you fall on that issue there is a news org trying to force you into a certain viewpoint one way or the other.
Please, describe to me how someone can convey pure unadulterated facts in language, without imposing an "interpretation" on them.
It's an absurd fantasy. There's no possibility for a disembodied, perfectly objective voice conveying facts. So yes, in a sense, every news org favors a certain interpretation of the facts. But these subtle variations used to be accepted as par for the course.
The root cause of the widespread distrust of media is the turn on the right towards a form of Orwellian doublespeak in their media outlets, beginning in the 90s and ramping up heavily in the Bush years. You see it's most virulent expression in the way Trump speaks: he accuses the interim AG of "betrayal" for acting on her conscious. Or the way he talks about returning government "to the people" while staffing his cabinet with billionaires. It badly subverts the ability of people on the left and the right to meaningfully speak to one another, because our words no longer signify the same thing.
You mean the ones contained in a dossier which accurately predicted several Trump related events that were not publicly known to be in planning at the time it was written, but were verifiable to have occurred as predicted before it was published?
Seems to me that it was plenty newsworthy.
BTW, it also reported that part of the carrot side of the carrot-and-stick blackmail and bribery by Russia was that Trump was promised a bribe of a share of Rosneft coincidentally the same size that was just sold off, on credit, to buyers concealed by various cutouts.
Gonna need more hard evidence before being concerned about this.
Occam's razor, but I'm guessing that was autocorrect.
Anyway, no, because there is no incentive for him to do what you are suggesting.
If however you believe his goal is to destabilise U.S. politics, then there is large incentive and zero downside for him to fake a sale of 19% of the company.
When did the people pushing the N Clinton conspiracies every say "this may or not be true..."???
So, your statement is disingenuous, at best.
Well, that's actually a pretty interesting example to look at. For one, the dossier concerned contained a lot of accusations to do with members of Trump's team travelling to Eastern Europe to meet with Russian contacts, suspect financial transactions and the like - you yourself are doing it a disservice by describing it only as rumours of a "piss orgy".
But irrespective of that, the dossier had been known about for months. But the media organisations didn't report on it, specifically because they couldn't verify the information contained within it. But then Buzzfeed decided to publish it anyway, and at that point any responsible news organisation is left in a pretty impossible position - either don't report on the thing everyone is talking about, or report unsubstantiated accusations.
Sometimes it feels like the media is damned if it does, and damned if it doesn't. Report unsubstantiated rumour? You're biased! Hold back information because it isn't verified? You're biased!
1000 * 0 is still 0.
If the Trump campaign had ordered a dossier of dirt on Hillary Clinton, and paid a respected former intelligence officer to provide it, would the claims made in it be credible?
Let's take one of the big 'fake news' items from the recent election, the one regarding Hillary's health. What do you make of this article by a former secret service agent on Hillary Clinton's health:
http://ijr.com/opinion/2016/09/260018-protected-hillary-clin...
None of the facts in that article are in disrepute either, and it's also from a respected secret service agent.
So are the questions it poses about Hillary's health more or less credible than the Trump dossier, and is it fake news or not?
The definition of fake news is getting stretched to include controversial news.
"Fake news" is fiction being sold as news on websites that look credible.
Flat out making stuff up, and polluting the media stream with it in order to manipulate people.
This is the easy case to solve. As people actually try to grapple with this, "fake news" will evolve, it will add parts of the truth to it dodge this 0th level definition.
A dossier actually compiled but unverified is still not fake news - it's a shady bad practice circa 1990. Unfortunately we're dealing with much worse problems today.
I mean that's the whole sub-prime mortgage problem all over again. Take a shitty product and wrap it in layers of respectability until people don't know any better.
When there is also evidence to suggest much of the contents of the dossier came from a 4-chan prank, it's hard to see where the difference is.
1) fake news: a recent phenomenon where fraudulent/fictional/completely made up literature is peddled as legitimate news. This is then distributed on steroids via social media. It uses unsuspecting people to transmit this.
Bias in news. This is an older problem and involves how news is presented and what spin is put. In the worst case it is deliberate in order to support an agenda.
There was a lot of anti-Trump news that basically matches what you said above:
> "fake news" will evolve, it will add parts of the truth to it dodge this 0th level definition
* Trump kicked a mother and baby out of rally
* Trump mocked a reporter's disability
* Trump proposed building database of muslims
And the list goes on.
This goes well beyond the realm of media bias, and in to direct collusion between media and the campaign.
I have no problem calling that 'fake news', which is perhaps a descriptive approach rather than a prescriptive one.
On top of that trump himself courted controversy at a rate and scale never seen before.
That's why this election was faced with drama unlike elections before them.
A lot of stuff listed above is sadly the regular calumny inflicted upon candidates. Iirc someone got kicked out of the race because of a bad photo op.
But These are all things that are problematic- without being fake news.
> * Trump mocked a reporter's disability
Do you deny that these things happened?
Has any other candidate - of any party - ever done anything like this?
Is the media supposed to pretend that it didn't happen?
This is where the "the facts have a well known liberal bias" joke comes from
For the first one, the mother who was supposedly 'kicked out' denies it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/08/...
For the second one, he was not mocking the reporter's disability. He was mocking the reporter for pulling a story and the impersonation he did is Trump's standard impersonation for a flustered, bumbling person. There is multiple video of him doing the exact same action to able bodied people - from Ted Cruz to military generals, and all sorts of others.
Not only that, but the reporter's disability is nothing like the action Trump did. The reporter actually has frozen/locked up joints e.g. almost the exact opposite of what Trump did.
So, either Trump knew of the reporter's disability and wasn't mocking it (completely different actions), or he didn't know of the reporter's disability (and therefore couldn't have been mocking it).
In either situation, Trump wasn't mocking the reporter's disability.
Unfortunately a freeze frame from the video of Trump's movement matches a still photo of the journalist, hence the belief that he was mocking the reporter's disability.
And this is why people say the media has a well known Trump bias.
I agree with you broadly, though. To me, fake news has absolutely no mooring in reality whatsoever and is pure clickbait - usually without political motive beyond getting angry people to click.
And that (apparently) can trace its origins to a 4-chan prank?
Personally, I do not.
http://gizmodo.com/4chan-idiots-claim-they-invented-the-trum...
"The White House has announced today at 7h30, through speaker ..., a piece of legislation that, quote: ~first paragraph summary of the legislation~.
You can read the full text here.
On the opinion of Bla bla, this legislation is innefective etc etc.
Disclaimer: Bla bla is not related to any of the mentioned organizations, though he declares he tends to agree with the opinion of former president Obama on most issues. You can read more about this commenter here."
Fallacy of gray. Just because you can't ask for perfect doesn't mean you can't ask for better.
I've addressed this elsewhere, but there is definitely cases where this can be done.
No, Tom Cruise is not moving to Buffalo, Missouri[1].
No, there is no attempt by lawmakers to legislate the disposal of unused semen[2].
Etc, etc. Some of these are satire, but some are just complete deliberate fakes.
This is a different class of problem to "OMG Hillary is a Nazi/OMG Trump bought Pizza" opinion spam.
[1] http://www.snopes.com/celebrity-moving-small-towns/
[2] http://www.snopes.com/unused-semen-bill/
According to Rudy Giuliani, when Trump first announced it, he called it a Muslim ban, so...
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/1/30/headlines/trump_favor...
So you admit you are only reading from sources with a similar bias/narrative on this issue?
A fake news detector isn't going to do anything by itself to solve the problem. Fake news consumers are going to guzzle the junk regardless of warning tags, scores, or nutritional labeling.
In the hands of a skilled journalist/activist/thought-leader whose abilities are "augmented" by this tool, however, it could really be a powerful antidote.
News is a product, but it should be noted that fraud is a crime in a free market. Not that it discounts the rest of what you're saying.
However, news as a public service has standards of liability to the public in general, not just to your own customers. It is an obligation to society, not to the buyer.
I don't see the problem. I don't want to hear lies, therefore I create a demand for true news. I don't need a nanny facebook/google/state telling me what news I like, and neither does the rest of the population.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
You can very easily overwhelm the signal with noise. The plethora of independents means nothing if only a few of them get heard.
Matter of fact, with some pushing, you can have one "independent" dominate a large portion of the channel. At some juncture the network effect takes over and the process becomes self sustaining, you just need to play on people's/your target markets biases well.
This is a people problem, and people are getting way too good and understanding and manipulating the biases of other people.
I think if we compare today's new to a decade ago's, the change is not more capitalism (ie, for-profit, corporate, quarterly-report focused...). The change is more choice, more information, more volume and the chaotic, many-to-many distribution systems of the social internet.
The clickbait imperative has got a quasi-capitalist single mindedness to it, but I think we'll be chasing down the wrong culprit by characterising the problem as a capitalist one.
In fact, I think it's best if we try not to jump to conclusions at all. We're hitting some problems with the way our democracies work and I haven't really heard a narrative yet that feels satisfying. Lets not jump to conclusions. We need to be right about it.
Is a great justification for doing nothing, ever.
It feels like we are entering a very much unprecedented era in America, where the President freezes out news organisations that do not report on him favorably, and is actively attacking the media with the aim of establishing the official government narrative as the only one voters should listen to.
This is extremely dangerous. I'm not saying that we should rush to judgement, but we shouldn't just sit back and wait to see how it all unfolds either. This is an issue to be investigated and worked on, urgently.
Really, because not more than a few weeks ago I remember a whole bunch of people believing the "we can't verify, but we're going to press anyway" stories about Trump and golden showers in Russia, not to mention a whole bunch of other similar fake news regarding Trump and Trump supporters.
I think you (and many others) are selectively applying a bias to what is and isn't fake news and the type of people who believe it based on your own political preferences.
And therein lies the real problem.
1) media agencies on all sides had the dossier and didn't publish it since t was unverifiable
2) when buzfeed or whomever linked the dossier, it forced other firms to do so as well or lose out on a critical story.
3) the adaptation to deal with this is to not report the dossier as fact, but as claims. And of course, it spiraled downhill from there,
In this scenario it's important to note that media firms avoided reporting on this issue because it was crap.
For global warming, ah man where do we start.
Firstly, it's unfair to lambast people for believing it's a hoax.
Since the 80s and before, a long, intelligent and concerted effort to spread FUD has been active in America. It is today successful enough to spread around the world.
If people were old enough, they would remember that initially scientists would not give the time of day to global warming conspiracist/deniers.
It was correctly believed that doing so actually gave cranks and loons the patina of credibility, when they should be allowed to die out.
Unfortunately, these cranks and loons were cultivated and nurtured, and given airtime. In particular there is one news network that I recall had a more active role in this and it was not CNN.
Eventually scientists were forced to engage, and by engaging they lost.
Scientists, (and people on HN) are constantly making the error that this is about facts.
It's about entertainment and playing with human emotions.
Scientists walked in expecting a debate, when it was about showmanship, with one side reporting things unevenly.
As a result there are people today who will be anti global warming because they are being manipulated.
Fake news is a new problem
Global warming wasn't part of my argument. That was just me quoting the parent who appears to believe only one side of the political spectrum is susceptible to fake news.
Personally I trust the science, and think that even if you don't there are enough other compelling reasons to move on to renewable energy sources that we'd be stupid not to anyway.
WaitButWhy.com had a good series on Elon Musk that explored many of these issues: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-lif...
> Fake news is a new problem
There was plenty of science going against 'smoking causes cancer'. Fake news has been around for quite some time, just not in its current more virulent form.
You can see this right now. The mainstream media falsifies or omits the truth on behalf of their backers or the organizations they fear: major political parties, subsidiaries of their parent companies, major investors, etc. I would argue that they do this because the public is not their customer, it's their target demographic.