That's great, but that's not what this project appears to be focused on. It currently has a hardcoded blocklist, some of which is clearly just right-wing news/opinion with little to no ads - clearly not what you've described as spam sites.
Incidentally: I have nothing to say about the utility of this particular project. I just know that there really is fakenews, and it's not subjective.
For example, I would never blacklist Breitbart, because I'm not interested in censoring political opinions I disagree with. I just want to free us from the burden of these websites that add nothing to the world and leech attention from everyone.
The slope is very slippery. It is very easy to put forth an argument that some left/right wing media "[adds] nothing to the world and [leeches] attention from everyone"
Keeping the focus on blatant spam sites is a noble cause, but this tool is as easily misused as a firearm.
Let me be more precise, and use tptacek's words in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12999887: "fake news = spam sites built from scripts consisting largely of a backcatalog nonsense stories [...] with a one or two carefully produced fake stories as a "payload".
I think this definition is as objective as it gets, and clearly excludes things I might disagree with politically, but are not the target of this extension.
I think the reverse assumption - that everything should be considered a valid information source until conclusively proved otherwise - is probably a more dangerous bias than assuming that some media does add nothing to the world.
From the backcatalog:
Putin Issues US Election Theft Warning, Orders Military To Protect Trump “At All Costs”
BREAKING: Putin Just Gave Obama 24 Hours Or His Ships Will Open Fire
Putin ally tells Americans: vote Trump or face nuclear war
Putin Warns Trump…ELITES PLANNING YOUR ASSASSINATION
Vladimir Putin Escapes New World Order Assassination Attempt
Putin Goes On LIVE TV And CONFIRMS That Obama And Hillary CREATED ISIS
and my personal favorite
Putin and Dalai Lama: Obama Is Responsible for ISIS, Along With Hillary
(and 23 more pages of stuff like this)
This is webspam.
The trick is: look past the front page. The front page is designed to look semi-sane. That's the point. Fakenews wouldn't work if you were just one click away from seeing that it's all a troll factory construction. You have to click a couple times to see that.
That didn't occur to me. Makes total sense. Thanks
> 60 Minutes Goes To Sweden To Show How Peaceful Refugees Are, Entire Crew Gets Assaulted By Refugees (video is actually of an altercation with a conservative news group, while their interview seems genial, the actual video is attempting to cast the immigrants in Sweden in as negative light as possible, even going so far as repeating the falsehood of "no-go zones" and failing to mention that the rioting they show is actually being perpetrated by Swedes themselves)
> German Scientists Prove There is Life After Death (So get back to church)
> UNREAL: Ground-Breaking Cancer Treatment Snubbed By Media Because THIS Country Made It (which country you ask? Israel of course! Because the leftist media hates Israel, duh!)
> BREAKING: Measles Outbreak Traced, Look at Sick Location it Originated From " For many months, conservatives and Republicans have been trying to warn the public that the incoming flood of immigrants"
When I was in Sweden I was hanging out with several Iraqis which confirmed the existence of no-go zones where assaults and arson including car bombs are common in some suburbs of Stockholm. I take their advice with a grain of salt but they had no apparent incentive to be dishonest.
Instead of a crude block list, why not bayesian filtering?
I don't think trying to rehabilitate this particular fakenews site is a good use of your time, because really you're just going to end up passionately defending a malign shell script.
I believe that the fake news problem is intractable. You cannot identify any news source as being fake or real objectively. You can only trust other people's interpretations of the information, and other people's interpretations are easily manipulated because people are emotional.
What do you think?
Furthermore, wherein do I censor and/or deny that an attack occurred? The title says "News crew goes to Sweden to show how peaceful refugees are" - yet the actual segment is the exact opposite of that. You can see the video yourself, as well as the context I point out - or lack thereof, as it were.
The fact of the matter is this isn't a spam filter, no matter how much you want to spin it that way. Anytime I see the phrase "fake news" I know for sure there's political bias at play. That phrase didn't exist in any real way before the election.
Somebody saying the Dalai Lama endorsed both Putin and Trump is producing original content and by definition isn't spam (unless they stole that content from somebody else, of course). Whether nefarious, delusional or just misinformed, do you think merely being wrong is proof enough to label an entire site as 'fake news'? Are we applying this standard to Fox News and CNN? They aired quite a few inaccuracies during the election.
We are not applying the same standard to Fox News and CNN, because neither of those organizations simply invented crazy stories out of whole cloth and ran them as news on multiple different sites.
Here's an exercise: take the craziest story you can find on ENDTHEFED.COM (the spam site), and search for the headline. You'll see it's not just on ENDTHEFED.COM, but on several other sites. That's because it's laundered, exactly the same way webspam is, across many sites to conceal its origin and lack of originality. This is 2005-grade spam technology.
You think you're arguing passionately in defense of open-minded political discourse. But you're not. You're defending webspam, run by cynical webspam farms. You should stop.
You claim this isn't a slippery slope, but we've already slid down it a bit. Infowars was delisted by Quantcast as 'fake news'. Whether you like Alex Jones or not, I think we can both agree his site isn't blogspam.
Why are you defending spam? You just did it upthread, when you suggested that maybe we shouldn't be so hostile to people who believe that the Dalai Lama endorsed Trump. The authors of that story do not believe that. It's webspam.
And now you're not even reading what I said! Spam should be filtered as spam. 'fake news' applies to so much more than just spam, as I have already demonstrated.
Are we agreed that ENDTHEFED.COM should be filtered? Maybe we're just arguing past each other.