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Comment by joshmn | Hacker News Reader

The last 12 months I have visited Snopes more times than not in order to disprove some of the articles my Facebook friends choose to share.

It's slightly alarming that people don't think they need to fact check. You know it's bad when the President-elect opens up about his internet fact checking[0].

It sets a dangerous precedent. There are less intelligent people in this world who read deeply into these "articles" and act on them. They choose to take it as fact because it's a website. It's scary.

What can we do? Upvotes/downvotes? Won't work at scale, because likes/shares have a connotation of legitimacy.

Can we educate the public? We can try, but some people are so far from being able to (or willing to) learn. They'll discard any help, citing propaganda, claiming "xyz source" is trying to influence their thinking; how dare they.

Can you tell this exhausts me?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9IEIP3k_8c

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> What can we do? Upvotes/downvotes? Won't work at scale, because likes/shares have a connotation of legitimacy.

News verification seems like the perfect application of NLP, AI, and data mining techniques.

Can it make any money for anyone? Right now it is much more profitable to make fake news and use data mining to manipulate people: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2015-11-12/is-the...

I don't think those technologies are well suited to this problem at all. I was just talking to some Swiss journalists last night. You know what Swiss news organizations are using those technologies for? To make their writing more "engaging", i.e. more sensationalist, not for fact-checking.

> I don't think those technologies are well suited to this problem at all.

How so? Deciding whether news is fake or not seems like a textbook application of natural language classification and search.

I haven't read any textbooks on the subject (I don't mean that facetiously) - what would this look like? Because it seems to me that to such an algorithm virality ~ legitimacy.

The only difference between a fake news story and a real news story that you can rely on is that the events in the real news story actually took place. Obviously there is no way to determine that by looking at the text itself.

Yes, at present the fake news may be written more colorfully or poorly. Obviously if you filter on that difference, it will go away.

How do you personally tell if a news story is suspicious? The publication it originated in, the places where it gets syndicated, shared, and re-posted, the style of the writing, and how sensational the content is. Authors that specialize in writing fake news stories will also have an identifiable individual writing style. There are a lot of signals you can use to classify news as fake or real, and that is before going to databases like Snopes.

This is IMO a much easier problem than a lot of the NLP work for sentiment analysis and other marketing stuff that is working or being funded today. The problem is not technical, the problem is that fake news is profitable.

Suspicious, sure, but that's moving the goalposts. And all of these signals exist at present, but as soon as Facebook starts suppressing posts based on machine classification then obviously fake news publishers will adapt and it won't work anymore. The only reliable identifying factor of fake news is that it reports facts that aren't. This obviously cannot be detected by text analysis. People who are suggesting technical solutions just haven't thought past the very first step in the dance.

To speculate, perhaps part of it a lack of respect for the hard work of real journalism, education, and geniune political dialogue, so the fantasy of surfacing all the crap from social media and then extracting the ground truth with a magical algorithm appeals to some people despite being a completely hopeless idea.

What you're actually arguing for is the negative twin of today's filter bubble effect. Algorithms already prioritize things you'll like, but now that the SV elite is shocked (shocked!) by how that worked out, there is a crisis of fake conscience. Obviously the solution is to also filter out the things that you'll think are fake. Or the things that "look fake" to Facebook's algorithm. It's concerning to me that the relatively intelligent folks here could be taking this at all seriously.

> And all of these signals exist at present, but as soon as Facebook starts suppressing posts based on machine classification then obviously fake news publishers will adapt and it won't work anymore. The only reliable identifying factor of fake news is that it reports facts that aren't.

Replace "news" with "email" and your argument remains the same. But spam filtering is working and working well right now with less signals to classify on.

> To speculate, perhaps part of it a lack of respect for the hard work of real journalism, education, and geniune political dialogue, so the fantasy of surfacing all the crap from social media and then extracting the ground truth with a magical algorithm appeals to some people despite being a completely hopeless idea.

Why are you ranting about synthesizing real news from social media? The problem I specifically mentioned was identifying fake news articles.

> What you're actually arguing for is the negative twin of today's filter bubble effect.

If you do not understand the difference between recommendation and classification you should not be arguing right now. It is a subtle and important distinction. Your argument is about as subtle as "computers can't solve it!"

> It's concerning to me that the relatively intelligent folks here could be taking this at all seriously.

In what substantive way is "fake news trying to get you to vote for a particular politician" different from "fake email trying to get you to buy fake pills"?

Indeed, "computers can't solve it". Software cannot replace fact checking.

> In what substantive way is "fake news trying to get you to vote for a particular politician" different from "fake email trying to get you to buy fake pills"?

You don't normally get ham email asking you to buy pills, do you? But you read and share news that has an ideological perspective all the time.

Again, the only reliable distinction between true and false news is whether it actually happened. By definition this is not to be found by looking at the text alone.

Let me give you a concrete example of a hypothetical pair of fake and real news items. You can tell me how your classifier would fare distinguishing them.

Real news item:

Pope calls Trump "not Christian"

Fake news item:

Pope calls Trump "not Christian"

The difference, of course, is that the real news item is published the day after this actually happened and the fake news item can be published at any time, and is easier to write.

Let me give you another example. There have been reports of hate crimes following the election. There have been claims that some of these reports are fabricated.

So I give you two articles:

Article A: Chanting Trump Slogans, Mob Assaults Local Man

Article B: Assault Story "Made Up", Local Man Admits

Now, tell me again about your algorithm.

AI has not advanced to the point where it can go out into the real world and verify whether or not events actually took place.

It is not hard to see some statement about or purportedly by an organization, government office, or celebrity and then call the organization, government office, or celebrity media contact to verify that information. Anonymous sources are protected by journalists and in that case you will have to have a trust metric for the journalist writing the story.

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."

~ William Casey, CIA Director

Link? Or is this 78.3% of statistics on internet quotes are made up?

The discussion by the source of the quote is worth a read (in the comment thread): https://www.quora.com/Did-William-Casey-CIA-Director-really-...

> Though not explicitly said at that time, it was made clear in other contexts during my two years in the West Wing in the highest level meetings that the pretext for this mentality was the claim that in a Cold War era when communications were essentially instantaneous, the vast majority of "the enemy's" - then the Soviet Union's - "intelligence" was also based on open press and media sources, so the most efficient way to lie to the Soviets was to lie in the U.S. and allied media, which meant the American public believing the lies was considered a kind of 'collateral damage.' (Barbara Honegger)

All Cretans are liars.

My brain hurts.

> What can we do? Upvotes/downvotes? Won't work at scale, because likes/shares have a connotation of legitimacy.

I think you just explained some very popular subreddits, in addition to a lot of the extreme political fake-news issues on facebook.

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