Show HN: Stop the Bullshit | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Stop the Bullshit

github.com

69 pointsjnotarstefano103 comments

I find it fascinating how paternalistic this whole topic is, and "Stop the Bullshit" is part of this. The goal is not developing independent thinkers, but merely ensuring that blind trust is given to the "enlightened people".

The whole idea behind this sort of filtering and vetting is not about teaching people how better to reason about the world and judging the truth of those that would tell you what is happening and why, but rather it says that most people are incapable of making those types of decisions for themselves and that an informed elite should be in control of what information is available to the plebs. Once you concede this, how far is it before we make "fake news", or rather unapproved news, simply illegal? How long until news simply becomes propaganda?

There absolutely is a problem with "fake news" from all quarters and it is nothing new at all: whether that was "bat boy" at the grocery checkout, the sinking of the Maine, or the news and characterizations during the recent campaign. "Stop the Bullshit" and filtering efforts is not a solution to the problem, merely the creation of new problems such an even less thoughtful populous and a new set of arbiters of the truth that I for one won't trust any more that the current ones.

Very nice project, I will definitely be using it and will try to contribute in my spare time.

One recommendation I'd have is not to use the word 'safety' in this context, it feels kind of overprotective. Perhaps the link should read "Take me back to reality" instead?

I like "reality" : )

I chose "safety" because I think I copied Chrome's message when visiting a website with an invalid certificate.

There have been a lot of these projects lately. It's clever, but I am not close to being convinced that fake news is a problem that we can engineer our way out of.

Exactly this. You are just abstracting the decision about "truth" to another set of observers.

Every crowdsourced news aggregation site faces the same challenge, too. Digg had serious vote manipulation problems. Reddit's /r/politics section was overrun by pro-Clinton activists, etc. Concerted, concentrated effort can almost always overpower the consensus of average users.

EDIT: to be clear, my point is that if/when this becomes a powerful tool, the incentive to aim it at a broader or different set of goals is overwhelming.

Tools for analyzing information can work, but they need to help the person using them make their own judgements, rather than delegate the whole process to some third party or opaque model/algorithm.

This is the same basic difference that you can see between good and bad science lectures in schools. Bad lectures give students a bunch of formulas they have to trust and memorize. Good lectures describe how the world works, which they can confirm through their own observations and experiments.

Anything that relies on blind trust in some curator will eventually have the exact same problems news most media has right now.

These aren't crowdsourced news aggregator sites. These are webspam sites, spun the same way any other webspam site is spun (with scripts and templates). The only thing that makes them interesting is that their payload is 1-2 carefully produced political stories, not a sales call-to-action.

Fake news site are just the latest symptom of the two fold problem of anyone being able to put anything on the internet and people tending to like things that validate their existing views.

If its not news sites, its images with some text over them, videos, etc.

People need to stop using the word "fake news" as though people were seeing stories about "bat boy" in the grocery store checkout aisle and believing them. This is propaganda. It's inflammatory, it's knowingly false, and it has a political agenda. It's propaganda.

I'd challenge you to name one news site that doesn't have a political agenda. Everything is "propaganda", including your comment, and mine.

edit: if you're going to down-vote something which is plainly constructive and well thought-out, you should try to articulate a response.

[1] propaganda, noun, derogatory: information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.

His comment is claiming that fake political news should be distinguished from the fake tabloid style news (bigfoot sightings/alien abduction/etc. that we've become accustomed to in the grocery store checkout aisle). The former is propaganda, the latter is not.

This distinction is correct, in terms of everyday usage of the word.

Your claim that "everything is propaganda" is plainly false. An author having a political agenda is not sufficient to render an article propaganda. This would be similar to claiming that every article written by someone with sexual desire is "pornography." It's plainly ridiculous, unless you are operationally defining "pornography" to mean something other than it does in everyday written English.

Things that are propaganda:

1. fake news stories disseminated with the express intent of influencing elections, which are known to be false by the author of the article / editor of the publication / etc.

Things that are not propaganda:

1. stories about bat children in supermarket tabloids

2. your comments

Things that might be propaganda:

1. fake news stories about political figures that appear in tabloids that also produce bat-child news (the article is false, the article might publicize and promote a political cause, but it isn't clear that it is a tool deliberately crafted to do that). What would clearly be propaganda in this situation though, would be a liberal/conservative/etc. spin site republishing a fake tabloid news story about Clinton/Trump that they must in good faith know is false).

[1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/propaganda

This is a fundamentally intellectually dishonest argument. There is a difference between making an argument with an agenda, even reporting news with an agenda, and propaganda. You can't just wash everything in shades of gray and shrug while saying "who knows what is truth? or what is false? oh well, guess we'll never know". Truth exists, and it is possible to determine what is true and what is not. Propaganda is passing off knowingly false reports in order to advance a political goal. It's a real thing, which is why there's a word that people created to describe it. Pretending that it's not propaganda has as much claim to legitimacy as any other news is not only wrong it's incredibly dangerous.

"The sky is blue."

That statement isn't untrue, it is objectively observation with one's eyes or using spectrometers in the case of an individual who is colorblind. It isn't binary, statements can be rated on a range of truthfulness from false propaganda to very objective...and, arguments that are isomorphisms of "all sides do it" are harmful because they essentially justify parties who benefit from such propaganda.

That the Earth's average temperature has been rising is also not untrue and can also be observed and measured. Yet it is often denied in political context, e.g. Sen. Jim Inhofe brought a snowball into the Senate as evidence to the contrary.

"The sky is blue" is a non-political statement only because no one stands to make money convincing people otherwise.

I kind of lumped "non-propaganda" with "demonstrably true" which you are right about. A true statement becomes propaganda when spoken at certain times especially when communicated while omitting related details. I think the general point still applies, it isn't binary, some statements aren't propaganda at all, while some have some mixed in, and some are fully propaganda. On the continuum, I'd rate the statements under consideration from least propaganda-ish to most as

   "sky is blue" < "here's a snowball"
                 < "avg temperature of Earth's surface is rising"
                 ~ "${average_comment_on_HN}"
                 << "This snowball demonstrates climate change is a hoax"
                 < "${fake_news_articles}"

Is is fair to put "${random_comments_on_HN}" in the same category as "${fake_news_articles}" because they are both "propaganda?" No.

If it at least amplifies awareness in the general public about the problem, it's done it's job.

I'd argue it could end up backfiring for multiple reasons. The most obvious one is that it will undoubtedly end up strengthening filter bubbles.

The problems that face us will not be solved by siloing ourselves away from views we disagree with. It might take more effort to filter out bullshit in our current age, but if we're not even aware of the bullshit someone else is feeding off, how are we going to combat it? We need to bring more people into public debate, not isolate them.

Counterpoint: if it provides a false sense of security, then it might have made things worse.

Also, confidence in the press is at an all time low, so there is already awareness. [1]

1. http://www.gallup.com/poll/192665/americans-confidence-newsp...

People read what they want to read. For instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning You can get rid of the fake news outlets, but you can't get rid of fake news as long as there is free speech.

Eliminating it would be an overly ambitious goal. We only need to mitigate its effects.

Isn't that exactly what the fake news sites works say?

Interesting project, Is censorship the best coarse of action? Bare with me for a second, would it not be better to somehow overlay a meter or light indicating that this story is likely false. Even better, some sort of indicator that showed the # of sources (if any) and devised some sort of rating of quality/truthfulness.

I'm against all the fake news in Facebook et all but if we dont teach people to be good at detecting it we're just putting a bandaid over a broken bone so to speak. Am I being overly optimistic of society, that learning how to detect bullshit is better than doing the hard work for them?

Censorship is not the best way forward. People need to adjust (read: acquire) critical thinking skills. But let's start with the media. For example, quoting unvetted tweaks should be grounds for shaming, or worse.

In addition,it should be not that this tool can be used to apply any prejudice, bias, etc. I certainly empathize with the sentiment here but this can quickly becomes a case of be careful what you wish for.

When Google blocks cialis spam from your inbox, do you consider that censorship? Because that's what these sites are: spam.

doesn't google lable it and just put it in the spam folder?

> Bare with me for a second, would it not be better to somehow overlay a meter or light indicating that this story is likely false. Even better, some sort of indicator that showed the # of sources (if any) and devised some sort of rating of quality/truthfulness.

This is an interesting idea. Perhaps we need a public PageRank algorithm and database of pages and domains that could evolve over time. Then the browser addon could just overlay the score of the current page's public rank (and perhaps have a menu showing a list of known outside pages/domains that link to the current page/domain).

It's not censorship as long as you have to install the extension yourself.

The problem is that the bad guys are actively trying to circumvent any detection mechanism people have.

You can't teach people to be on full alert all the time.

The whole point of fakenews spam is that the effort it takes to evaluate individual stories exceeds the capacity of the reader. It's a little like asking for a "truth meter" for cialis resellers.

The analysis that shows you whether a site is fakenews or not is structural (and simple: go through the backcatalog, see if the Dalai Lama or the Pope is endorsing both Putin and Trump). Once you've accomplished that, there is no point to wasting any energy on any of the stories on the site.

I hear what you're saying about the spam/fake news. However it is not black and white. Sometimes even the 'good guys' make mistakes.

The fake news/spam thing might be straightforward. But what people are objecting to is the black list. Who decides what is one that blacklist?? That is the problem. What happens if the developer goes rogue/gets hacked/sells to a shady interest?? What happens if the developer is in favor of a certain parties biased news? Or even more insidious, what if they dont recognize their bias??

And in anticipation of the crowd sourced/decentralized argument I have heard elsewhere: lets talk about bitcoin. It is decentralized, under no one's control, right? A while back there was talk of increasing the block size to make transfers go faster. (the technical details are irrelevant, sorry if I made a mistake). One developer resigned because the other couple wouldn't make the change. Who controls bitcoin? ~4 people. This is why people are worried about blacklists.

As a side note, the book Fahrenheit 451 is super relevant right now. This is what we are scared of. FWIW, it was the only book I read in school that I remember/had an influence on me. Please read everyone! Thanks

We need to make things ridiculously simple for the users. A meter on an article showing them if its true or not will likely be ignored.

I like this approach, big, bold and in your face. We need to call out all the fake, garbage news out there.

Does anyone smart enough to install a browser plugin (much less visit GitHub) really need something to identify fake news sites?

You never know. Also, the smart enough person can install it on browsers on less smart people.

To people who believe this kind of project is "paternalistic" or that filtering out noise is somehow weak or irresponsible, I disagree.

Time is finite. It is impossible to consume all of the information that is published in the world. It's not just a little impossible: the fraction of information that an individual can consume is very near zero. Most people who have worked in an academic or scientific field know that it is impossible to consume even a fraction of the domain-specific publications in their field, much less "all the news that's fit to print."

It makes sense, therefore, to have a strategy for selecting a subset of information that one trusts as "worth considering," which might include a spam filter (just as email has, for good reason).

I personally very seldom read news articles shared online, because my experience has been that they are consistently of very low quality. Speaking for myself, I get big world event news from the Economist, which has earned some trust, and the rare nytimes/wsj article that is about something it can't possibly fuck up (anything outside the borders of the United States is generally beyond NYT/WSJ).

Would I be wrong for filtering all of the shared news articles from my feed? The only reason I keep them there is that I skim Facebook to get a feel for what people are thinking about and feeling on a given day (to stay slightly "in touch" with people, even if I think they wallow in a world of self-serving garbage information and would be better served by finding something more interesting to occupy their minds).

A better criticism of this kind of filtering might that it is intrinsically arrogant, but I don't think it is any more paternalistic or irresponsible than a spam filter for email.

How is the clustering analysis going to work?

Because the current hard coded list of URLs is a start, but it's not really a scalable solution to the issue.

However, from what I can see in this file:

https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/blob/master/d...

It just seems like it's going to compare examples of articles included in the source files, as found here:

https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/tree/master/d...

So how is it going to detect the difference between a real or fake piece from this?

Given two clusters, I can predict the class of a new article by choosing the cluster whose centroid is closest to the article.

So, given some training data that produced two reasonable clusters with respect to the ground truth, I have a model that I can expect to generalize well on new data.

Now, this is not what that notebook shows, because it's missing the evaluating on testing data! The main point of the notebook is that the Jaccard Distance of the tokens of the HTML of the page, despite being very simple, appears to generate a reasonable model.

While I like the friendly notification/explanation, any tool targeting fake news should do a little better in establishing its own credibility. You want to persuade, not block. I'm not sure the dollar amount is enough. We see it in these very comments: show the user a sample of obvious falsehoods they published. This way you could probably come up with a threshold where you just give up.

That's an excellent idea. I wrote the copy on that page trying to convey "can I get your help against these bad people?", rather than something blaming the user, or a scary looking warning.

But showing them the _reason_ why a certain website is blocked can become an opportunity to teach people critical thought, something that other comment threads point out.

I was working on something similar, but with a database that would contain credibility ratings from users and users would rate the website. The extension was supposed to display the rating and ev. warnings on top of the website.

Nice project. I may use it :)

So in other words, Web of Trust for news sites.

Sounds like an interesting concept, though it'll need some really careful moderation to stop it getting abused. I've seen sites get low WOT ratings because the staff banned a few members and said members then took it out on their WOT page.

You'll need a good way to stop these negative SEO type attacks from being weaponised against a news site's rating by its competitors.

You need a browser extension for this nowadays? Is the target audience so judgement-impaired that they can't, you know, not click on obvious clickbait and think about what they're seeing on Facebook?

> Is the target audience so judgement-impaired

As we've seen this last election, yes, they are. How else do you explain millions of shares on "news" stories that are immediately, obviously false to anyone looking past the headlines?

are we really pretending that those people would've changed their vote had they not seen the "fake" news?

I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of these shares were by people who wanted the news to be true anyway. I have friends who shared some stuff like that. they were never gonna change their vote/view. everyone else would just roll their eyes.

I'm with Zuckerberg on this one. fake news did not affect the election. people are just looking for an excuse to blame. I would love to see how many people will still be against fake news come April first

You seem to enjoy pretending that Hillary lost because of fake news and "clearly everyone else is just plain stupid" and not because she's the most corrupt politician possibly in our country's history, so why not pretend about more stuff?

Please don't post only snarky comments. We ask that HN users comment civilly and substantively or not at all.

Fake news isn't the problem. People willing to think critically is. The problem is, no one wants to know their baby is ugly. So the bury their heads in their person echo chamber.

My feeling is that people with good critical thinking skills wouldn't buy into fake news anyway so wouldn't need an app to help them and people that buy into fake news don't want to improve their critical thinking skills so wouldn't use an app to help them either. People like being surrounded by other people that agree with them.

Are there any examples of subtle fake news stories? My feeling is they're really obvious especially if not being covered by major news sites.

Define bullshit.

This will be subjective at some point beyond the BuzzFeeds of the Internet.

Nice! I love this idea. What happens when most sites that deliver news have at least some bullshit?

That's really the issue. It's just a question of whose bullshit. Bullshit of the rich media mughals? Right wing conservatives? Liberal elite? Environmentalists? Alt-right nutters? At the end of the day, media has stopped being about objectivity, just as long as there is a semblance, anything goes. People tell lies, or next to lies in order to get people to see things their ways. It's just a question of the level of sophistication of those lies. Outright lies are the lowest level of sophistication, all the way up to manufactured consent.

How can you distinguish between news that pisses a lot of people off and news that is fake/spam?

If I write a blatant hit piece which is based entirely on factual information a lot of people will report it because they are upset over it but it doesn't change the fact that is truthful.

How do you prevent people from suppressing opposing view points by reporting them as fake?

The idea isn't to target sites that occasionally run false stories; it's to target fakenews webspam sites.

I never used the word "occasionally." Some news outlets run outright false stories that _are as bad as_ "fakenews" sites daily/weekly. Impling that those stories aren't as bad as the "fakenews" schemes and that we can't automate hiding those is just false.

I was merely pointing out that there could be more to address this problem and that I love this idea so far (I read the readme).

if anyone doesn't want to use a clunky browser addon, you can just ask me. Like the author of the app, I too know what is true and what is not and I will guide you on what news is safe for you to read.

Please, let me do your thinking for you.

Zoom out one meta level: Show HN: Stop the Stop-the-Bullshit. A Fake Fake News Detector Detector.

Wait, but then we would need Stop the Stop the Stop-the-Bullshit.... um... but what if?!!

How does it work? Is it just a blacklist?

> "Also includes a clustering analysis that could lead to an algorithm to automatically detect Fake News."

This implies that they want to do automatic fake news detection, but aren't quite there yet. Is that correct?

Looks like it's currently using a hard coded list of urls that are considered to be bad.

For general requests: https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/blob/master/s...

For facebook: https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit/blob/master/s...

Yeah, it's just some arbitrary list of a few hardcoded URLs right now... Is this really useful??

Consider that I built it this night for http://lauzhack.com/, so it's not intended to be a fully-featured solution to the problem.

The main issue I wanted to address is the fact that such a blocker must be widely installed to be useful. Therefore, the Facebook message is intended to prod current users of the extensions to ask that their friends install it as well.

I'm amused that long-running British newspaper the Daily Star has made the list. I mean, it's probably accurate as they do have a bit of a reputation, but still - surprising.

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