Expanding Fact Checking at Google | Hacker News Reader

Expanding Fact Checking at Google

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148 pointsmpweiher274 comments

Nearly all fact-checking organizations are considered to be biased and untrustworthy by a sizable percentage of the population. I'm skeptical that this will actually lead to change in people's critical thinking as applied to processing news and news sources.

A recent poll showed that more Americans trusted Donald Trump, someone who has not gone a day in his short tenure in office without him or someone on his staff telling a verifiable lie to the press, to tell them the truth compared to the U.S. media.

But has the news gone a day without telling a verifiable lie? I read an article yesterday running down the list of organizations (quoted and linked) mocking Trump for referring to a terrorist attack the night before in Sweden. The full transcript shows Trump never mentioned a terrorist attack.

It's not that Trump is so trustworthy it's just that one person can't possibly lie as much as thousands.

We live in a world where obama can get the number of US states wrong and get a pass, and trump mentioning a segment he saw last night on FOX is the end of the world.

Interestingly enough the media parroted the "debunked" claim when the article was using statistics from Sweden's own government. Rape is up 70% since 2005.

Grenade attacks are also a thing in Sweden now, which is absolutely unacceptable.

And you are not believing stats released by one of the least corrupt democracy of the West.

There was one grenade launched in Sweden in August last year. There's at least 1 killed by a semi auto in the US per day. Sweden has near zero homicide rate.

edit: it seems there was more than 'one' explosions in Sweden, but looking at the wikipedia article history linked below doesn't fill me with confidence considering how the language used has changed between august when the article was made and now. Also note how the wikipedia editors write about organized crime using old grenades from WWII and not migrants bombing Swedish people.

One? Huh?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...

Wow, they're almost up to a few days worth of gun crime in the US there.

Wow, that dramatic increase in frequency just magically happened huh?

Sounds like all your prejudices are confirmed.

That's certainly one way to interpret it. Not a very good one, but do you.

Unlike Obama, Trump is a pathological liar. He peaked at 40 lies in a single day, his diatribe against mainstream media included 17 lies, and he's managed at least 80 lies as so called president.

As a matter of fact, Trump built his political career on lying about Obama's place of birth.

See:

https://www.thestar.com/news/donald-trump-fact-check.html

https://www.thestar.com/news/world/uselection/2016/11/04/don...

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-false-statem...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/opinion/campaign-stops/all...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/politics/donald-trump-o...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/05/...

Trump Lies about His Birther Past: A Closer Look https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sBhANSz--k "Trump built his career on a racist lie because he's a racist and a liar" -- Seth Meyers

New item from the Washington Post's fact checkers: In the 33 days so far, we’ve counted 132 false or misleading claims

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claim...

About Obama getting the states wrong, did you mean this: http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/57states.asp?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the increase in rape statistics in Sweden largely attributable to broadening of the government's definition of what it considers rape?

Yes, legal reform in 2005 and 2013 can be clearly linked to those spikes.

how does Trump react when hes called out on a lie, and how does Obama react when hes called out?

> I understand I said there were 57 states today. It’s a sign that my numeracy is getting a little, uh …”

>“I don’t know,” Trump repeated. “I was given that information.”

He mentioned all cities and countries where terrorist attacks occurred. Then mentioned something happened in Sweden as well specifically the night before. It's not because he didn't put the word "terrorist attack" in the same sentence that he didn't mean that, it's clear from the transcript that it was exactly what he meant.

---- "Here's the bottom line, we've got to keep our country safe," Trump said. "You look at what's happening. We've got to keep our country safe. You look at what's happening in Germany. You look at what's happening last night in Sweden. Sweden! Who would believe this? Sweden! They took in large numbers, they're having problems like they never thought possible."

He continued, " You look at what’s happening in Brussels. You look at what’s happening all over the world. Take a look at Nice. Take a look at Paris. We’ve allowed thousands and thousands of people into our country and there was no way to vet those people. There was no documentation. There was no nothing. So we’re going to keep our country safe." ----

Yet it happened the day after his speech[0]. A fertile ground for various conspiracies.

0. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/02/21...

I don't know why this is considered conspiracy. This event is a bit like the car burning "protests" in France. Most days where it "doesn't" happen according to the press should be understood as it happening less, not so much not. People are demonstrating and torching cars pretty much every Friday, in Paris, in Nice, in Lille, in ..., and more so every once and a while for a decade now.

Most recent New Year's eve: http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/749511/French-government...

There are constant serious incidents in Stockholm and Malmo, every Friday. There are constant serious incidents (like 10-20 cars torched minimum) in every major French city every Friday, including even Brussels on occasion, for over a decade now. There are serious incidents in Rotterdam and the poor parts of Amsterdam.

I'm not sure why this is not being reported, although in the French case it is pretty clear the government is suppressing reporting. But of course, after a decade of this few people are unaware. The problem is, everybody knows, and the suppression is causing people to assume things are worse than they are (although they are far beyond what even a San Franciscan would tolerate). The issue is people can just leave their homes, drive 1km further than usual and see proof positive (torched cars being cleaned up, destroyed businesses) that the government is suppressing news. And no, it (mostly) isn't immigrants doing this, although it definitely is muslim inner city youth.

The issue is simple: the governments are lying. Very, very transparently lying. For the fool's hope of turning an anti-immigrant wave back. Meanwhile, you can't actually say you feel like this in most settings. The issue with that is what happens at work. 90% or so of a consulting team working at some bank or whatever will be of the opinion that this needs to stop, and some percentage of them feels that electing Le Pen/Dewinter/Wilders/... will accomplish, maybe not a stop, but an improvement. And it absolutely can't be discussed, because that is sure to, at the very least, result in complaints to HR or management. Meanwhile 100m down the road, 15 floors down, things are slowly getting worse. Some days you can't get a sandwich without getting confronted with it.

Will this get us Le Pen ? God I hope not.

Trump didn't directly claim there was a terrorist attack in Sweden "last night", but by saying in the same breath as "look at Paris, look at Nice" where there was three very well known attacks in 2 years, he is implicitely saying "there was an attack in Sweden last night", and he knows it perfectly well. And he knows that a portion of his listeners will not hear the debunking and others will believe him rather than hard tangible facts. And he very consciouly said it in this way because he knew all this.

This is the Kuleshov effect of speeches.

He's been in office 31 days. What are the 31 lies?

More like 80 - https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2017/02/03/daniel-dales-d...

Only Trump statements, not including his staff [1]:

Of 26 checked statements, 20 were mostly false or worse.

[1] http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/stateme...

I did a little fact checking of Politifact:

Discussing his speech in Florida, they claim he referred to a terrorist attack in Sweden. He never mentioned a terrorist attack.

They said Trump's approval rating is 41% [1], cherry picking one of the lowest polls. Lower, in fact, than any recent poll listed on RCP [2].

1: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/feb/18/...

2: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trum...

("Recent" not including one poll from 19 days ago, 17 days before the Politifact article, that reported 40% approval.)

Do they say he said that? All the articles I read talked about confusion about what he said and mentioned the former Prime Minister of Sweden's inference he was talking about a terrorist attack.

e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/world/europe/last-night-i...

Their entire fact check is about terrorist attacks, omitting crime or other "problems" (the word Trump used).

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/feb/...

And the Fox News report (which is mentioned by Politifact) Trump later referred to is about crime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSzjfAMk-RI

His approval rating ranges between 40-50 in your second link, and is at 42% on both Gallup and Pew Research (which he himself has used when it fit him).

And regarding Florida:

"Look around you... Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy... look at leereeves last night, would you believe it?"

Am I referring to you as a serial killer?

The only 40 in my second link is from 17 days before the article. Recent?

I don't know where 41 came from exactly but I know that at that same time, Rasmussen was reporting 53% approval. How did Politifact choose?

As for Florida:

> They’re having problems like they never thought possible.

He said problems, not attacks.

And the Politifact article was written after (and even mentioned) Trump said he was referring to a Fox News report [1] about problems in Sweden, which isn't about terrorism.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSzjfAMk-RI

> The only 40 in my second link is from 17 days before the article. Recent?

Sure, and tomorrow it might be 20, or 60. You can only use previously existing data.

> I don't know where 41 came from exactly but I know that at that same time, Rasmussen was reporting 53% approval. How did Politifact choose?

I'm assuming the Gallup poll they link to stated 41 at the time of publication. That's the beauty of sourcing. You can always verify it. Step two is knowing if Gallup is trustworthy, that's where your RCP comes in, which puts it against other sources, most of which we recognize. Further steps would be sourcing their respective data, etc.

> He said problems, not attacks.

In the same breath as specifically cities with attacks in recent years.

But even ignoring that, let's say he wasn't inferring attacks, then:

* What problems?

* What specifically about last night?

"Problems" in the area he was talking about (unrest) usually means attack, so it's not an unreasonable assumption about what he meant.

He of course later stated he was referring to a Fox News segment. How that makes it better is beyond me though, seeing as:

* The segment was blatantly lying. [1]

* He can get briefings from 11 intelligence agencies.

* Sweden has crime statistics and is generally considered one of the least corrupt states in the west. [2]

[1] http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/nyheter/swedish-police-featured...

[2] http://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percepti...

> I'm assuming the Gallup poll they link to stated 41 at the time of publication.

The Gallup poll they link to isn't even about his approval.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/203834/americans-world-standing-w...

That's the problem with assuming...

Yeah, sorry, I clicked on it through your RCP link, thinking it was the same. My bad.

The rest of my post though?

Honestly, I have no idea what's going on in Sweden. I've heard so many different stories and it's hard to know who to trust when neither the media nor the government are trustworthy.

I tend to trust more often when a source publishes something that runs counter to (my perception of) its bias. Such as this article from the WaPo:

> Yet he also acknowledged that the country is reaching the limits of what it can handle, and may have no choice but to tighten its policies in the face of an influx this year that is expected to bring more than 150,000 asylum seekers to a country with a population of less than 10 million.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/behind-swedens-w...

It's not hard if you just skip the middle man and look at the data you want to observe.

Yes, Sweden takes in (per capita) among the most refugees. [1] This has been the case when I've looked at data for at least 4-5 years.

Yet violent crimes has gone down. [2]

> Honestly, I have no idea what's going on in Sweden. I've heard so many different stories and it's hard to know who to trust when neither the media nor the government are trustworthy.

What specifically is it that you don't trust or wish you had more information about?

I see nothing wrong in the article you link. It's interviewing a representative of the rise of "Sweden Democrats", which is a nationalistic party on the rise that has gotten ~20% of the electorate, in a multi party country, which is very significant.

It's however not relevant to any crime statistics or unrest, but merely _perceived_ unrest, much like the alt-right movement, Brexit, and similar.

A lot of Swedish statistics are mandatorily published in English, so it's not terribly difficult to get it if you try.

[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/09/daily-c...

[2] https://www.bra.se/bra/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statist...

> Yet violent crimes has gone down.

https://www.bra.se/bra/bra-in-english/home/crime-and-statist...

Those stats only go up to 2014, before the refugee crisis.

It's the same year as the refugee stats I posted.

But not relevant to the effects of the massive increase in immigration in 2015 and 2016.

https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/About-the-Migration-...

You're right in that there is a spike in 2015, but the 2014 stats are more than twice as high as 2016.

And regardless of which, it's completely relevant if we want to measure immigration as a factor on crime.

I have a hard time reconciling those numbers with what's reported in the media.

Half as many applications in 2016 as in 2013?

Those are only "asylum" applications...could they be processing people under other categories now?

Not unless you're interested in work permits.

What media are you referring to?

This is literally the Swedish equivalent of the USCIS. If you rather listen to your preferred outlet reporting otherwise, then bias is certainly at large.

I've never heard any media (of whatever bias) report either that Sweden stopped immigration, cutting asylum to half the level of 2013, or that refugees have ceased trying to immigrate to Sweden.

If either of those are true, that would be a story I'd like to read.

Has anyone reported that?

I'd like to know why those numbers fell. Did Sweden stop immigration? Did refugees stop coming? Are refugees being admitted in some other way, not counting as asylum?

Edit:

I found an article in Foreign Policy from over a year ago. According to them, Sweden closed the door.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/10/the-death-of-the-most-ge...

Interesting that the media continues to chide Trump and laud Sweden, if they've both done the same thing.

> Interesting that the media continues to chide Trump and laud Sweden, if they've both done the same thing.

Strawman.

Either he claims Sweden has immigration problems, which data suggests against, or he suggests Sweden has an immigration problem but they stopped immigration. So which is it?

Either one makes Trump look like an idiot.

ok but you are misrepresenting this completely now.

>Conversely, 57 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of the country’s standing in the world. That’s the highest that number has been in a decade, according to Gallup.[1] And Trump’s approval rating, of 41 percent, is lower at this point than any other president Gallup has tracked since Dwight Eisenhower.

the link in the politifact article is very clearly talking about americans having an unfavorable view of the country, and not approval ratings.

Why are you lying?

If you look on gallup for the day of the politifact article[2], you will see that it shows % approve is 41%.

as for why they would choose the gallup approval ratings over rasmussen, there are very many answers to that question. rasmussen is an online poll, which has been viewed by pollsters since forever as much less accurate than live phone surveys (since online polls can very easily be gamed brigading, they dont verify the identity of the respondent, etc.)

The average from all the approval ratings is 45%[3]

[1]http://www.gallup.com/poll/203834/americans-world-standing-w... [2]http://www.gallup.com/poll/201617/gallup-daily-trump-job-app... [3]https://imgur.com/a/MzDa4

Toronto's thestar.com did a piece on this (80 lies in 28 days):

https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2017/02/03/daniel-dales-d...

There are about 30% of the population that are totally ignorant not just about facts but about how to even ascertain what the truth is. I'm not sure we should throw up our hands and give up because a sizable percentage of people are hopeless. There are a lot of people who can be helped by that kind of thing.

We absolutely should not throw up our hands. To some extent, I appreciate that Google and Facebook are at least aware of the issue and want to act on it. My skepticism is that as a result of these efforts, Google and Facebook will be considered to be biased, inaccurate, and no longer trustworthy. There is already a lot of animosity towards Silicon Valley companies as it is.

I certainly hope that if there is 70% of the population this can still help, that it accomplishes that goal without making the other 30% even worse.

Google of all companies has no moral authority to be "filtering" anything based on "facts", given that they were shown to manipulate search auto-completes with political bias.

If you're referring to the Soros thing you've both:

* Drunk the Kool-Aid

* Ignored doing the most rudimentary test of replacing his name with any other and matching results.

Not true. http://www.snopes.com/google-manipulate-hillary-clinton/

Maybe Hacker News needs fact checking integration also.

[Refutation of bias] [link to biased refutation]

Snopes is definitely ideologically biased. http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/16/snopes-facebooks-new-fact-...

Looks like we're stuck in a loop here.

If I prove to you how 2 + 2 is 4, is my political leaning relevant?

Look at proof, not at people.

prove the above mathematically then.

Better education + a chance for everyone to travel the world and get to know "the other side" would solve a lot of your problems.

It would take a couple of generations though.

There are weird enough breakthroughs reported pretty regularly that I'm not sure anybody can reliably know what's real outside their area of expertise. It would be nice if better education were the answer, but to be honest, I'm not sure it is.

When my brother was in medical school, one of his textbooks had a sidebar that claimed many doctors would believe in quack medicine. In that case, though, it appeared that they thought they were too smart to be fooled.

It's a little ironic you made up a statistic about how people are ignorant about facts...

It's a lovely round number and suitably situated in a comfortable minority position; it's thus inoffensive, aesthetically pleasing, relatively benign and allows one to feel reasonably smug when repeating it. Seems to be factual to me!

;)

I think it's pretty clear from context that that is an opinion/estimate and not a fact.

> I'm not sure we should throw up our hands and give up because a sizable percentage of people are hopeless.

I hope you're not excluding HN with 'we' and 'our'. I see a lot of tech people, actually most people in general (including myself), just as clueless and ignorant about the facts. The supporters of Linux and open source claiming "superiority" vs competing tech comes to mind.

In general, Linux is faster and more secure than most closed source alternatives, including Windows and macOS. In terms of moral "superiority," some users appreciate that Linux does not collect information about its users, does not install updates without permission, and is open source. There are downsides to Linux however, such as shorter battery life and a potentially harder user interface.

Your claim that supporters of Linux who claim superiority over competing tech are clueless and ignorant about the facts is not supported by evidence. Do you have any?

>In general, Linux is faster and more secure than most closed source alternatives, including Windows and macOS.

Not that I feel the need to prove anything about myself, but I have been using Linux since 1995, so I have had a fairly long-term experience with using Linux, and I personally have never found it to be faster. To that end, I will concede that the word faster is not a measurable metric. We'd have to define a workload - one that isn't biased towards an OS design, provide an argument that it is a reasonable workload to compare OSs with wildly different design goals, etc, etc.

>Your claim that supporters of Linux who claim superiority over competing tech are clueless and ignorant about the facts is not supported by evidence. Do you have any?

Yes. I've been reading Slashdot since it started. There isn't a single story about Windows or Microsoft on Slashdot that doesn't contain false information.

I think this is more about the low standards in journalism as opposed to high standards of honesty in the Trump adminstration.

A recent example: Salon just ran an article on Milo Yiannopoulos. He was sexually abused as a child and made claims a year ago that recently came to light that it was mostly his fault and he seduced the transgressor, somewhat excusing the behavior. At that very same moment they removed articles that seemed to support pedophilia that they had published previously.

https://mobile.twitter.com/stillgray/status/8338350313281249...

Yes, the problem is not a technical one, and the term 'fake news' is in itself gaslighting and part of the problem - as soon as you accept this term, you accept people just shouting fake news to shut down conversation (as Trump does frequently to shut down lines of questioning he doesn't like, notably in his press conference before he'd even heard the question). We should reject the premise of any argument that depends on some news being fake and some being real, and somehow if everyone just knew the one truth it'd be ok.

People start from different places (education, background, prejudices), so they interpret even the same set of facts differently. We don't have too much fake news, we have too little critical thinking.

The majority of TV media routinely engages in "just honest enough so you can't sue me" reporting. They consistently misrepresent the facts and spin things to their agendas.

Now your university educated will call it filtering/magnifying/selective truth/implementation of propoganda models (see: Chomsky)

Your average person just says "they lie!" And "fake news".

When dealing with organizations as fundamentally dishonest as the corporate media this is the most you can expect from Joe public.

QED

I am not convinced that the TV media is intentionally dishonest (other than obvious propaganda machines like RT). In the stories I have seen where I knew what actually happened, the errors and omissions in the media could be adequately explained by ignorance, laziness, and lack of resources. TV "news" is primarily an entertainment business and in most cases there's simply no incentive to present complete and accurate stories. If viewers will watch anyway then why waste time doing extra work?

What makes RT propaganda? The fact that they are critical of the US in ways our own media isn't?

No, the fact that they're state owned media and used by the Russian government to put out propaganda makes RT propaganda.

https://euvsdisinfo.eu/

EG: https://euvsdisinfo.eu/useful-experts-in-russian-media/

While the article mentions RT as an example of state-owned media, none of the cited incidents actually involve it. Also this website self-identifies as anti-Russian "disinformation." RT, ironically, has a similar mission against mainstream Western and EU media. So every one of these outlets has bias (even though not all of them are honest enough to claim it). So who should we believe?

ahh a classic

А у вас негров линчуют

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

Ironically, your implication of tu quoque is itself a logical fallacy. I am not saying "RT is unbiased because Western media _is_ biased" - in fact I am saying all media is biased but of the parties mentioned only one consistently draws ire for its bias.

"RT is the only media outlet criticized for bias"

riiight

You quoted something I didn't say. How does that even work? Is there a word for this? There should be. Anyway that's not what I said - I said they are the only ones who draw consistent ire. As in they are forcefully denounced as biased consistently, instead of all of them being called out for bias and conflict of interest equally (which, really, many more news networks should be).

Uhh, the fact that they are the state run media arm of a notoriously free press-hostile regime in a country with a famous history of a government propaganda arm?

RT is state-funded as is the BBC and PBS, among many others. But none of them are immediately dismissed as propaganda. Why? Simply because "it's Russia?"

> Why? Simply because "it's Russia?"

Yes.

No. Simply because it's propaganda.

BBC has spent decades earning a reputation for being (mostly) accurate and unbiased. RT has spent at least one decade earning a reputation for being Putin's mouthpiece, and part of his mechanism of control over Russia. The two are not remotely equivalent, despite lapses you can cite at BBC.

Where is evidence of this 'reputation for being Putin's mouthpiece?' Other than your impassioned assertions? Also, all media is biased. BBC is biased toward Western and UK interests, RT is biased toward Russian interests. This is something RT freely admits. But does BBC?

RT is beyond biased. Your claim, if true, equates all media to propaganda. Biased media is simply not the same as propaganda.

Secondary and tertiary definitions from MW for propaganda:

- the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person

- ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause; also : a public action having such an effect

That certainly sounds exactly like the media's behavior in this country to me.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/propaganda

EDIT: formatting

> RT is state-funded as is the BBC

Is the BBC state funded?

"The BBC is established under a Royal Charter and operates under its Agreement with the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. Its work is funded principally by an annual television licence fee which is charged to all British households, companies, and organisations using any type of equipment to receive or record live television broadcasts."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC

Yes, most of their operating funds come from taxation. Technically only people with televisions have to pay.

I decided to look, given that I'd heard a lot about Rt being untrustworthy. Here's what a cursory search found, but it's possible the results may have been biased by my search term. It's up to you to determine whether these are credible or if there's another side not represented here. One (American) new sanchor for RT quit on the air because they believed the agency was advancing Putin's agenda over the news[1][2]

As to how much of a public institution it is, I think it's important to look at how much of the organization's budget is from the state. For PBS, it appears it was around 12% in 2010[3]. RT appears to get almost all its funding from the government (if Wikipedia is to be trusted)[4].

Sorry for the Quora links, but really, there's no reason to accept anything I present over what people there might be able to supply anyways. I present them not as sources, but as additional discussions about the topic.

1: https://www.quora.com/How-biased-or-accurate-is-RTs-coverage...

2: https://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/how-the-truth-is-made-at-...

3: https://www.quora.com/What-portion-of-PBS-funding-comes-from...

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)#Budget

The BBC gets almost all of its budget through taxation and mandatory purchases of "television licenses"

There are numerous cases they got caught making up stories.

> adequately explained by ignorance, laziness, and lack of resources

That only seem to go one way...

"Fake news" (along with Russia-panic) started its life as part of a propaganda offensive by the DNC and DNC affiliated media (CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, etc.) to justify why Hillary lost that didn't involve blaming her.

I think it was mainly targeted at Democrats/Hillary supporters rather than Trump supporters (they obviously didn't need to hear an excuse for why she lost).

Also the term 'filter-bubble' which acts as if conservatives are simply not exposed to liberal viewpoints.

Fake news started with the Tea Party, "shock jocks" and other right-wing conservative attempts to discredit reality-based news media. Blaming the DNC is a good example of fake news lies in action.

Fake news started hundreds if not thousands of years ago. The recent hysteria about fake news started roughly 48 hours after the Presidential election results.

Fake news was abundant enough that it became a meme in 2005 as "truthiness".

That you took offense to it only after November 10, 2016 is inconsequential.

The media's sudden obsession starting Nov 10th is graphed here:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=fake%20news

Spikes like that don't happen by accident.

No, they don't. In this case, on your link, the top "related topic" is Donald Trump and the top three "related queries" are "trump", "trump fake news" and "trump news".

This is what happens when you get a pathological liar running for president. Trump "defended" his lies with more lies, such as calling honest news sources "fake news".

You're looking at a specific term that has caught on, of course there is a spike. The ancestral comments are talking about the idea of disinformation, which I'm guessing has been around as long as humans started talking to each other (hell maybe even before that).

No, fake news started long ago. You are very confused if you think these mainstream media companies are lieing to avoid talking about why hillary lost. They give lots of reasons that appear to be valid, like that she didn't pay enough attention to those important three states, and that she had no widely publicized plan to deal with the people that lots their local factories and jobs. I think this latter case was really important, and HRC really missed out on this area. A lot of trump supporters seem to believe that billionaire and job exporter trump will somehow get their factory jobs back to their town. This idea has been widely discussed.

Sure, some people also wrote about how trump won because of fake news (i.e. blog posts about things that aren't true, like the comet pizza thing), and that must have contributed, but that is just one of many things.

>No, fake news started long ago.

Like I said two comments down.

>You are very confused

I don't think so.

>"Fake news" (along with Russia-panic) started ... to justify why Hillary lost that didn't involve blaming her.

>fake news started long ago

you can only pick one.

That is why I used "quotation marks" to indicate that I was referring to the moral panic about fake news that was suddenly plastered over the Dem-linked media (NYTimes, Washpost, CNN, CNBC, etc.) starting November 10th which led to the search spike which can be very clearly seen here:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=fake%20news

Edit: oh look you downvoted the comment below after I pointed it out. how cute.

i cant even downvote you because you responded to me? but you can blame me if you want.

anyways, even the fake news phenomena that is being discussed today has been around for quite a while, so you are still incorrect in your assertion that its a recent phenomena started by the DNC and hillarys campaign

snopes even did a write up about fake news sites in january of 2016[1]

[1]http://www.snopes.com/2016/01/14/fake-news-sites/

"fake news" as a phrase only started showing up regularly after Hillary started doing badly.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Fake%20news

"Fake News" was a term created to explain why Hillary didn't win the election. If she had won, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Ironically, Trump has successfully comandeered the term to criticize his enemies in the media.

The problem is that the mainstream has lost its influence to a lot of smaller players and they are doing whatever they can to get it back. Facebook and Google are having political problems because they are viewed as part of the cause of the mainstream media's lack of influence and they are trying to comply with pressure from somewhere. I don't think fake news really hurts their bottom line. In fact, Facebook and Google being viewed as politically biased might be a reason for people to switch to other search engines, especially since nearly 50% of the U.S did vote for Trump after all.

> Ironically, Trump has successfully comandeered the term to criticize his enemies in the media.

Ironically ? This was more predictable than the coyote's fate in cartoons.

Apparently the reaction to getting an undesirable leader in the white house is to prepare a massive shotgun, give it to the government (that said leader will be controlling), and make sure everyone is threatened by it.

It seems that because "of course" Hillary's defeat was nobody's fault, not hers [1], not the party [2], and not her supporters [3], and it wasn't Trump's efforts either, so it must have been nefarious actions from evil outsiders. This disaster started rolling to make sure this was the narrative surrounding Hillary's defeat.

Obviously, I feel like the the fault is not in our stars, not even the Russian ones.

This will get a lot worse before it gets better.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZHp4JLWjNw or http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/john-podesta-wikileaks...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVKC0egDBpk

(I am not saying the above links illustrate the reason we ended up with Trump. Each of them by themselves probably did not make enough difference to turn the tide. But they are fuckups. They did not help. Enough fuckups and you loose. And yes, I think Hillary lost the election much more than that Trump won it. Hillary defeated herself and Trump moved into the vacuum that remained without fucking up sufficiently himself. But making his election the actions of evil Putin ... stuff like that has the potential to give Trump 8 years. Frankly, even if it's true (because of course Russia ... and the US ... interfere in eachother's elections).

> especially since nearly 50% of the U.S did vote for Trump after all.

This is something I hear a lot. But according to [1] only 54.6% of the voting age population turned up to vote. Of that Trump got 46.1%[2]. So it's definitely not 50% of the country that voted for Trump. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St... [2] http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/21/politics/donald-trump-hillary-...

You can make that claim about most US elected officials. It's broadly understood that nowhere near 100% of the US voting-eligible population votes in elections, and that when someone says "50% of the population voted for...", it means that 50% of those who bothered to vote at all. It's the same thing as the stories you see citing a study that finds that X% of Y's have Z trait. Everyone understands that it's referencing a percentage of those included in the study, not the entire population.

Yes but 50% of America did not vote for Trump. He got nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton.

The majority of Americans do not approve of him, after one month in office.

Depends on who you ask.

https://imgur.com/a/MzDa4

Why are you linking to approval ratings in a discussion about votes?

Read the last sentence of the person I replied to's comment.

Ah, I missed that. Fair enough.

What an interesting distribution... From the table it looks like there is a correlation between method and results. Are people less willing to put their trust in Trump over the phone than in anonymity, or are the people who are making calls biased, or...? :)

The assumption with the study you mentioned only works when those included in the study are a random sample of the population, expected to be representative. I'd argue that people who vote aren't a random sample and not representative of the population. In other words, when people don't like either candidate, they are more likely to stay home. Therefore, a percentage of the population that voted for a candidate could potentially be an interesting measure. Just pulled together some numbers by dividing the winner's popular vote by the total US population in that year, and was actually surprised at Trump's showing. He's at the median of all presidents since 1960. Not sure what meaning could be extracted from it, though, as there are many factors that would affect turnout.

Trump 16 - 19.5%

Obama 12 - 20.9%

Obama 08 - 22.8%

Bush 04 - 21.2%

Bush 00 - 17.9%

Clinton 96 - 16.9%

Clinton 92 - 17.5%

Bush 88 - 19.6%

Reagan 84 - 23.1%

Reagan 80 - 19.3%

Carter 76 - 18.7%

Nixon 72 - 22.3%

Nixon 68 - 15.8%

Johnson 64 - 22.3%

Kennedy 60 - 18.9%

Sources:

http://www.multpl.com/united-states-population/table

http://www.270towin.com/historical-presidential-elections/

People were using fake news before hillary lost the election. The extreme amount of obviously rediculuous and impossible "articles" (yet believed by a fair amount of people) caused the widespread use of this. As an example, the endless stories about the comet pizza place and hillary hiding and supporting an international child trafficing ring or something like that.

> the term 'fake news' is in itself gaslighting and part of the problem

The term "fake news" is not gaslighting. It was coined to describe news that was, quite literally, intentionally made up with the intent to deceive and manipulate the reader using objectively false facts. For example, the fake electoral map that showed that Clinton only won the popular vote along the coasts, and that everywhere else (including Chicago!) voted uniformly for Trump.

The term has since been appropriated (one might argue intentionally, by progenitors of said fake news) to describe any news that has a perceived bias or slant differing from the one held by the person speaking, but that's not "fake news" - that's just... well, news.

> We don't have too much fake news, we have too little critical thinking

I agree with this. To a large degree, if people collectively possessed better critical thinking skills and demonstrated the interest in using them, actual fake news would be a non-issue. As I said, true "fake news" is trivially verifiable as false (e.g. Trump winning Chicago), but it's spread by people who either don't have the skills to think that deeply, don't want to think deeply, or simply don't mind blatantly lying in order to push their agenda.

True fake news is not produced by Democrats? Hmm. I think better to reject this style of argument altogether, whoever uses it, the term has been poisoned irredeemably by its misuse and evacuated successfully of meaning, if it ever had any. I suspect this was a deliberate strategy by Trump's campaign, but it also shows up the vacuous nature of the original term that it can be so successfully co-opted. When you accept an argument on the basis of vague concepts like fake news, terrorists and protecting the homeland and you've already lost in a fundamental sense by failing to look at the foundation and assumptions going into the arguments over what is true and not.

We should look at the basis of the argument and facts presented - the content, and just ignore the rhetorical packaging like 'very fake news', it's not helpful to argue over whether things are fake or not or what exactly fake news is, because definitions like that are so easily twisted. You might find that you oppose fake news only to find it has been redefined successfully to mean everything Trump disagrees with.

> True fake news is not produced by Democrats?

...where on earth did you read that anywhere in what I wrote?

:) Hyperbole I admit. You didn't say exactly that, but you did approach it in saying that 'true fake news' was labelled as such by the Democrats (implying they didn't make any), as opposed to the fake fake news term of Trump, which came later.

Again, I don't think the labels are as interesting as the claims - better to focus just on what is true and what is not for one atomic fact, not on whether a given fact is 'fake news' which shuts down rational thought and becomes a partisan matter. The sophistry of vague terms like fake news is dangerous whoever wields them and has been really well used by people like Trump to simply distract from reality and shut down the critical faculties of those watching, even when they hate him - it distracts from the actual argument with arguments about what is fake etc, etc.

Imagine if you will a search engine applying labels like 'fake news', 'true fake news' and perhaps 'fake fake news' to results - this is pointless, and would not persuade one person, but would help to polarise society further into different camps, just as Fox News and CNN say have become different constituencies who wouldn't dream of looking at the other channel.

"Fake news" sites is not necessarily politics. Call it conspiracy theory, rumor mill gossip, and the like. There are fake news sites on celebrities, supernatural events, "gross out" fake news, race / cultural baiting, and any other general outrage that inspires clicks. Snopes has a list of them compiled in early 2016, and politics is only a small part of it. (http://www.snopes.com/2016/01/14/fake-news-sites/)

I don't see "fake news" as vague. Fake news is fake. There is nothing ambiguous about the term; many people (eg Trump) have co-opted the term wrongly. If you publish an article saying Adam Sandler committed suicide (http://archive.is/n78Do) and the truth is he's still quite alive and making movies... that's fake news. Can you think of a better word? Liars? Con artists? All these apply to me.

I do think that true fake news websites did embrace Trump more than other politicians, but I believe a lot of this came more from Donald Trump's position as an "anti-establishment" candidate making him a perfect target for writers targeting the conspiracy minded. I think it's fair to say that a lot of conspiracy theory relies on large distrust of institutional authority. I doubt personally that the fake news sites would've similarly embraced Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush.

None of this is terribly new to the Internet (stuff like the National Enquirer and Weekly World News would probably be described as "fake news" now). I agree that, if one is prone to believing conspiracy theory, I'm not sure simply a warning label in a Google search will persuade anyone.

Nevertheless, since Google and Facebook are essentially about advertising, my thought is that there might be an economic motivation to at least quietly make sure true fake news sites are less visible. I doubt many mainstream corporations want to be associated with true "fake news", personally, and the often questionable content they have. (Unfortunately any algorithm alterations probably will have to be done quietly, since it's now such a political football.)

Sounds like a serious condemnation of the media.

My theory is that public opinion takes a long time to shift on these issues, and the media has been a fundamentally dishonest and deceptive industry for so long it's hard to outdo them in such a short time.

Sounds like you're a source of fake news, or a victim of conservative media lies.

The media nowadays covers a very wide spectrum from honest mainstream media (NYT, WP, BBC etc) to partizan sources that include a high proportion of lies (Fox News) to the totally dishonest and unreliable (Breitbart, Infowars etc).

Mainstream media reporting based on trained journalists and subeditors, fact checkers and ombudsmen (who publish corrections) is not "fundamentally dishonest and deceptive", despite the efforts of liars like Trump to undermine it.

The American tragedy is that a large proportion of the electorate has been corrupted by alt-right media lies to the point where people deny things that are provably, factually true.

For an informed account of the problem, see: http://uk.businessinsider.com/conservative-media-trump-drudg...

To be fair, trump does tell _his_ truth. His statements are generally wrong not for any conniving purpose, but because he genuinely has no idea what is going on.

I'm not sure I find that comforting...

As with anything, that poll is deeply party political:

"The results were vastly skewed along partisan lines, with 81 percent of Republicans trusting the administration over the media and 79 percent of Democrats deferring to news organizations over the White House."

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/trump-media-trust-poll...

IMO the poll doesn't reflect anything other than people's willingness to believe, against any and all evidence, that their "side" is correct. It feels like a very specific effect of the internet - with five seconds of googling you can find an opinion that reinforces yours, rather than confront the fact that you might be wrong.

"This sort of fact-checking data journalism mythology, which is really just political ideology masquerading as data-driven reporting" [1]

The speed with which the likes of Mr. Yannipoulous are pre-empting the rise of mainstream fact-checking/referencing is startling. It shows that who stand to lose from more effective veracity-detection tools will attempt to outpace the development of said solutions by rapidly deploying undermining rhetoric.

[1] https://youtu.be/PTxSAjXpnqo?t=1m40s

How will a system like this handle developing news stories after the fact? E.g. in the Québec mosque shooting there were initially two suspects, and many news articles that had accurate information at the time look incorrect in retrospect. Would those all be marked as BS retroactively by such a system, or is it enough that the news article used the best available facts at the time?

How will it handle granularity? It's very hard to write any news article that's 100% correct about everything. Will the entire article be marked as non-factually accurate due to the slightest mistake, or will they be highlighting specific factual inaccuracies in the content itself?

It seems like the system doesn't actually fact check stuff, it just marks an existing article as a "fact check".

Or to put it in another way, it's "fact check", not "fact checked".

Cheap labor. There's plenty out there. Google will tell them what the facts are and they'll promote/hide stories based on truthiness.

Google was good. Then Google was bad. Then the Democrats lost the election and Google was good again.

Even terrible people and organizations can be smeared. Whether Google is good or not is irrelevant to whether your particular accusation is baseless.

As I pointed above, it doesn't seem like Google is even marking stuff has "checked", but marking articles as being themselves "fact checks".

Whether Google is good or not is irrelevant to whether your particular accusation is baseless.

The perception of whether Google is good or not is all that matters. This is how media and mass psychology works. This isn't about fact-checking stories. It's about using Google's brand to deem specific stories to be real or fake.

But that's not what they're doing! Did you read my whole post? They are not marking articles as checked, they are just tagging them as being Fact Checking articles.

And what's the difference?

The difference is that it's not a evaluation about whether the content is correct, just about the type of content. It's akin to marking links as "PDF" or "Video".

It's almost funny how the underlying premise is ignored: that there is really no such thing as "news" in terms of the information we consume -- all these sources are just a segment of the Entertainment industry. So-called News organizations make their money the same way a game show does: advertising. There is no built-in economic reward for being a great truth-teller. Attract more eyeballs and you make more in advertising, period. Especially in these days of so many forms/channels of communications, this all promotes echo chambers of bias, which is sad but true.

The idea of automated "fact checking" should be sending chills down everybody's spine.

Wasn't the whole point of Google replacing things like Yahoo directories, curated manually, with fully automated algorithms? Being able to find quality information on "Bill Clinton" algorithmically and not settle for the page "Bill Clinton Sucks" as their early paper discussed? And aren't we in the age of AI, everything is solved even more now with NNs than it was with PageRank?

Why then prop up human-chosen sources like snopes and politifact? Is the AI too dumb or does it hold the wrong political opinions?

>Why then prop up human-chosen sources like snopes and politifact? Is the AI too dumb or does it hold the wrong political opinions?

There's not much AI behind it.

I mean it's more complicated than that but a page's rank is based on number of incoming links.

What's interesting is that the net seems to be partitioning along various demographic lines: rural/urban, left/right etc, each creating their own subspace of 'credible' sites based on the pagerank algorithm.

In fact it's a self reinforcing cycle because of personalized searches. Once google gathers enough information about you based on your search history it will present you with results tailored to your opinions and tastes.

It's unfortunate because in the 90s we talked about the web breaking down barriers, but in some cases it's walling people in. Sometime in obvious ways like with actual walled gardens like facebook, but also in more insidious ways such as personalized searching.

You mean the great advances in Deep Learning we keep reading about did not revolutionize search? Still PageRank?

I feel like this is something that maybe should be handled outside of search engines / aggregators themselves. I'm imagining some sort of community around a browser extension - the ability to vote for tags / add comments to any url, using the extension would allow you to see what others think. Would need moderation and would have to really get a critical mass before it would be useful. Perhaps the ability to have multiple "communities" you subscribe to with their own groups and ratings e.g. the "Fact Checkers" community rates this article one way, the "Reddit Politics" community rates it a bit differently, etc.

Some sort of community around a browser extension you say?

Check out https://hypothes.is/ it's a project to allow universal annotation of web content, which could conceivably enable just such a process of decentralized, community-moderated fact checking. Wouldn't that be nice! Of course, given what's happening on Wikipedia lately, I'm not totally convinced it could work, but hey, at least someone's trying.

very cool, thank you for pointing this out. I want to play with it some more, but I think one of the things that isnt fully thought out is that some url's will inherently change over time - the front page of the NYT for instance shows comments from over a year ago that obviously don't apply now - even comments from an hour ago may reference content that is no longer there. I don't have an answer for the problem but its something thats got to be thought about. Similar problem would be canonicalization of urls.

Introducing TaaS: Truth as a Service. Brought to you by your omniscient Corporate Overlords. Because you're not smart enough to find the Truth for yourself!

Whoa. I have a bad feeling this will lead to antitrust suits.

Its highly suspicious its launching in france and germany while their populist movements are growing.

There's tape of Merkel telling Zuckerberg to censor migrant crimes on Facebook.

Imagine how much more persuasive this comment would have been if you'd just taken a few more seconds add and hand full of links to provide evidence and context to your statement.

Zuckerberg was talking about his opinion that "hate speech" doesn't have a place on Facebook and that they "need to do some work".

Merkel merely asked "are you working on this"?

Somehow Infowars turned this into the following headline:

"Mark Zuckerberg Caught on Hot Mic Saying Facebook Will Censor Anti-Migrant Posts"

Other, more credible outlets said that Merkel was "pressing" Zuckerberg. Like asking a question puts so much pressure on someone.

I for one would like to see headlines like this rewritten, "Saved you a click" style. People often read nothing more than the headline.

Words matter.

Ignoring the blatant lies by Infowars, this still seems pretty bad. Giving Zuckerberg the power to identify "hate speech" and work with politicians on it can only lead to abuse in the long run.

I'm not a fan of hate speech laws personally as a general concept, but Germany does have some pretty strong laws on their books regarding hate speech (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung). So Zuckerberg may not really have a choice here (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/technology/facebook-germa...).

In The Netherlands we have these rules as well. It's forbidden to publicly offend _groups_ of people because of their race, faith, sex or handicap (art. 137c). It's also forbidden to encourage racism, hate or violence (art. 137d) and to publish or even possess publications that do so (art. 137e).

We are living in the Post Fact World where you no longer need to provide evidence or cite your sources.

These days saying “I was given that information.” or “Actually, I’ve seen that information around." is all you need to convince half of Americans of whatever you want them to believe.

Am I the only one who doesnt want Google to fact check the news?

Like yes propaganda is a problem but so is the ministery of truth.

Fake news stories have always existed the problem now is that we don't get news anymore we get policy driven editorials.

Fixing fake news is a red herring I much rather get opinion pieces and corrected speech out of prime time news.

But that's what you get for decades or people being offended by factual headlines.

I thought that this article might be about fact-checking the excerpts from web sites that Google sometimes presents as an answer to a Google search. One egregious instance of such a result that needs fact-checking is for the search "Is Donald Trump a citizen?"[1], for which this featured snippet appears at the top:

    Donald Trump is NOT Natural Born. Donald John Trump, Senior,
    was born in Queens, New York on June 14, 1946. He presents
    himself as a person eligible to the Office of President of
    the United States, yet, he does not have the parentage
    necessary to be a "natural born citizen."
    
    Donald Trump - NOT Natural Born - Natural born, The National Society ...
    natural-borncitizens.com/donaldtrumpnotnaturalborn.html

I doubt that Google wishes to represent this excerpt, from a website whose views are on the fringe (to say the least) as fact. Perhaps Google should be more careful about automatically displaying snippets pulled from websites as fact.

[1] https://google.com/search?q=Is+Donald+Trump+a+citizen?

Similarly, as recently as a couple of months ago, searching "Firefox" in Google yielded an ad for a malware site masquerading as Mozilla.

Google does make some effort to prevent these, but it's clearly not enough - that particular example happened for literally years.

Fact Checking is a new word for censorship.

How dare they make a business decision to have standards for accuracy on their platform.

The nerve of giant corporations in our corporatist world!

The nerve!

He's right, though. Google itself cannot be trusted. The size of the organization itself along with how many state actors it's colluding with should set off alarms.

Censorship is often hidden behind innocuous phrases like "standards for accuracy".

It was fairly obvious when the media started talking about "fake news online" that the endgame was censoring the Internet.

Yeah, totally obvious.

Robust freedom of speech doesn't mean that idiots get to have an equal voice. In fact, I think it depends on idiots quickly getting ignored, even in vile, pernicious, institutionalized ways.

So you're arguing in favor of censorship?

Who decides who gets ignored in "vile, pernicious, institutionalized ways"?

Let me know when it becomes illegal to start up a news aggregator.

Until then, it's whoever makes better news aggregators.

'Better' meaning?

Popular? Then you're deciding truth by popularity.

And?

The alternative is to ban sorting news articles at all.

And you'll end up with a liberal echo chamber and a conservative echo chamber, and never the two sides shall read the same story.

Maybe. In the US I think the more partisan media operations are pandering at least as much as they are influencing (I guess probably quite a bit more). The opinion bubble exists whether they sell ad space on it or not, they have some effect of making it bigger.

There's also the fun problem where the sorting and other display choices of a news aggregator are speech. Why should that speech be suppressed?

Moving the debate to evaluating accuracy is better than what we were headed towards. The conclusion stops being a race-to-the-bottom "can we even know anything?" and becomes "how can we perfect our knowledge?"

How will a system like this handle unpredictable developments reported by new or few sources?

And how will a system like this handle news or reports about events that challenge our world view?

Not everything takes the form of Trump saying random outrageous stuff that is easily verified/rejected.

Also, you may say that "Fact checked" is just an additional data point to judge whether to trust an information source, but you know as well as I do that lazy people (most people) will start thinking that "Fact checked" means truth and "Not fact checked" means lies. Even more so on Facebook.

I think, in the long run, these systems will be detrimental to peoples' ability to judge any information themselves. This is a problem for democracy.

It's not like we are starting in a place where people do a reasonable job of judging information.

I remember sitting in a library years ago as two goofballs met each other for the first time and immediately extended each other more credibility than they gave to the institutions they proceeded to ramble about. It was fascinating to watch.

Then they are not fixing the right problem.

The articles aren't being marked as Fact Checked, they are being only tagged as being Fact Checking articles.

That's interesting. Not sure it will be interpreted that way by most people, considering how many are interpreting the announcement itself. Even after reading it again and the one announcing the "fact-check" tag, it was still not obvious what they meant until I read your comments in here.

Anyway, the part regarding Facebook still stands, and we are moving in that general direction I believe.

Read the article, look at the screen shots.

Articles are being tagged with things like

'Fact Check', 'Opinion' and 'In depth'

Yes, it was clear when I wrote that... Label itself will still be misinterpreted.

I found the word accuracy applied to an advertising company quite ironic.

Censorship is about hiding information, this is adding additional information regarding accuracy, which you're free to ignore should you wish.

> Censorship is about hiding information

Google says in the blog they push Fact Checked articles up the results list (and by implication push unchecked ones down).

No, Fact Checking articles will be pushed up. People here are reading this wrongly. The articles aren't marked as checked, but as themselves being fact checks (of the overall story).

If that's true its terribly poor labeling. I guarantee the majority of folks glancing at an article and seeing that tag will interpret it as the article being vetted not an article doing the vetting.

If that's what they're doing their must be a reference article the "fact checking" article is pointing to. So I'd much rather have tags on the reference article pointing to the "fact checking" articles and tags on the "fact checking" articles pointing back to the reference article.

If that's what they're doing their must be a reference article the "fact checking" article is pointing to.

Why? Facts about a particular story are often reproduced by many sites. It's reasonable to run a check on those facts without specifically targeting a site. Snopes (which they use as an example) does this regularly.

accuracy based on what? this blog post avoids going into any detail or example of how fact checking works in practice.

Facts are falsifiable claims (e.g. there was a mass shooting in Sweden last night), not opinions where there's no objective notion of correctness. One casualty of the current political environment is that people forget what they were taught in school about the difference between facts and opinions.

Many news organizations reported that Trump mentioned a terrorist attack in Sweden the night before. The transcript shows he was ambiguous on what happened the night before.

So in this case would Google mark these news organizations, most of them reputable as far as it's possible to be today, as fact checks even though they apparently hadn't bothered to read the full transcript?

If only facts were so clear.

What if the event is hidden?

For example, the New Year's assaults in Cologne that the German government allegedly attempted to cover up.[1] That failed, but such efforts do sometimes succeed.

1: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/120...

Interesting that the "facts" in your comment have now changed since you originally posted. Is it a "terror attack" or a "mass shooting" in Sweden that you are claiming Trump referenced?

I'm sorry, what?? Not sure what fortune cookie you read this from, but fact checking is the action of investigating a claim to see if it is true or not.

Not directly. Fact checking just seems like it's an API layer in news. By proxy, you're now trusting the fact checking organizations instead of the publisher/journalist themselves. Readers will read your news if they've got that tag on there. So it helps both sides out on the surface.

It's very difficult to collude with 120 organizations dedicated to fact checking.

The actual problem is when 120 organizations disagree 50/50 about the truth, you're basically left with a consensus problem and you have to decide who's side is more trustworthy, which is a problem we had before with deciding which news organizations were trustworthy. All this is doing is moving the ball from the old guard to the new and rebranding it, because the population loves shiny new things. Or maybe the old guard is just fronting.

There also probably won't be published data about when fact checking organizations are wrong, so nothing is stopping a decently financed group from becoming an authority in this new system and then staying around for a good while. There's also no metric for success and thresholds of when badly managed fact checking organizations should be culled from the herd.

Will fact checking organizations have the balls to publish facts that put themselves in a terrible light and then self-terminate? What about the reputations of the people in that organization who move on to new organizations? Are they sufficiently punished for abusing the system?

That is what is disturbing about this: that anyone can stand up and throw the fact checking badge around. It's not state-level censorship yet (IMO).

Do you feel the same way about peer review?

Fact Checking isn't censorship. It is a process whereby someone with good reputation for factual accuracy, gauges the extent to which an article is based on accurate facts.

Ahh, how soon we will have the Ministry of Truth.

How about showing the country of record from WHOIS? Most of the severe offenders I saw in 2016 were e.g. Washington Post knockoffs using a Panama "WHOIS guard" mailing address, or sites that were literally registered to a street address in Macedonia (e.g. usapoliticszone.com). These are the sorts of sites that were tricking Trump devotees en masse in private groups (on Facebook and across the broader internet).

Surely having a real mailing address listed in WHOIS isn't too much to ask for a news organization? Google performs real verification on mailing addresses of Maps business listings – the technical infrastructure to hard-verify WHOIS mailing addresses seems to already exist.

Google News...

I follow events in Venezuela. I routinely see teleSUR garbage (Chavista's Pravda) mixed in with credible reporting on Google news. And not just the benign news these state organs always conflate with their agenda pieces; the pure Bolvarian conspiratorial left-wing dreck stuff is there too, offered as "news" by Google News. Been seeing this for years.

One guess whether teleSUR propaganda is going to suffer any "fact checking" downmods as a result of Google's sudden desire to protect us all from Trumpian untruths.

Google used to be about "organizing the world's information."

It's disappointing to see they've become "organizing the world's information that we want you to see."

This presents an issue that we've seen a lot of this political season...

Anonymous sources, how do you "fact check" them? This season has been full of supposed leaks from the FBI, White House staffers, intelligence community, DOJ, and beyond. But a single publication claiming something with an anonymous source isn't fact check-able. Then what you see is second publications posting the same story (particularly dedicated political sites like Politico/The Hill) but their only source is the first publication. Then a third publication runs it only saying that X Y and Z reported the story, implying that it is true just by virtue of the level of attention.

Everyone is talking about "alt news" (typically far right news) which is legitimately problematic, but few have been discussing the problematic way anonymous sources have been used and reported. It isn't too dissimilar from this XKCD except replace Wikipedia with third tier publications and broadcasters[0]. You can seemingly get a story verified just by repeating it enough, that's a problem.

[0] https://xkcd.com/978/

> Anonymous sources, how do you "fact check" them?

Reputation.

Some journals, and some reporters, have earned my benefit of doubt. They tend to be--where I've been able to verify--direct to their anonymous sources and do everything in their power to verify what was said. This process takes effort, for the journalist and the reader.

Except then nonsense like the "PewDiePie is a nazi" articles happens (originally WSJ but then propagated by other "reputable" newspapers) and it becomes obvious even "trustworthy" sources aren't reliable.

All media is biased because all media is gathered and edited by biased people (or as I like to call them: people). The only thing fact checking can help cutting down on is actual fake news -- hoaxes and blatantly obvious lies.

The "fake news" label however is applied so broadly now that you can have two contrasting reports standing side by side calling each other fake news when neither side is able to report on the full picture and both sides skew the few factoids they have in accordance with their biases or use inflammatory language.

I have yet to see a journal or reporter who consistently reports facts as presented while checking for authenticity and motive. It seems like certain organisations have learned that they can bypass a lot of accountability by "leaking" information anonymously rather than using official press releases (e.g. the "intelligence" sources during the late stages of the presidential election campaigning, none of which any agency seems to consider worth hunting down as a security risk like any of the real "leakers" before).

The closest I've seen is a constant chorus of "we don't know the specifics yet", which predictably doesn't perform well when competing with "news" sources that just forward unsubstantiated tweets and anonymous "eyewitness accounts".

Except then nonsense like the "PewDiePie is a nazi" articles happens

At the risk of getting very meta here in a discussion about trustworthiness. I cannot find any article on the WSJ site where they claimed that "PewDiePie is a nazi". Could you please provide a link?

Since their original article is paywalled and has been edited since, I can't find a direct quote calling him a nazi and I'm sure they didn't literally use those three words like that.

The oldest snapshot[0] on archive.org indicates the article's subheading as "Star with most subscribers posted videos in which he makes anti-Semitic jokes or content, testing media firm’s standards" which they later changed to "Move came after the Journal asked about videos in which he included anti-Semitic jokes or Nazi imagery".

The accompanying video[1] deliberately took a lot of sequences out of context and presented them as representative. Regardless of the validity of the Souther Poverty Law Center quotes[2] they deliberately suggest he is a nazi by association, especially by ending the video with the implication that The Daily Stormer (a nazi website) likes him.

Ironically The Daily Stormer has since changed its tagline from "the world's #1 PewDiePie fan site" to "the world's #1 Wall Street Journal fan site", with a composite image of the three journalists that wrote the WSJ hit piece on PewDiePie.

The WSJ presents the entire story as investigatory journalism (the WaPo[3] even calls it "investigatory") with all the characteristic window dressing like the haunting steel drum soundtrack and creepy transitions to soundbites. It includes an apology and follows it up with a SPLC quote suggesting the apology itself is just a nazi dogwhistle.

I would be far more forgiving if the entire ordeal didn't give off such a strong "old media vs new media" vibe. PewDiePie became popular with probably the most mundane and inoffensive content (gameplay videos with quirky humour) before recently shifting into more daring content, much of which is built on him calling out his critics. A lot of the nazi/anti-semitism segments the WSJ cites are actually retorts to people accusing him of these exact things and can be summarised as "Look, this is what you say I am: <nazi segment>. This is ridiculous".

I don't care much for PewDiePie's style of content, neither the old gameplay stuff nor the more recent videos. And his humour is definitely playing with societal sensibilities and at times in bad taste. But the anti-semitism accusations are willfully ignorant of the context and no more valid than the child abuse accusations against Louis CK.

Regardless of whether PewDiePie is an anti-semite/nazi or not, the style of reporting by the WSJ, WaPo, Guardian et al is sensationalist and intellectually dishonest. It calls into question their credibility on topics that actually matter, which is a net negative to the credibility of the traditional press as a whole.

[0]: http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.wsj.com/articles/di...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFY7mGkmFxo

[2]: While frequently cited because it's ostensibly "good people" the SPLC has also called Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz as "anti-Muslim extremist" (which almost everyone else seems to agree on being ridiculous and irresponsible). Appealing to their moral authority should thus be taken with a grain of salt.

[3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/1...

What's interesting and problematic is that it is exactly that kind of faith based ("reputation") belief that is causing such a split between the "alt right" news and the other news.

You might take it for granted that e.g. Washington Post, CNN, etc should be trusted but your primary reason for doing so is their age and historic pedigree. Their anonymously sourced stories sometimes don't pan out, and there's seemingly no consequence for them when that occurs.

So what's stopping people at the far right from sitting around all day poking holes in these publications anonymously sourced stories that people believe based on faith, and then holding up their own drudge (Breitbart, Fox News, etc) as equivalent? That's what allows alt news to flourish.

It is something a lot of people seem to miss. If you believe a specific piece of news based on Reputation, then that's no different from the "alt news" folks believing a different piece of news based on Reputation. Reputation is in the eye of the beholder after all.

Reputable news sources cross-check and criticize other reputable sources, and reputable sources publish corrections and retractions. They may be imperfect but they are trying to tell the truth.

Reputable news sources generally don't bother with #fakenews sites (Brietbart, Infowars, Red State, Daily Caller, The Blaze etc) because they have no interest in telling the truth.

Reputable news sources are sustained by a structure based on trained professional reporters and subeditors, fact-checkers, ombudsmen (who review complaints and publish corrections), codes of conduct etc. Fake news sites are not.

I'm curious whether there is a correlation between people's political affiliation and their likelihood to use fact checking services.

It likely changes with the party in control (i.e. members of the party in control won't spend much effort fact checking their own and fact checking a minority group doesn't matter much).

I have friends who blindly spout nonsense from the right and left sides. I would postulate that both do to a similar extent, and it depends on the issue.

Correlation is probably there but indirect: education level, age, etc influence the affiliation and their likelihood to use fact checking services.

I think The goal shouldn't be to detect fake news. The goal should be to detect whether a specific claim is true or false. For that, you simply need a site, like a crowd sourced fact checking sites, where people are required to source their arguments precisely, unlike fake news which doesn't. Then you have a resource to turn to, similarly to how fact checkers are used in the face of fake news. After that, you can build an engine to crawl news articles or have them submitted, and detect the claims being made. Those claims can be either auto-matched to existing ones or create new ones (deduplication) and then the site has a fresh new stream of claims to fact check. StackOverflow could build this site on their existing engine. If someone here knows them, can you reply and put me in touch?

What is to keep these fact checking organizations free from manipulation & spreading g propaganda? Will Google use this feature to further their own interests alone? If the answer to that is 'no,' how can we be sure they won't?

Just publish proof that their fact checking is lying?

Rumours spread fast. Corrections to rumours don't fully negate the rumours.

Journalists are also held less accountable than even elected officials these days.

Wait, are you arguing for or against fact checking?

I'm for it.

I'm saying that it doesn't really solve the problem of lies in mass media and the impact of the lies. It's a mitigating factor at best, a polarizer at worst.

Sure, but the cost of free press is that basically anyone can publish whatever crap they want.

Fact checking is a good tool (critical thinking and self-verification would be better). What can save time over time is to know which publications continously publish the most verifiable truths. Albeit always reading with vigilance.

In what way would fact checking be polarizing?

Fact checking is a good tool (critical thinking and self-verification would be better).

Humans don't act this way and don't respond to it. The media isn't out to inform people through content, but to program people through delivery.

The only result of this will be to have people say "SEE! GOOGLE SAYS IT'S TRUE/FAKE!" And they'll share the headline on Facebook/Twitter and be done with it.

People don't act rationally anymore, especially when it comes to media.

Media outlets have agendas. The press hasn't been free in a long time. https://medium.com/@SarahRRunge/amazon-the-washington-post-a...

Which can get censored by the same algorithms.

Through that outlet, theoretically, sure. Wouldn't stop it though.

Considering the fake news movement is itself in large part propaganda google has chosen sides in this already and absolutely shouldn't be trusted.

Sorry. You'll have to explain yourself in a bit more depth. At first reading that sounds like confused nonsense which I'm sure doesn't give your argument the merit it deserves.

Pizzagate is a pretty classic example of "fake news". How is criticism of it in any way "propaganda"?

There's been over 1500 pedophilia and sex trafficking arrests since Trump took office. It may be less fake than you think.

Sadly the answer to this and many similar questions about society, politics and power is and always will be "we can't be sure".

Eternal vigilance and a dedication to the open society and Enlightenment values are the best we can do.

We can't be sure, and they won't always be perfectly honest, but if you're billing yourself as a fact checker, you're trying to appeal to people who are interested in the truth in the first place.

You can apply some spin and get away with it (and this will happen) but if you tell flat out lies, people will notice.

This isn't a panacea, but it is a step in the right direction.

You can significantly lie in your narrative by choosing what to fact check.

I'd much prefer if Google let me opt in to the fact checking organizations I trust.

Of course then some idiots will pick Infowars as their fact checker.

I think this is going down the wrong path. I would not trust an advertising company to fact check, or even link to fact checking tools.

This kind of actions are important now more than ever for western societies. We have to remember that Russia is committed to destroy democratic institutions using fake news as one of its tools. Using fake news is an old trick to distort reality. In the pass it was done controlling state media or a good part of it. Now is making it into your Facebook feed.

Does anybody have any examples on how fact checking is automated?

Is it a mix of natural language processing and database cross-checks?

I reckon they use a mix of NLP and ontologies.

Wish this was up and running back in 2003, when the invasion of Iraq started based on fabricated evidence on WMD.

Then the media would just hide behind the fact that the fabricated evidence was coming from the intel agencies.

FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) has been at work since 1986 -- see their archives for 2003[1].

"Fake news" is not a new issue, this has always existed, and the real antidote is the same now as it has always been: critical thinking.

[1] http://fair.org/extra-issues/

If it was up and running back in 2003, the fact checkers would have been saying that there were WMD's in Iraq.

That's doubtful. My understanding is that most bodies outside of the special pentagon task force established by the WH at the time were skeptical.

But a lot of news around elections is about predictions of the future which you can't really fact-check. A lot of other news these days is in the form of 'opinions', which you also have to accept for what they are.

So few companies have so much power with generating and spreading information.

This is a good time for the industry to organize a new open and transparent Wikileaks style organization to make the decisions on what's fake or not.

Then who monitors the monitoring organisation? A centralised solution to information oligopolies cannot work.

Agreed. An important part to this is transparency of the members working on this as well. Almost every fact-checker I've read up on has a conflict of interest on many of the "facts" they're checking.

Only court can prove that something is fake or not fake. Other solutions are vulnerable.

Extreme example: Russian plane was shoot at Black sea in 2001, and Ukraine is blamed by every article in internet you can find, but not by court.

I'm 100% sure that every fact-check organization, except court, will confirm mainstream «fact».

Expanding fact checking at Google?

Fine.

DuckDuckGo[1] it is for me, then.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/about

What would a fact checker say about Iraq & WMDs prior to the US invasion?

I'll decide what I'll believe and what is fact. Not an algorithm or search engine.

It seems like Google is trying to make the old statement " its printed it must be true" new. "Its fact check on Google it must be true."

The joy of reading online is coming under attack.

1984 here we come. Was nice playing with you, humans - until next time! Oh, there is no next time? Well...

Instead of fact checking, they should show opinions from every side of issues across the spectrum.

That's what they do now. It's why I know that vaccines cause autism, and global warming is a myth.

Opinions and facts are distinct. Opinions separate out into categories of "agree", "disagree", "don't care", etc. Facts separate out into very different categories of "true", "untrue", "unsubstantiated either way", etc.

Yes, its good to be exposed to a broad spectrum of opinions. Yes, different sources can select different true facts to push an agenda and substantiate their own cause, and it is thus important to get true facts from multiple sources to get a complete picture. No, it is not a good idea to put unsubstantiated "facts" or outright untruths on equal footing as the truth.

You have to put all "facts" out there to show they are untrue. Who determines the "facts"? Conspiracy theorists get confirmation bias when you ignore them.

Facts are not hard to check. No one knows when and why fact checkers disagree. Fact checkers can't check intentions of a speaker nor do they follow up.

Bad move. A search engine should not be valuing certain websites more just because they proclaim to be "fact checkers". For example, politifact is usually trusty but some of their judgements are highly questionable. But Google will trust them and display their link prominently, even when it might be total bullshit.

Yeah, but this isn't their search site, this is their news site. Google has become more than just a search engine.

"We’re also launching the fact check tag in these countries on news mode in Search"

So now it's also integrated into Google Search

I can honestly say I have never went into "news mode" on the main search site before. If I know I want to search for news stories I go to news.google.com and search there. At any rate you have to choose "news mode", it is not in the normal search screen.

I try to keep my facts in check, any examples of questionable politifact judgements?

Even if some were questionable, it doesn't mean there's a hidden agenda. Unlike the real 'fake news' outlets, where truth is intentionally skewed, hidden or muddied, with the intent of attracting the most eyeballs.

Attacking reputable sources -- which Trump does all the time -- is the main way to con supporters so they'll keep believing their #fakenews lies.

As is getting into arguments about fake news and continuing the meme. Figuring out how to work from a common set of facts is important, but this meme distracts from other important issues.

Fake news sites often have no "facts" at all. That's why people don't bother fact checking them. At worst, they'll crop up when somebody uses fake news for political purposes, example being Trump's racist birther lies, or his lies about crime rates.

Today's problem is that Trump is using the #fakenews label to attack reputable sources that call him out on his lies. This is an attempt to establish a false equivalence, and it's the core issue. It's extremely damaging to American democracy.

As many reputable news organizations (including the BBC) have pointed out, Trump is taking the same approach as Hitler, Mao and other dictators, and going directly against the line that previous US presidents have taken (at least, in public).

I understand where you're coming from. Take a step back. When you argue about this, who is your audience? What do you want to accomplish? Are you trying to mobilize people who already agree with you? Reach people on the fence? Convince those who disagree? How does your message sound to your intended audience?

Who you're trying to reach is up to you. I believe that using the term "fake news" is very unhelpful. At this point it's effectively without definition except as a perjorative dismissal, so you'll nearly always be discussing something with a different meaning for each party unless care is taken to define it upfront. If you're anti-Trump, you're continuing a meme used effectively by Trump himself. This meme is being used to further polarize, every side pointing to the others as being at fault.

Edit to add: Please don't misinterpret this to mean I don't think critical reading of news and calling out misrepresentation of facts or outright lies is important. This is very important. Doing so under the banner of fake news distracts so much from this effort that it works against it.

> I believe that using the term "fake news" is very unhelpful.

True, but it's the term Donald Trump uses to try to discredit sources that are not fake news. This is a matter of fact.

> At this point it's effectively without definition except as a perjorative dismissal

No. Fake news is completely made up news that is designed to look like real news in order to deceive readers, usually for profit. Examples: Trump was born in Pakistan, Pizzagate, George Soros paid protesters etc.

This is also a matter of fact.

Look at how people are using the term, including Trump. Look at the discussions here on HN. Memes like "fake news" have the meaning as they are used, regardless of a strict definition you'd like to keep it to. If you think you can convince everyone to use your definition and only your definition, best of luck to you, though I think that battle is already lost. If you're content knowing that you're using the correct definition and others are wrong, I fear you're not going to be effective in getting your message across.

I fear I'm in a similar situation with respect to this argument; at least in terms of my presentation, so I'll leave it at that. My sincere best wishes.

Well, I pointed out the factual uses. I'm not responsible for other people misusing the term (as Trump does) or failing to understand it. I'll leave you with Politifact:

QUOTE:

Fake news is made-up stuff, masterfully manipulated to look like credible journalistic reports that are easily spread online to large audiences willing to believe the fictions and spread the word. In 2016, the prevalence of political fact abuse – promulgated by the words of two polarizing presidential candidates and their passionate supporters – gave rise to a spreading of fake news with unprecedented impunity. Fake news: Hillary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of a pizza shop. Fake news: Democrats want to impose Islamic law in Florida. Fake news: Thousands of people at a Donald Trump rally in Manhattan chanted, "We hate Muslims, we hate blacks, we want our great country back." None of those stories – and there are so many more like them – is remotely true.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/dec/13/...

Here you go:https://www.google.com/amp/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/politifa... ,and this one:http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/414434/politifact-and-m...

Can't read the first source, but the National Review should never be cited as a legitimate source (the second link). It also reads like an almost raving rant...

I've seen excellent articles in National Review from time to time. I'm not a regular reader by any means, but a blanket statement like this isn't useful. It leans conservative, but it's also pretty upfront about that fact.

It doesn't just "lean conservative," it is an explicitly conservative opinion journal, and an excellent one. Even if you are not a conservative, it's a great source for understanding conservative thought.

I think you've just demonstrated why it's dangerous to have a single official keeper of truth. You're conflating policy judgments with factual correctness, but facts don't necessarily directly lead to policies. We must first judge the facts through our personal lenses of values, and that can lead to different conclusions.

National Review certainly has a political bias, but they're generally pretty good with keeping contact with reality, factually. The fact that they arrive at different conclusions is no reason to try to blacklist them.

It's just "National Review" and it's the preeminent conservative opinion journal. If it's illegitimate, then there can be no legitimate opposition I suppose? Maybe that's your point?

I couldn't read the WSJ article through that link or through a google search.

I read through the NR article, and while the attempts to contact the authors of the fact check was lacking, I don't see the problem in the fact check itself.

ACA was basically saying you can't discriminate against any state licensed and certified health practitioner.

While I think homeopathy is bullshit, I don't see how else to do it, and claiming it gives "elevated legitimacy to alternative medicine" is misleading at best.

It's really far fetched as an attempt to show politifacts questionability.

I'm more inclined by the lack of evidence to the contrary to consider them generally trustworthy.

As a matter of fact, the ACA does legitimize alternative medicine by mandating that state licensure be the standard of legitimacy. Whether that's troubling or not is matter of opinion. As an opinion writer, Kevin Williamson shared his opinion. Politifact then disagreed with him, not on the merits of his premises, but on the argument itself. This would be perfectly acceptable as a rebuttal in the form of an editorial, but instead it was given an air of authority in a "fact check." This is a genre meant to convey to the reader that certain "facts" are beyond debate among serious people. It makes the journalist, or the "fact checker," the arbiter of what conversation can be considered "legitimate." It's so popular because it gives center-left readers the warm feeling of "knowing" that they need not confront and deal with an opposing argument. It can be dismissed as a lie. Ots done under the auspices of cold, disinterested public service, but it's comical to believe that the "fact checkers" are somehow immune from bias in a way other journalists are not. I'm sure a quick Google search for more examples would be fruitful if anyone were interested, but I assume that like all things people have already made up their minds on this.

But the basis for the "fact check" is right there on the site, they aren't hiding anything. State licensure is a reasonable standard. It's otherwise difficult to specify exactly what should and shouldn't be covered. It would also be more federal control. An editorial can claim that it legitimizes something, but clarifying what the ACA actually does (regardless of what you and I think of the effects) and concluding that it is misleading isn't editorializing.

A nice analysis of one politifact article:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/02/trump-4-politi...

Note that there are many such examples. Another exceedingly silly piece:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jan/...

It's almost like a child wrote it. It "fact-checks" a reasonable guess.

> But Google will trust them

Google will label them as 'Fact Check'.

And that's kind of what I expect from a news aggregator. Perfect addition really.

What if the popularity based content curation creates problems like mobs, genocide, destruction of democracies, destruction of alliances, destruction of the environment, destruction of institutions?

Think of smaller non-digital social groups and how bad a rumour can affect somebodies lives and how helpful is to have somebody respected who can break the positive feedback loop. Pre-digital communities faced similar problems of the digital media and they were able to build mechanisms to cope with these.

These companies are trying to implement similar mechanism to break these loops and are going to be effective only if the fact checking organisations do good job.

If it works our, we can have the information spread freely but displayed in a context. So If you a fact checking organisation proves to be reliable, users will be able to have more accurate understanding of the reality.

If the fact checkers fail, people will just disregard the judgements of these.

I somewhat agree, except that I don't think there is a useful objective metric for ranking search results. Or what would you suggest? PageRank can be played with SEO shenanigans.

So if somebody searches for vaccines, how should the anti-vaxxers and pro-vaxxers be ranked? Just because somebody has an opinion, does it deserve to be presented as likely as every other opinion? What if I start a new movement vaccines have a chance to turn people into spiderman, should my theory also rank equally to other vaccine sites?

<So if somebody searches for vaccines, how should the anti-vaxxers and pro-vaxxers be ranked? Just because somebody has an opinion, does it deserve to be presented as likely as every other opinion?

Real example. Bextra. Dr prescribed. Immediate loss of strength in legs especially climbing stairs.

Pro sites gave all +++ chat sites gave common experiences.

I want Google to not touch their search. They can put a good housekeeping tag on search results but don't remove them from my world

You mean you would have wanted a search result that talked about the side effect you experienced? Fair enough, but it is not clear that it didn't show up because of Google ranking, or maybe it simply didn't exist? In any case, this seems to be about a real side effect, not an imagined one.

I suppose I'm ignorant but I assumed search didn't qualify things. Like if it's true or not or somewhere in between.

I used Google to see if others had bextra problems. And thankfully a link appeared.

Now i hope these reactive changes don't eliminate content. Let my fingers do the clicking (so to speak)

There are always some ranking factors at play for ordering the search results.

you've pointed out something wrong with politifact but think about how many times it has been used to debunk falsehoods. One bad case doesn't negate the whole source, that bad case just needs to be fixed.

it seems we're taking a step back with education, and credible news sources are being actively de-legitimized which will no doubt lead to more confusion and fake/propaganda news affecting large numbers of voters beliefs.

I think Google has an opportunity to help with this problem. I think all tech companies should take this problem on so that voters are at least making their decisions based on facts. I think this should be the biggest priority right now.

Assaults on free speech always come with arguments of moral righteousness.

A service to the public needs to actually credibly serve the public. A bakery cannot refuse to cater a wedding, ever if they find the clients repulsive because they are two dudes, or whatever reason they have. Google should not be permitted to discriminate or censor search results, even if they find the clients repulsive because they are 4chan users, or whatever reason they have.

> Google should not be prohibited to discriminate or censor search results[...]

You're right, filtering results would be a concerning step. I guess this is why they've added a fact check tag rather than a filter. I think it's a good solution.

But then again, free speech doesn't mean you have the right to have your results shown on the first page of Google. If they change their algorithm to preference articles with fact checking, is it the same as someone refusing to make a wedding cake for two dudes?

I know, I just used the 4chan example because it's an example of censorship that they're already doing. I haven't gone through to check the legitimacy of Google's fact checking efforts although I have a feel it's going to be awful.

Google is not public service though, it's a multi-billion dollar advertising corporation.

They are totally at liberty to do whatever the hell they like, however much they want to portray themselves as non-evil and in the public interest.

So you're also vehemently against public accommodation, fair housing and other equal-treatment laws? Or you're doublethinking.

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