Although I'm willing to believe this kind of low-latency news-mining tech may be quite robust against noise, it seems like it would be difficult or impossible to filter real news from intentional, hostile, targeted false news injected by people who understand the basic principles upon which the tech is based.
Judging from the article, it relies mostly on "trusted accounts" who often tweet things they hear before they substantiate and file articles on them (but can certainly be fooled themselves) and can pick up some image-driven false stories by identifying the same image in earlier contexts (which presumably has some issues with stock images too...)
Some events can't be photographed (either for legal reasons, access reasons or because they happen on computers). Stock Pictures of relevant people, buildings and logos get used instead. It's a bit more likely to be fake news if the pictures are supposed to be "protests" or "bombing" from different dates and geographical contexts but those stories see people posting stock photos of locations and repost vaguely relevant memes too...
If you take that approach and add Musk's source truthfulness rating[1], then perhaps we'll have something.
Something's gotta give. Right now, it's all hard about narrative. It's not information, it's all shaping and characterization these days. Of course Trump doesn't help the cause, but to watch the news contort itself in an effort to "counter" has lead to its demise as a semi trusted
fourth estate.
"...If you take that approach and add Musk's source truthfulness rating[1]..."
Not sure resurrecting Pravda is the best way to ascertain the veracity of facts with authority. Pravda was a joke.
That said, the unfortunate reality is that ALL of these proposals are predicated on trust. Do you trust whatever news source you are consuming? Do you trust whatever news source rating platform you are consuming? Etc etc.
Nowadays, it's probably best just to accept that every article or comment you see on the internet is possibly part of a well tuned professional manipulation campaign. This goes DOUBLY for any article or comment that is even remotely political. Including this comment, your comment, and every other comment on this thread.
That's just the nature of the world in which we currently live. A sad reality is that, in the end, we'll all be effectively choosing the sources, the data and the stories we wish to believe. And those choices will be largely informed by our pre-existing biases.
Sure, I think he's frustrated with the media's reporting on him. And obvs the Pravda moniker was a tongue in cheek dig at them. Still, I'm intrigued by the idea of a news source rating system --like a seller's rating on Amazon, eBay. Obvs those are skewed and unscientific, but something along those lines will be better than what we have today.
From the reaction from some journos, it's clear some don't like the idea being accountable for their reporting.
> Obvs those are skewed and unscientific, but something along those lines will be better than what we have today.
Why? Surely what you'll actually get is one political faction dominating [parts of] the site and doing their utmost to downvote anything that contradicts their worldview to oblivion and (to a somewhat lesser extent) upvote probably false stuff that happens to support it. It's very much a winner-takes-all battle, because people that just want to read stuff or fact check aren't going to stick around if it obviously skews alt-right or far-left, and probably not even if it has an allegiance to one relatively moderate political coalition or another. If you want to know what a particular faction thinks are the important news stories of the day it probably has a subreddit anyway. The alternative to winner-takes-all is top-down curation, which is basically what the media does anyway, usually being more open about their partisanship, and I'm not sure write less unfavourable stuff about Elon Musk companies is the best starting point for curation.
And if your site is started with the premise that the media cannot be trusted, there's a good chance the people that choose to spend most of their time there will be those with even less regard for truth and objectivity. (Case in point: As soon as Elon posted about "who owns the press", his timeline became dominated by people arguing that he meant "the Jews" who certainly had the numbers to drown out any useful observations Elon might actually have wanted make on the subject)
I think there is a large swath of Americans (presumable in other countries people feel the way) who are moderate and would welcome a news rating system. I'm talking about Bernie bros who broke for Trump, or Repubs who broke for Hillary, for example. I'm sure there are volumes of regular people who would like to know that what they are reading is based on fact, rather then interpretation.
Just today, we had someone from the NYT RT a picture of illegal immigrants during the Obama admin and pinned it on Trump --when people called it out, he re-framed the issue. Of course with Musk it's about misrepresenting statistics and making mountain out of mole hills from minor production issues.
Then there is the whole aspect of using a small unverified studies to call for one type of action or another in favor of one group or another. News have become something akin to a rumour mill and echo chamber than an organ which diffuses unframed news.
"... I'm sure there are volumes of regular people who would like to know that what they are reading is based on fact, rather then interpretation..."
How would a news ratings agency tell you that?
The only thing ratings agencies tell you, is how the public voted on news agencies. (Or if the ratings agencies don't allow the public to vote, then the only thing they tell you is what THEY feel is "true".)
Either way, they are no more worthy of our trust than the media outlets they purport to be "rating".
It's EXTREMELY likely that they'll be just another cog in the machinery of professional manipulation campaigns. (For all we know, it's likely a professional manipulation campaign that wants to start the "ratings agency" in the first place.) That's just the reality of the world we live in right now. You just have to be skeptical of everything you see like that.
Sure, but that doesn't mean WE should trust said systems. Whether those systems trust each other or not is irrelevant to the question of whether or not I should trust them.
It's something to keep in mind when designing our own personal meta-strategies for how to deal with the [dis]information glut.
As a global society we are starting to come to self-awareness, and confronting the need to distinguish between hallucinations and real sensory inputs. [1] We're in the situation of a person who has suddenly woken up after falling asleep while driving on the freeway. We have to clear away the cobwebs and dreamstuff, but quick, and get back in our lane and out of the way of that oncoming semi-truck.
The global AI is already here, and it has people for neurons. Katsuhiro Yoneshige's service functions like a close-to-primary-perception locus of attention, compared to most news services which are more like idle daydreams.
In this memetic evolutionary system, there's about to be a strong selective pressure towards fidelity in communications. (Cf. Musk's Pravda thrust.)
[1] "Anatomy of an online misinformation network" (plos.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17173593 This is on Public Library of Science analyzing what, in psychological terms , could be considered a neurosis in the global human psyche.
The problem is that it seems that most people prefer narrative over neutral reporting. So even if a neutral, AI-based site delivered great reporting, or if Musk's truthfulness rating existed, it might not even matter — most readers will just continue to click on narrative-driven garbage
Some portion would, certainly, 10, 20, 30% would. I think most people would at least have a neutral source in addition to their narrative feeding news source.
NPR kind of exists off this mystique, although they are not neural, though many of their listeners believe that, they are closer to being neutral on at least some issues than many other sources.
Some of their reporters are at least fair (@nrpgreene) although their ombudsman gets complaints from the left that NPR _leans_ _right!_ while most neutral people would tell you they are left _leaning_.
Isn't this what reddit already does? a media giant with no reporters but instead of robots using humans scraping content for fictional internet points (karma)
Google's (now public) PageRank algorithm isn't that complicated, and it brought an astounding improvement in our ability to find what we wanted. There might in fact be a simple algorithm for determining who to trust -- but a closed-source algorithm seems like it cannot by definition go very far to improve media transparency.
If we had more kinds of metadata publicly available -- "[person] trusts [person]", "[person] found [article] helpful for understanding [topic]", "[person] testifies that [person] wrote a good PhD dissertation on [topic]", etc. -- we could publicly experiment with algorithms like, "restrict results to people whose writings have been contradicted fewer times than they have been endorsed", or "to people trusted by people I trust," or "to persons X for whom at least 50 other persons Y testify that X helped them understand [topic]," or whatever.
Hypergraph databases (e.g. Grakn, HypergraphDb) and logic programming languages (e.g. Datalog) already let us express arbitrary metadata -- anything expressible, as far as I am aware.
Getting ordinary users to state their thoughts (and their search queries over those thoughts) in an easily machine-readable manner might be tough. For that purpose I wrote a language[1,2], extremely close to natural language, that allows such machine-readable expression of higher-order relationship information.
If you want to be in the know when news is breaking I've found the Banjo app to be invaluable. If something is happening in say Provo, you're patched into the local newspapers, TV and radio stations and the Twitter from locals.
Sure sometimes there are errors but when multiple people are saying something it's got a pretty good chance of being right. But the national media gets things wrong as well. Often you're in the know thirty to sixty minutes ahead of national media and with more details - if that's important to you.
I have to ask a question,and this question has bothered me for a while: Do we absolutely have to have breaking news at the speed of light? Can most people not wait a couple of hours before they hear about the latest tragedy or event?
All I've ever seen from citizen journalists (on Reddit/Twitter/etc.) is a bunch of typically wrong rumors, data and analysis. Every once in a while they get it right, but that's the rare exception. The reason people watch CNN et al is because biases or not, they're somewhat trusted to at least get the majority of their facts correct (and see below as to why I think all of these wishy washy adjectives).
I think this goes back into the curse of the 24 hour news cycle. It creates demand for sensationalism, "breaking" news. The speed that these news networks feel that they have to be have the exclusive does lead to errors, which leads to less trustworthiness in their reporting.
I just don't see the necessity of constant up to the minute news reporting. I consider myself a news junkie, but to me the important questions are usually answered after the fact anyways: "Why did this happen and what does it mean?"
I also have to wonder if this is part of our Constantly Connected Culture. People have to have their smart phone and be connected to every event constantly. I don't know if these phenomenon are somehow connected, but I would guess they are.
Last September, my fiance and I made a rule: no more phones in the bedroom. That small decision has been life-changing. Right away it had a couple interesting effects; I ended up reading (novels) about 3x more, we chatted more, there was more sex, and I stopped starting my day out with the news.
That last point has had the largest impact on my life.
By not starting my day with what inevitably ends up being something negative (Oh Joy, what industry am I as a millennial ruining today and how many times has the president tweeted about it?), I quickly noticed that my morning mood had improved. First I started reading the news once I got out of my room making breakfast, then that became reading it after breakfast and eventually that became catching up on the news after lunch.
About 3 months later, I was catching up on the world around me later on in the day, and in smaller bits. I was also noticeably happier. While I'm all for carefully examining causul vs correlation, and am keenly aware of the biases, it didn't take a lot of reading a couple papers to see that, surprise surprise, the news is depressing.
Then I had a realization when hanging out with my grandpa, who frankly, is all out of fucks to give. While extremely well read, he gets all of his news from the few magazines he is subscribed to (The Economist, Bloomberg and Maclean’s) and therefore only hears things sometimes two weeks after they happen. And it didn't matter. He's just as well read on world events, he's not living in a cave or under a rock, he just isn't stuck in this cycle of fear of missing out on being in the know. He doesn't care.
So three months ago, I quit reading the news. I set a couple of redirects on my computer so that whenever I tried to visit a few of the places I used to frequent, I was redirected to either here, HN, where I enjoy the comments, or to Pocket. Every Sunday since then, I take the time to sit down in the morning, and read through The Economist, which I am a subscriber to.
That's it.
That is my only source of news - well, that and what I read on here or twitter. Sure I still hear about major events (and unfortunately, school shootings tend to make their rounds on twitter). I am keenly aware that like all news sources, the economist is biased. I try to balance that out by following a few tweet-happy people with opposing views. But let me tell you, being unplugged from the Breaking News! cycle and the continuous back and forth between the talking heads is the most refreshing thing I've ever done for my mental health. It may not be for everyone, and I may not do it forever, but for now, I have no intentions on going back to reading the news.
Yes they are. Next time you're in a public place, look at all the people surfing on their phone.
They're going after the immediate dopamine hit that you get from little tiny updates of new information. [1] So, yes, many (most?) people actually do need it, or they will suffer withdrawal symptoms from the lack of dopamine.
If you're a news channel without frequent updates, then you get lost in the dust, apparently. Interestingly (from my perspective at least), it seems that the info doesn't even have to be correct, but just what I call "gap-filler" (think of all the talking heads who speculate on things endlessly before the facts start to come in), and you can still make money - you just have to have information (no matter how irrelevant it is).
To me it surely looks like a lost cause unless we can start to wake up out of this trance. Where's Wesley Crusher when we need him? [2]
> Next time you're in a public place, look at all the people surfing on their phone.
But are they looking at the news? While I see people surfing on their phones, when I do see their screens they're texting, looking at Facebook, playing a game -- they aren't on CNN (or some other news site).
Other than breaking news, how often does the news get updated on a newspaper's web site? While FoxNews updates articles throughout the day (or at least moves them around); I don't see a lot of new articles on "The Washington Post" web site throughout the day.
36 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 73.2 ms ] threadSomething's gotta give. Right now, it's all hard about narrative. It's not information, it's all shaping and characterization these days. Of course Trump doesn't help the cause, but to watch the news contort itself in an effort to "counter" has lead to its demise as a semi trusted fourth estate.
[1]money.cnn.com/2018/05/23/technology/elon-musk-media/index.html
Not sure resurrecting Pravda is the best way to ascertain the veracity of facts with authority. Pravda was a joke.
That said, the unfortunate reality is that ALL of these proposals are predicated on trust. Do you trust whatever news source you are consuming? Do you trust whatever news source rating platform you are consuming? Etc etc.
Nowadays, it's probably best just to accept that every article or comment you see on the internet is possibly part of a well tuned professional manipulation campaign. This goes DOUBLY for any article or comment that is even remotely political. Including this comment, your comment, and every other comment on this thread.
That's just the nature of the world in which we currently live. A sad reality is that, in the end, we'll all be effectively choosing the sources, the data and the stories we wish to believe. And those choices will be largely informed by our pre-existing biases.
From the reaction from some journos, it's clear some don't like the idea being accountable for their reporting.
Why? Surely what you'll actually get is one political faction dominating [parts of] the site and doing their utmost to downvote anything that contradicts their worldview to oblivion and (to a somewhat lesser extent) upvote probably false stuff that happens to support it. It's very much a winner-takes-all battle, because people that just want to read stuff or fact check aren't going to stick around if it obviously skews alt-right or far-left, and probably not even if it has an allegiance to one relatively moderate political coalition or another. If you want to know what a particular faction thinks are the important news stories of the day it probably has a subreddit anyway. The alternative to winner-takes-all is top-down curation, which is basically what the media does anyway, usually being more open about their partisanship, and I'm not sure write less unfavourable stuff about Elon Musk companies is the best starting point for curation.
And if your site is started with the premise that the media cannot be trusted, there's a good chance the people that choose to spend most of their time there will be those with even less regard for truth and objectivity. (Case in point: As soon as Elon posted about "who owns the press", his timeline became dominated by people arguing that he meant "the Jews" who certainly had the numbers to drown out any useful observations Elon might actually have wanted make on the subject)
Just today, we had someone from the NYT RT a picture of illegal immigrants during the Obama admin and pinned it on Trump --when people called it out, he re-framed the issue. Of course with Musk it's about misrepresenting statistics and making mountain out of mole hills from minor production issues. Then there is the whole aspect of using a small unverified studies to call for one type of action or another in favor of one group or another. News have become something akin to a rumour mill and echo chamber than an organ which diffuses unframed news.
See also: Todd & Claire.
How would a news ratings agency tell you that?
The only thing ratings agencies tell you, is how the public voted on news agencies. (Or if the ratings agencies don't allow the public to vote, then the only thing they tell you is what THEY feel is "true".)
Either way, they are no more worthy of our trust than the media outlets they purport to be "rating".
It's EXTREMELY likely that they'll be just another cog in the machinery of professional manipulation campaigns. (For all we know, it's likely a professional manipulation campaign that wants to start the "ratings agency" in the first place.) That's just the reality of the world we live in right now. You just have to be skeptical of everything you see like that.
As a global society we are starting to come to self-awareness, and confronting the need to distinguish between hallucinations and real sensory inputs. [1] We're in the situation of a person who has suddenly woken up after falling asleep while driving on the freeway. We have to clear away the cobwebs and dreamstuff, but quick, and get back in our lane and out of the way of that oncoming semi-truck.
The global AI is already here, and it has people for neurons. Katsuhiro Yoneshige's service functions like a close-to-primary-perception locus of attention, compared to most news services which are more like idle daydreams.
In this memetic evolutionary system, there's about to be a strong selective pressure towards fidelity in communications. (Cf. Musk's Pravda thrust.)
[1] "Anatomy of an online misinformation network" (plos.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17173593 This is on Public Library of Science analyzing what, in psychological terms , could be considered a neurosis in the global human psyche.
I ask myself this sometimes.
NPR kind of exists off this mystique, although they are not neural, though many of their listeners believe that, they are closer to being neutral on at least some issues than many other sources. Some of their reporters are at least fair (@nrpgreene) although their ombudsman gets complaints from the left that NPR _leans_ _right!_ while most neutral people would tell you they are left _leaning_.
If we had more kinds of metadata publicly available -- "[person] trusts [person]", "[person] found [article] helpful for understanding [topic]", "[person] testifies that [person] wrote a good PhD dissertation on [topic]", etc. -- we could publicly experiment with algorithms like, "restrict results to people whose writings have been contradicted fewer times than they have been endorsed", or "to people trusted by people I trust," or "to persons X for whom at least 50 other persons Y testify that X helped them understand [topic]," or whatever.
Hypergraph databases (e.g. Grakn, HypergraphDb) and logic programming languages (e.g. Datalog) already let us express arbitrary metadata -- anything expressible, as far as I am aware.
Getting ordinary users to state their thoughts (and their search queries over those thoughts) in an easily machine-readable manner might be tough. For that purpose I wrote a language[1,2], extremely close to natural language, that allows such machine-readable expression of higher-order relationship information.
[1] Why use Hash: https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/b...
[2] How to use Hash: https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/b...
Bloomberg, really? "Which?" I presume the author is not a native speaker but their editors should know it should be "whom"
Sure sometimes there are errors but when multiple people are saying something it's got a pretty good chance of being right. But the national media gets things wrong as well. Often you're in the know thirty to sixty minutes ahead of national media and with more details - if that's important to you.
All I've ever seen from citizen journalists (on Reddit/Twitter/etc.) is a bunch of typically wrong rumors, data and analysis. Every once in a while they get it right, but that's the rare exception. The reason people watch CNN et al is because biases or not, they're somewhat trusted to at least get the majority of their facts correct (and see below as to why I think all of these wishy washy adjectives).
I think this goes back into the curse of the 24 hour news cycle. It creates demand for sensationalism, "breaking" news. The speed that these news networks feel that they have to be have the exclusive does lead to errors, which leads to less trustworthiness in their reporting.
I just don't see the necessity of constant up to the minute news reporting. I consider myself a news junkie, but to me the important questions are usually answered after the fact anyways: "Why did this happen and what does it mean?"
I also have to wonder if this is part of our Constantly Connected Culture. People have to have their smart phone and be connected to every event constantly. I don't know if these phenomenon are somehow connected, but I would guess they are.
But again, are people that impatient about facts?
That last point has had the largest impact on my life.
By not starting my day with what inevitably ends up being something negative (Oh Joy, what industry am I as a millennial ruining today and how many times has the president tweeted about it?), I quickly noticed that my morning mood had improved. First I started reading the news once I got out of my room making breakfast, then that became reading it after breakfast and eventually that became catching up on the news after lunch.
About 3 months later, I was catching up on the world around me later on in the day, and in smaller bits. I was also noticeably happier. While I'm all for carefully examining causul vs correlation, and am keenly aware of the biases, it didn't take a lot of reading a couple papers to see that, surprise surprise, the news is depressing.
Then I had a realization when hanging out with my grandpa, who frankly, is all out of fucks to give. While extremely well read, he gets all of his news from the few magazines he is subscribed to (The Economist, Bloomberg and Maclean’s) and therefore only hears things sometimes two weeks after they happen. And it didn't matter. He's just as well read on world events, he's not living in a cave or under a rock, he just isn't stuck in this cycle of fear of missing out on being in the know. He doesn't care.
So three months ago, I quit reading the news. I set a couple of redirects on my computer so that whenever I tried to visit a few of the places I used to frequent, I was redirected to either here, HN, where I enjoy the comments, or to Pocket. Every Sunday since then, I take the time to sit down in the morning, and read through The Economist, which I am a subscriber to.
That's it.
That is my only source of news - well, that and what I read on here or twitter. Sure I still hear about major events (and unfortunately, school shootings tend to make their rounds on twitter). I am keenly aware that like all news sources, the economist is biased. I try to balance that out by following a few tweet-happy people with opposing views. But let me tell you, being unplugged from the Breaking News! cycle and the continuous back and forth between the talking heads is the most refreshing thing I've ever done for my mental health. It may not be for everyone, and I may not do it forever, but for now, I have no intentions on going back to reading the news.
They're going after the immediate dopamine hit that you get from little tiny updates of new information. [1] So, yes, many (most?) people actually do need it, or they will suffer withdrawal symptoms from the lack of dopamine.
If you're a news channel without frequent updates, then you get lost in the dust, apparently. Interestingly (from my perspective at least), it seems that the info doesn't even have to be correct, but just what I call "gap-filler" (think of all the talking heads who speculate on things endlessly before the facts start to come in), and you can still make money - you just have to have information (no matter how irrelevant it is).
To me it surely looks like a lost cause unless we can start to wake up out of this trance. Where's Wesley Crusher when we need him? [2]
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/exploitin...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...
But are they looking at the news? While I see people surfing on their phones, when I do see their screens they're texting, looking at Facebook, playing a game -- they aren't on CNN (or some other news site).
Other than breaking news, how often does the news get updated on a newspaper's web site? While FoxNews updates articles throughout the day (or at least moves them around); I don't see a lot of new articles on "The Washington Post" web site throughout the day.
https://www.slow-journalism.com/
Maybe I’m reading too much Huffington Post