Facebook Must Really Suck At Machine Learning
blog.eladgil.com
blog.eladgil.com
Better for them to feign ignorance and lie to themselves.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
(a) fake
(b) it is rather obvious what the truth is
I'm not saying this is the level the MSM has dropped to, but it most certainly is where it's going.
I'd also like to say that this is what's happening to large media worldwide, and is in fact being used to marginalize the victims of the current economic climate.
Exactly what leftists SHOULD NOT do, if anything they should err on the side of the poor.
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/14/opinions/america-doing-bet... (and 1000s other articles)
vs
http://www.wsj.com/articles/election-2016-is-propelled-by-th...
and the "fake news" version of it
https://www.videoblocks.com/video/detroit-ghetto-driving-1-d...
Now read the Hillary articles again, assuming you 100% believe the above links and what they mean about the MSM. I think you'll understand better what is happening.
Frankly the MSM lies about economic facts that are very much in the face of a hell of a lot of people, and that causes people to not trust them anymore. This seems natural, and ... censorship of fake news will make this worse, not better (or better put: I have enough Russian friends and stories from them certainly indicate it will).
But as someone who regularly visits Middle/Eastern Europe but does not live there I see the same thing. I read the newspapers and ... I just don't believe them. The difference with the country I see when visiting is too great. Online fora, filled with locals are easy to find and while filtering absolutely is a necessity, they are generally telling the truth. There are areas where it is worse, e.g. immigrants (and whether or not a particular town was seriously damaged/looted during a "protest" march), but it is certainly true in general. And yes, these fora do not put forward the view the American left has of the world. They don't like immigrants (too many stories of looting, extremely poor work ethic, attacks, criminal behavior, ... combined with stories of the government working against the victims. It is extremely hard to not believe all of them when you've had 2 friends tell you one. In confidence, because they were afraid of retaliation at work.
I think that's one thing people don't realize. The main fake news, in terms of reach, are sites like reddit, and it's country-local alternatives.
But the story goes like this: they had rented a "work" apartment, a place to sleep close to work for during the week, avoiding a commute after a long day at work. Work is in the middle of the capital city, surrounded by immigrant neighborhoods, so this apartment was in an immigrant neighborhood. They got constantly treated very unfriendly in the hallways, but that, they can take. One day a few obviously muslim youth stormed in, speaking French, screaming to eachother how it's their right to rob kuffar (arabic word meaning infidel in the sense of non-muslim, or cockroach), lots of screaming, obviously high. They broke the tv they were stealing, and beat my friend and his colleague in revenge for that. They had guns, took several macbooks, their cell phones and wallets, beat them up, and took their time to smash up the place. At the hospital they could not see a police officer, they knew where the police office was in the hospital, but there was no-one there that wanted to see them, so they went to the police station 2 days later. The police refused to take down a complaint ... They reported it at work and a director called them in that they were not to talk about it or they'd "face consequences", as those assholes say. Why ? Because nothing good could come of this. Either the story dies and they'll be frustrated, or the story gets attention ... and, the director felt, city hall would be mad, and there might even be an attack on the hospital in revenge for the story. And just so we're clear, I know these people. This happened, in the sense that I know one of the 2 people this happened to.
Now this is one data point, and I get it, it's not like crime is new to that part of town (violent crime like that is, though, pickpocketing is what it used to be). It's the reaction to it that makes me believe a lot of far right nuttery. If you read the newspapers, you'd think this was a harmonious neighborhood with everyone living together peacefully. Regular initiatives and public displays about how integrated everyone is, but, and this is important, a drive through it will make it incredibly obvious that there is exactly one ethnic group living there, or if others are living there, they're certainly not willing to show their faces on the street. The neighborhood has a reputation that women cannot go there and you should, under no circumstances, take your girlfriend there, but as a man you can eat there, eat well, and cheap (and there's lots of businesses where one might work nearby, including a huge hospital), but don't take expensive phones or a wallet with either your ID or more money than you'd need to eat. There are no businesses, not a single one, that is owned by anyone from even a slightly different ethnic group.
So it's only those two options? It's not possible that the polling was just flawed or wrong but it's they can't pay them (implying they have shit statisticians) or they lied?
Not a fan of most of the media but come on there are more options here. It was a tough election to predict. Bringing in two, fairly unpopular candidates is going to create some interesting results.
The implication was that they fudged their data to make a candidate look better. Clearly they have the money to pay for the poll and statisticians.
The more I think about the more it is seems one of the reason for the loss was this overconfidence. News channels were often way too happy to put up a map with Hillary in the 400+ points and the whole map being blue. They believed that would just discourage those voting for Trump to show up. In their it was a terrible blunder (or win depending who you support), in the end more people who would have voted for the Democrats stayed home.
Bill's advice to put effort into was ridiculed.
Russ Feingold, who was as far as I know honestly expected to win his election for Senator (note he'd just lost the seat 6 years earlier in the off-season 2010 Republican langslide), desperately asked for help towards the end of the campaign and was ignored.
It's been reported that a computer system named Ada was driving pretty much all these sorts of decisions, and it said the Rust Belt was safe.
And there are some other things I think I'm forgetting this early in the morning, anyway, just how wrong this was is demonstrated by how close Minnesota ended up. If Team Trump had realized the opportunity there earlier and put more resources into it, he might well have won it. That that Democratic (well, DFL) bastion was in play....
Take a look at the open source election models. They all make similar mistakes in that they don't properly propergate sources of errors from polls into their prediction. 538 did a good job but was criticised for it.
I don't think you need a conspiracy when simple incompetent will do.
Note it was not just a small mistake. They presented Hillary having a massive landslide, and instead she delivered the worst Democratic performance in 20 years.
Something doesn't add up...
Where do you think they "lied?" Even simple poll averages showed Hillary was ahead.
I'm willing to admit that they overestimated the chances of a Clinton victory. Nate Silver's 60% was a lot more realistic than the 90% the NYT was pushing. But having a poor prediction model is a lot different than falsely reporting the past.
More importantly, it's totally incoherent. If the MSM was tilting their model to try to get Hillary elected, the worst thing they could do would be to present it as a sure thing (depressing turnout).
Also, for the record, Clinton won the popular vote. So the polls got the popular vote percentage right.
State polls were a lot more noisy and infrequent—it's not that surprising that there was a polling miss.
Sorry. Didn't know you heard this before. Yeah the argument is misguided perhaps, but "incredibly stupid"? I don't know, I think you're being a bit harsh.
> Where do you think they "lied?"
They lied who they polled and how they fudged the results
> Incorrectly forecasting the future is a far cry from incorrectly reporting facts.
It is not far cry. This is one organization which has lost its credibility because it routinely lied and misconstrued facts, cheated during debates. I don't see as suspicious that they fudged the models to make her look good as "incredibly stupid", but again you have your opinion, so that's cool.
> More importantly, it's totally incoherent.
Sometimes maliciousness and coherency doesn't go together. Again, I would say it might be "mildly incoherent" but not "totally". You can just as well say they wanted her to look good to discourage anyone voting for the other candidate, which indeed jives with the rest of the rhetoric.
> Also, for the record, Clinton won the popular vote. So the polls got the popular vote percentage right.
What does that have to do with anything? Are you saying, she is a top experienced politician, lawyer, with a stellar team of experts, media behind her back, President, DNC, may large corporate donors and she didn't know that she had to win electoral college votes and just got a little confused?
> State polls were a lot more noisy and infrequent—it's not that surprising that there was a polling miss.
Somehow the "idiot" Trump managed to poll in the right states at the right time make Hillary deliver the worst Democratic election results in more than 20 years. If a dummy can do it, surely it was possible to poll properly.
Care to provide evidence that dozens of independent pollsters all colluded to fudge results?
> It is not far cry.
Yes it is. Do you really not see the difference between me saying "it's raining outside" (when it's not) and saying "I think it's going to rain tomorrow" (and it doesn't).
> What does that have to do with anything?
It has a lot to do with it. The primary input into most forecasting models was national polling data. And national polls ended up being correct: Clinton won the national popular vote.
I'm not sure why you think Trump managed to poll better than the media. He spent months railing about how the election was rigged and he might not accept the result—if he was convinced he'd win, he wouldn't be wasting effort on that.
You're not even mentioning betting markets. Do you think thousands of independent people bet money in order to incorrectly portray Clinton as having a lead?
If you want to assert a global conspiracy to subvert reality, please bring data.
Not if your job is to predict rain and you somehow completely missed the that there's going to be a massive rain-storm. And you also happened to own a company which sells umbrellas on the street corner.
> It has a lot to do with it.
Well, ok, I take it back. It has a lot to do with them failing to predict it because they relied on the popular vote.
> Care to provide evidence that dozens of independent pollsters all colluded to fudge results?
I didn't say they colluded. They fudged their models by being in denial and wanting to see a certain candidate win. Someone doing it as a hobby is understandable. But when they are paid a pretty penny for it, then it borders into dishonesty.
All actors doing the same thing doesn't imply it is a cabal and they all colluding. They simply have to have the same incentives.
Surprisingly one of the polls that does measure enthusiasm the Daybreak poll from USC did predict a win for Trump http://cesrusc.org/election/
> Do you think thousands of independent people bet money in order to incorrectly portray Clinton as having a lead?
The probably took the cue from the media.
> He spent months railing about how the election was rigged and he might not accept the result—if he was convinced he'd win, he wouldn't be wasting effort on that.
But wasn't that a much better strategy, as overconfidence lead to people staying home. That idea is probably not novel to him or his team!
We've all heard how dumb he is, yet somehow he knew exactly which states to go to, doing up to 6 speeches a day, in seemingly just at the right places. He got lucky a few times, maybe in primaries, but he seems to keep getting lucky consistently.
> If you want to assert a global conspiracy to subvert reality, please bring data.
Would you say reality was subverted already? We have a TV personality as a President. This is the stuff they put in comic books. Conspiracy here is called overconfidence, cockiness and complacency. That's the conspiracy. We can make fun of and call Trump supporters names as much as we want. But in the end Hillary had a very expensive gun (the media) and she went ahead and shot herself in the foot with it. I think that is one of the primary reason people didn't vote -- they saw the map with 400+ electoral college votes in her favor and 1% chance for Trump to win. But in the end it is those pesky KGB agents and Fake News that we are blaming... The more we blame them. The more Trump will keep winning.
Elections don't happen that often... so it's just a comparison against fellow losers Gore and Kerry.
And Kerry lost by both the popular vote and the electoral vote.
Oh, wow, here's a Wikipedia article worth looking at, "Historical polling for U.S. Presidential elections": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_polling_for_U.S._Pr...
Some, though not the best regarded, gave a Clinton victory a very high probability, largely because they modelled state-level variability as independent rather than highly correlated, an error that 538 called out explicitly.
Yeah I don't know the answer, what the mistake was. I'd want to know. I suspect some never responded or wanted to participate. Those who participated, said they'd vote for someone else but changed their mind. They used registered phone numbers and some people more consistently paid to have their number de-listed...
I mean, this election was used as an opportunity to mount a successful coup ousting its founder, who'd, BTW, announced a couple of years ago that the network was moving to the left anyway....
Edit: admittedly, that was Huffington Post, hardly a standard for good journalism. E.g. NYT had 80%, 1 wrong in 20 years, which is still quite optimistic IMO.
Related to the broader topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule#Proper_scoring_ru...
It's mostly unsubstantiated claims, without scientific rigor to back them up (ex: they cite papers but misrepresent the findings), and heavily mixed with personal opinion. Breitbart may have been right about the election, but that doesn't really seem to be because the website is dedicated to clear objective journalism... Wouldn't you agree?
Sounds like pretty much any non-scientific media citing scientific articles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_Wtu8Pzvd4
>“Also interesting is, remember, it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents. It’s different for the media. So everything you learn about this, you’re learning from us.”
CNN has yet to apologize for, or even retract, this.
Where is the outrage at all of these "real news" outlets coordinating their messaging with the DNC? Where is the shock at them asking the DNC for questions to pose to Trump? Or the concern that Hillary Clinton was given multiple debate questions by a CNN employee?
The simple fact is that almost all media is propaganda. Depending on anyone, or anything, to protect you from "fake news" is laughable.
The 'fake news' thing, the 'troll' thing before that, the 'political spam' thing before that: these are attempts to prevent the manifestations of credible alternatives that can attract funding, challenge the doctrinal ideology espoused by the network of media, or further disrupt the reputation of the current infrastructure for engaging in public diplomacy.
Maybe that's a more popular trend now? Having been active on HN for a long time and watched it evolve I guess I could see that...
Anyway, the branch of the conversation has gotten quite deep down the 'meta' rabbithole.
My hope is that now that it has become very noticeable in the US maybe they'll do something about it, but it's entirely possible they do nothing for the reasons you said.
And that's the problem. The people who make up this stuff can see when it's being shared, and commented on, and what resonates most with people. They can write up the perfect crazy story for my Mom and Uncle to talk about like they have done for the past 60 years.
I can go in and say this is fake, don't believe anything you read from this website or facebook page, and sometimes they'll believe me. But that doesn't stop the content from flooding in.
The only thing I can think of is getting people to stop using Facebook altogether.
We haven't really figured out how to address these issues. The best we've got now is an initiative by Metro called Viralgranskaren (~"viral post inspector") that debunks myths like these. [1] What I think needs to happen is for the education system to start putting a larger emphasis on skepticism and source criticism. These skills and qualities are crucial for a 21th century liberal democracy.
[0]: http://www.snopes.com/sweden-bans-christmas-lights/
[1]: http://www.metro.se/nyheter/viralgranskaren/ (sadly only available in Swedish, it seems)
http://gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-und...
Yeah, fine line between fake news and something that is just extremely slanted.
where that ridiculous stuff about the podesta "spirit dinner" fall?
Where does something like this
https://fellowshipoftheminds.com/2016/10/22/wikileaks-podest...
fall? It's based on an email, but the content is, IMO, pretty low quality. It talks about unrelated things, and ignores context to portray a skewed version of facts.
Despite that, you could argue that yes it is a fact based news source and should be allowed.
I believe that's one of the things that gave all this traction, something is seriously wrong here, even if it's just a few sick souls. One of whom just happened to be the chairman of Hillary's campaign.
If you believe the Clinton Machine is evil, and you're open to supernatural explanations for evil (I myself am not willing to rule them out), well, we can go so far as demonic possession, that's straight out of the New Testament, Jesus driving demons out of people.
Even look in this comment thread. You have people insisting that Breitbart is a highly reputable site (that just happens to promulgate far-right conspiracy theories) while mainstream news is supposedly "fake" because they incorrectly forecast an election.
Or do you think it's a coincidence the "fake news" story only broke after the "non-fake" media lost the election, not before while they were still very confident they'd win?
Don't pretend that your comment history doesn't display a clear Trump bias.
There might be some difficult cases at the margin, but lots of fake news is very easy to spot. No, ISIS was not founded by Clinton. No, Obama is not instituting Sharia law. No, George Soros is not hacking voting machines.
> Or do you think it's a coincidence the "fake news" story only broke after the "non-fake" media lost the election, not before while they were still very confident they'd win?
No, I don't think it's a coincidence. It seems very natural that new events would shine an event on existing trends. Or perhaps do you think that Islamic terrorism only began on 9/11, or that mortgage fraud began in 2008?
Though I might disagree with yummyfajitas on things, he at least brings data and arguments to back up his claims instead of just asserting that the MSM is obviously fake and biased.
So instituting censorship (since you agree there is a bias in your previous paragraphs) to affect the outcome of an election is:
1) acceptable
2) you DO realize the keys to the kingdom will be handed off to Trump, Pence and Steve Bannon, right ? Really think about what you're doing here. You're mounting a bigger gun on a tank that will be driven by Trump. Do you seriously not realize who it'll be firing at ?
But clearly you think things like censorship are acceptable as long as you agree with them. Hell, it seems the entire democratic establishment agrees with it. Why ? Just to not offend Hillary Clinton ? Fuck that.
Trump won because he showcased the ugly side of the democratic party and Hillary Clinton in particular, quite successfully. And what is being done in response ? Dig deeper. Of course the issue MUST be that they're being shown in the wrong light by "fake" articles. Even if that actually is the issue you should still assume it's not.
I would love it if this whole nonsense stopped, and some serious introspection would be done instead. How about we declare that Middle America's white supremacy fringe is about as offensive as Islam's sharia laws, that underwear toting rednecks with guns are pretty much the same thing as child-raping muslim "revolutionaries", and should be ignored and marginalized WITHOUT marginalizing the entire population there, and since they are having a hugely difficult time, they deserve the same protection and help and state action that minorities get (they are, by the way, a minority) ?
Now THAT would help the next president to be democratic. THAT is what we should do.
To make it unequivocally clear: no, I do not think the government should be in the business of censoring news (fake or not).
Most take offence at Obama defending muslims and sharia law, voluntary application of sharia law that is, after Newt Gingrich's call for mass-deportation. They do not claim Obama said anything he didn't say. Obama was very political, leaving out any actual controversial statement.
So I don't think, on the whole, that your statement is fair. These articles mostly lack quality, so they're easy to attack. They're not wrong, in a strict sense. Clickbaity, spammy, unpleasant, even misleading ... yes. Wrong, no.
And I have no trouble whatsoever finding all those properties in articles linked from the homepages of CNN, MSN, ... especially in the business and science sections. And I have to say, I am against Trump, but most of the frontpage stuff I would agree if anyone said half of them were hit pieces.
Also, why not use a white list that includes outlets that sizable portions of facebook's user base seem to think are reliable? For example, include breitbart.com and motherjones.com, but exclude .tumblr.com and .wordpress.com.
for example, say i am a hillary fan, and i say to another hillary fan "hillary is a criminal" as a way to mock people who say that. will facebook know when something is insincere and in jest?
How much of the hoopla around Sessions is "fake"?
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/googles-top-search-result-for-fi...
I have some problem with those claims that offer little to none details. Use the above link as an example, how do we teach machine to verify this news? First, we need to teach them to formulate a question, in this case, 'Who has a larger number of popular vote [as of now]?', then it needs to find its way to verify the number from reliable sources, possibly need to struggle between conflicted sources as well.
This is no trivial, if we solve this, we might as well solve the problem of understanding human language as a whole.
The mentioning of Princeton students' Hackthon project is really offbeat, if the author really bothers to look into what that project actually is, nothing more than an API mashup.
https://github.com/anantdgoel/HackPrincetonF16/blob/master/b...
Disclaimer: I worked for a major news app, and the effort to battle fake news or low quality non-trustworthy news is ever growing. While application of machine learning is promising, human, especially experienced human is still the real workhorse for this problem
Edit: Typo.
Look at the source. 70news.wordpress.com should not be at the top of anybody's list of reliable news sources.
Look at the topic (e.g. from simple keywords). Look at the references (urls) mentioned in the article. Look at the timeliness.
There is plenty of information available to machine learning algorithms, without even needing to touch the natural language aspect.
That's the only thing you can focus on. Why should someone be punished and labeled as fake if they're on a wordpress.com subdomain? Domain is just out, even spammy or weird looking domains may end up being popular / culturally fit. You would be preventing good journalistic folks from having any type of reach if you want to test against domains names, something that arguable may go away as far as the user is concerned in the next decade.
I'm unconvinced there is anything but content that you can really go off of. Keywords are not even used in search results, why would they determine news legitimacy? Even references are not always useful.
Because metadata can be super useful in making inferences about page quality. Pagerank exploited this idea a ton. If wordpress subdomains are more likely fake in a training corpus, then that piece of evidence should be counted.
i don't know about "labeled as fake", exactly, but it's possible that quickly and easily acquired urls (such as a wordpress subdomain) may display a different amount of reliability (per whatever heuristic) in comparison with various established urls.
I'm surprised Google messed it up so badly. Was 70news manipulated to the top of the results page, or did their ranking algorithm totally screw up a simple query? Neither makes much sense.
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/10/16/m...
This is not 'fake' news, in a literal sense, because it just says someone is about to release something about Clinton. But for some people, this news could simply be seen as an indictment. Can we claim it is fake in that sense? As I have said above, it is equally controversial to penalize such websites for editorialization, because find story out of non-story is how most news agencies makes money and they have incentive to do this. Blame modern media and journalism for this.
In the end, using one simple algorithm to battle this is kinda of naive, not because it won't work for simple cases, but it fails to cover corner cases. In such scenario, human judgement is still crucial.
I agree that it doesn't cover corner cases, but why should it? If an algorithm knocks out 90% of the crap (like 70news.wordpress.com), there's much less work for the humans.
Also, wow, I didn't know Breitbart was quite that nutty. It reminds me of that LBJ quip along the lines of "it doesn't matter if he porks pigs or not, but now I made him deny it." This seems like a case where a human could do a bit of actual investigation, decide that the article's "Hillary is a lesbian" gist was BS, and permanently penalize Breitbart for publishing it.
"Google News Growth Hack Exposed" http://jmarbach.com/google-news-growth-hack-exposed
Facebook regularly censors and directs conversation online around the world to the whims of various regimes and administrations, but it's just not easy "use machine learning".
The issue is that machine learning is inherently modeled to solve decision problems in spaces that separate high level 'features' from low level observations. The study and practice of machine learning thus far has modeled noise, uncertainty and complex state spaces.
However, machine learning classifiers do not themselves have a concept of adversarial data: this led, for example, to spammers who would "poison" machine learning classifiers by biasing them to learn the wrong things, so that they could get their spam through. Similarly, not too long ago, Microsoft put a conversation bot on the web that 'learned the wrong things' because people approached the bot in an attempt to trick it.
Facebook's requirement for battling unsanctioned opinions is that it solves this problem - it hasn't been solved yet. Facebook needs to continuously monitor the adapting activity and patterns of people who are trying to say things that governments and Facebook customers don't want people saying.
Basically: machine learning doesn't adapt but people do, and naive attempts to get machine learning to adapt make it vulnerable to being tricked, because classifier theory inherently has no concept of adversarial data.
It's important to understand that these approaches are on the leading edge of research, and represent unsolved problems!
I also really recommend this book https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulato...
The type of attack is a lot more oldschool but nonetheless, pretty effective.
Snopes published an article yesterday asking that asks the question more clearly:
There is much bad news in the online world, but not all of it is "fake" (i.e., completely fabricated information that has little or no intersection with real-world events). There are also partisan political sites that take nuggets of real news and spin them into highly distorted, clickbait articles. There are sites that misleadingly repackage old news as if it were current information. There are sites that aggregate articles from a variety of dubious and questionable sources. There are sites (especially in the fields of health and science) that believe they're presenting pertinent information but are woefully inaccurate in their information-gathering and reporting. These forms of news are all bad in one way or another, but broadly classifying all such information as "fake news" clouds an already confusing issue.
http://www.snopes.com/2016/11/17/we-have-a-bad-news-problem-...
http://abcnews.com.co/donald-trump-protester-speaks-out-i-wa...
Google is probably just as easy to fool as Facebook. This was the first hit on a search for "protesters paid to protest", a story that is demonstrably fake: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11...
Immediate red flags should be: This isn't ABC News's website. There are statements in the article like: "No one still has an AOL email address except people that would vote for Hillary Clinton" and from a made up Trump supporter quoted saying "I knew those weren’t real protesters, they were too organized and smart..." and (awesomely) "I think I was paid more than the other protesters because I was white and had taken classes in street fighting and boxing a few years back".
I mean, this may well be parody, but it gets picked up as real news and he's making real money off it, impersonating a real news site, which is the point at which it cross the line from parody to fake, IMO.
I think the trick with a machine learning approach to identifying these sites is not letting the model fixate on particular words (e.g. Obama or Moon Landing could be terms with the right dataset; though if they occur together maybe that's a good indicator after all...)
"May well be" is being unnecessarily conservative. Maybe you didn't make it far enough into the article to read the faked interview with the author of the the Snope's article I posted:
David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes.com, a website known for its biased opinions and inaccurate information they write about stories on the internet in order to generate advertising revenue, told ABC News that he approves of what a story like this is accomplishing.
“You have to understand that when a story like this goes viral, and we spend a minute or two debunking it, we make lots of money. Stories like this have helped put my children through college, buy a new car, a home and even get the Silverback gorilla my wife Barbara always wanted since she was a child,” Mikkleson said.
Buried, but actually rather funny. In a way, this is both a fabulous and a terrible example. Read in its entirety, it's clearly satire. Yet I'm sure that many people never read it closely enough to notice.
Should Facebook be censoring this? No. Should they be labelling it? Yeah, it might be a good idea. Is this the sort of story that the author is referring to? I don't know, but it would be nice if he'd tell us explicitly.
One things I don't get, though, is why so many organizations destroyed whatever credibility they had remaining in a futile attempt to win this election for their preferred candidate, I mean, this was an "it's my turn" race, a bit like Dole in 1996 and Romney in 2012. Especially prior to Trump winning the Republican nomination, was it really that important?
Note that this goes all the way to the DNC for the party itself....
How hard a concept is this, really?
Real news is saying that Trump wants to address immigration by building a wall. People may disagree about what that means, but it's still a true story.
The discussion is about the definition of "real news".
Two very different things.
Nowadays "the news" also includes:
1. What someone says might be happening right now.
2. What someone says about something that happened, or which might be happening right now.
3. What someone thinks might happen next.
None of which are necessarily true or grounded in fact but all of which are valued by the media in the race to be first with the headlines.
So perhaps "real news" could be defined as "events which have occurred and for which we have objective proof" and everything else is just "editorial".
IOW, this is very similar to a problem we expect companies to be able to solve: identifying phishing sites.
If a site claims to be ABC News, a known media entity, and it clearly is not, I'd argue anything posted on it should be considered fake.
http://www.denverpost.com/2016/11/05/there-is-no-such-thing-...
Define "news" as probabilistic statement of an event.
Define "real news" as news with probability > e, where e is some chosen threshold value.
Fake news is popular. And the entire social economy is based on facilitating that which is popular. Because the more eyes you can drive to your content the more advertising you can sell.
While Google vilifies the website for making the fake news, they also profited by selling the AdWords those sites hosted. While Facebook says it's difficult to distinguish legitimate news from fake news, they make more money from the frequently shared fake news than the less popular real news.
The conflation of article content with advertising gives the advertising brokers a disincentive to prevent fake articles. Until readers stop clicking on the fake stories, but one glance at a typical supermarket checkout aisle will tell you that isn't going to happen. If Google or Facebook are serious about not encouraging fake news they will stop using the content of a webpage to drive the price of ads. But that obviously isn't going to happen as targeted advertising is their raison d'etre.
TLDR, Facebook has met the enemy, and he is Facebook.
Google News seems to have something in place with the "Interested in? / Not interested" underneath some story abstracts.
The Information is an unpopular, I think even blacklisted, news source here due to their paywall. But they do a really great job writing a very terse and high signal two-sentence takeaway for each article. I'm not a subscriber anymore (too pricy IMO), but here are some recent examples:
Surge-Price Builder Leaves Uber By Amir Efrati · Monday Oct 17, 2016
> THE TAKEAWAY: One of Uber’s secret weapons in recent years was an economics professor, Keith Chen. He overhauled Uber’s surge-price algorithm and made other key contributions that helped riders, and Uber, save money.
How Dropbox Doubled Down on Business Market By Steve Nellis · Thursday Sep 15, 2016
> THE TAKEAWAY: Dropbox founder Drew Houston has come to terms with the fact that his company probably isn’t the next consumer tech giant like Facebook or Google. That was reflected in a decision halfway through last year to sharpen the company’s focus on the business market, including shutting off consumer-focused apps like Carousel.
I would love to have that for all tech news.
There are ML systems out there for summarization. I wonder how long until the systems are good enough to provide this as well. The examples I've seen (e.g., Summly, which uses SRI tech, IIRC), are likely good enough if you just want the facts. I still want it to be well-written.
Ouch. I just checked out the subscription rates for The Information. AFAICT, you can't even see the rates without supplying your name and email address. :/
Edit to add: From other sources on the internet, it looks like subscription rates are $399/year.
I do remember the rates being hard to find as well: $39/month or $399/annual [1]. They do offer you half-price initially etc for a few months.
I suppose what I meant is technically not microtransactions (mostly just used in the context of in-app purchases) but micropayments [1]. I've added ko-fi [2] to my personal site but no one has actually done it yet.
they rewrite all the headlines to get rid of clickbait nonsense and actually save you the click in some cases if their summary is enough.
I want and will pay for a news service which only reports facts (no opinions) and which is concerned with accuracy. There are specialty services that provide this in certain niche areas, but no general service.
They leave the fact-check to the publisher and ask them to use http://pending.schema.org/ClaimReview schema to tag news as fact-checked.
Already in use by some publications. Announced almost a month before the election day (Oct 13).
I think we will eventually get to a point where we can flag potentially fake news. But were still a few years away with our current technology.
There has been a large amount of successful research using neural networks to classify human behaviors (facial expressions, lip reading, etc.)
Is it possible to create a system to act as a high quality lie detector?
Such software could be a poweful tool in studying crime, politics and business.
It's very blurred indeed.
What would probably help is extracting list of (main) statements/assumptions made and give them fact-probability score (ideally with references) - and show it to people.
But this is not trivial exercise, is it?
I mean, once we have technology that's good in doing it, well... it means we can probably rely on this AI to make 80% of decisions to run the country.