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patrickaljord

I wonder how far they are willing to go with this. How about these kinds of claims:

"Increasing the minimum wage helps improve the economy"

* Fact check by Conservative-example: false

* Fact check by Progressive-example: true

Another good one:

"God exists":

* Fact check by Conservative-example: true

* Fact check by Progressive-example: false

This is going to be fun. This is typical of Google, providing a technical solution to a human problem that can't be solved easily. Not everything can be tweaked with an algorithm.

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> “God exists ... > Fact check by Progressive-example: false

I know you’re making an observation so this isn’t directed at you, but to those who got us to this segregation - so no offense intended towards you friend.

It makes me so sad that this is the assumption. Yes, the traditional definition of God is not one many of us subscribe to, but to generally group progressives and atheists together, conservatives and religion together is just as much the problem as “fake news”.

Reference, myself, a progressive who found his spirituality in his late twenties while working at a startup and finding the church of consumerism unacceptable. Yet, look at that, still progressive.

Well, in the US, most people believe in God, regardless of political affiliation. The % of Democrats that are also atheists is larger, but it's still under 15%.

True, but "nones" (those with no religious affiliation) are on the rise, now accounting for a fifth of the U.S. population, and the overwhelming reason for that is a backlash against the religious right.

Sources: Gallup, https://www.sociologicalscience.com/articles-vol1-24-423/

The "Nones" are actually two different groups of people:

(1) Those with religious belief but no religious affiliation. They believe in God and/or an afterlife, but they don't participate in or identify with any organised religion.

(2) Those with neither religious belief nor affiliation. They say that there is no good reason to believe that God exists and that when we die we irreversibly cease to exist.

Both groups are growing, but group (1) is significantly bigger than group (2).

I'm not sure how helpful it really is to lump these two groups together.

Unfortunately, while I personally appreciate you sharing this, I thought I'd mention that I think you are being downvoted because your post is too far off the primary topic--which is an appropriate reason to downvote--and not because your idea does not contain merit (I think that it does).

"Progressive" and "Conservative" are sometimes used in extra-political contexts this way, e.g. in linguistics when characterizing dialects.

> “God exists ... > Fact check by Progressive-example: false

Not even false. Religion is immune to fact checks.

But if you introduce categories that are immune to fact checking the flat earth society will claim that too. Same for evolution.

That is the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is when one of those is prohibited from publishing "fact checks" because they "don't meet our high standards" (which Google is free to set as they see fit) and the other is free to declare "false" anything opposing tribe says because everybody knows they're the bunch of damn liars anyway.

Also, "fact checkers" are free to misinterpret the content of the article, i.e.:

"Increasing the minimum wage helps improve the economy"

* Fact check by Conservative-example:

Claim: "we should take all the money away from successful people and give it free to drug addicts and moochers"

Verdict: false

* Fact check by Progressive-example:

Claim: "we should let poor people to just die from hunger"

Verdict: false

etc. Neither of that contributes to the discussion much, in fact, it makes it harder by caricaturising positions of opposing sides and making it harder to discuss arguments on the manner, while wearing the veil of "objective fact checking". The expression "fact checking", which once meant verifying objective facts, has already been hijacked by propagandists to make their propaganda more plausibly sounding. I predict more such abuse is going to happen and the term would be further eroded until it's completely meaningless.

But your examples aren't 'facts', they're 'opinions'. Unless we're going to just throw away the definition of 'fact', we shouldn't be pretending that those example claims can possible be 'fact'.

> But your examples aren't 'facts', they're 'opinions'.

Exactly.

> we shouldn't be pretending that those example claims can possible be 'fact'.

We shouldn't. But "we" do all the time. Slapping API and UI with Google logo on it won't change that. But it would let people pretend that now these are "facts" - after all, the source of all knowledge in the universe, Almighty Google says right here "fact check"! How's that not a fact?!

Yes, but that's actually a great thing. It allows Google to discern controversy. If people disagree about a fact, that's fine, Google can choose how to present facts that have that property. For the ones people do agree about, they can present them as truth.

There are things that are false that everyone believes and things that are true that nobody believes...

Google's algorithns weren't designed to tell the truth, only to tell what's popular.

Thank you. For example, one of the worst forms of evidence, that is not permitted as science, is eye witness testimony. People are too fallible be relied on. We only forget that because of our judicial system, unfortunately. But what's even worse than that is what's next in line: a collection of testimonial opinions, or a democracy on truth, especially one run by a non-opensource algorithm.

Maybe nothing bad will come of this, but every step Google makes has me worried that they will abuse their power. There's something that seems dangerous about a nation of people fact checking primarily via a single corporation.

Remember when NASA burned up the Challenger space shuttle because of the groupthink that prevented a couple engineers from letting everyone know that they knew this would happen? And NASA is not evil, nor have incentives to allow this, which is why we need to work together to be dilligent to protect ourselves from these problems--they easily sneak in.

Otherwise known as "common sense". If this in an engine to promote common sense then we're just digging ourselves a bigger hole.

I'm not sure what your point is. If a thing is true but nobody believes it, then there is no way to determine that truth from Google searches in the first place.

That's exactly my point. Google is advertising this as a truth-telling mechanism, but it's a "majority belief" telling one instead.

Did you actually read the link? It's clear that this Google feature is designed to identify fact checks from websites, as opposed to providing an authoritative fact check itself.

If you run a website that hosts fact checks, you are now encouraged to annotate these fact check articles with "ClaimReview" elements that describe the fact in question and your website's verdict on the fact.

In the search results, users see "Fact check by Example.com". Google does not present fact checks as a "truth-telling mechanism" in any way, shape, or form.

> In the search results, users see "Fact check by Example.com"

Correction, the users sees "Fact Check by example.com: False"

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/images/...

If that is Google is not "presenting as truth-telling mechanism", it's a hell of a dark pattern.

It is completely clear that the fact check comes from a particular source. Stop calling it a "dark pattern" when this element is not deceptive in any way, shape or form.

It's not like people didn't know how to disagree on the internet before. Google, however, purports to structure this disagreement in a way that predefines certain semantic roles. For example, it designates one content provider as "fact-checker", and their claims as inherently more authoritative (because fact-check is always more authoritative than the article under the check, isn't it?) and capable of rendering verdicts which can not be further challenged, while the other role is completely passive - and even the claims are formulated not by the original article but by the checker, leaving the whole authority only in the hands of the checker role.

This does not look like a good setup to structure the discussion. Why somebody would get so much authority just for using some API? It's like giving people password-less sudo access and then wondering will it work well.

Why are you assuming that Google is going to trust these people implicitly? They are providing markup so they can associate claims of fact with identities. They can then choose how to weight those claims using other evidence.

> Why are you assuming that Google is going to trust these people implicitly?

How are they going not to? Hand-verify each provider and each claim? Not scalable and volatile, reliable site today can become trashy in two years. It's either completely uncurated list (welcome, 4chan trolls, food bonanza for you!) or list curated according to biases of a small overworked team isolated somewhere deep in the guts of Google corporate behemoth. What other options are there for selection?

> They are providing markup so they can associate claims of fact with identities

URLs already provide that markup. Google's markup assigns specific elevated role to "fact-checkers", implying they are somehow more authoritative than the original article, otherwise there won't be any need for special designated status for them.

> They can then choose how to weight those claims using other evidence.

That's what I am afraid of - that they (Google) would choose to weight the claims according to how they see fit, thus blocking from me information they consider not necessary for me and skewing my informational stream.

It's more important to start with the easy stuff than to worry about the hard stuff.

And this isn't about a technical solution to conspiracy theories, it's about the markup that will help surface the highest quality human answers to conspiracy theories.

Reminds me of the Bielefeld Conspiracy [0], a German satire of conspiracy theories that spread on Usenet.

The theory poses three questions:

1) Do you know anybody from Bielefeld?

2) Have you ever been to Bielefeld?

3) Do you know anybody who has ever been to Bielefeld?

A majority are expected to answer no to all three queries.

Anybody claiming knowledge about Bielefeld is promptly disregarded as being in on the conspiracy or having been themselves deceived.

Conspiracy theories will always be with us, but at least now Google can help show high-quality answers to easy questions like Bielefeld.

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

>I wonder how far they are willing to go with this.

It's reducing assertions to single sentences. Calling it fact-checking is also deceptive. That phrase is a tool of the media to get viewers to stop looking at counter-arguments and to take the pundit's side. It's another 'headline' and for sure, will have click-bait content from news companies.

It would be different if it showed the assertions and then linked to rebuttals (and then linking rebuttals to rebuttals -- like debate, you have a limited number of "rounds" constrained by the amount of space Google will allow you). However, dropping a bool is going too far. That's implying the matter is settled, and for politics, it isn't likely to be settled. For sure, it needs "mostly true/false" and "partially true/false".

Agree with you. It actually not boolean though:

-1 = "Hard to categorize"

1 = "False"

2 = "Mostly false"

3 = "Half true"

4 = "Mostly true"

5 = "True"

What it doesn't have though is "debatable" or "unknown". As if we always have perfect information. "Hard to categorize" one fits more for unintelligible questions which don't make sense at all.

I guess google could assign "debatable" if for the same claim different sources assign different truth. But that's pretty wack too, because a single source can't concede that a question is debatable and is forced to pick a side.

I had interpreted the "hard to categorize" as "hard to put in any of the other categories", which could also mean "unknown" or "conflicting information".

> This is typical of Google, providing a technical solution to a human problem that can't be solved easily.

Google didn't want to do this. It was the traditional media attacking google, facebook and social media after the last election.

> Not everything can be tweaked with an algorithm.

It's not a tweak. It's getting google to align with the traditional media's rhetoric.

If washingtonpost or the nytimes says X, then google has to adhere to X.

I'm not sure I understand this objection.

Google already lists sites that claim god does and does not exist (and many variations on those themes) and presumably will return them in searches based on whatever the Google algorithm does. This new thing just lets the site encode that information for machine readability when it is responding to a specific published claim.

These kinds of claims are almost never what fact-checkers are after, even in places with particular political leanings.

> Not everything can be tweaked with an algorithm.

But the problem they are trying to solve was kind of caused by algorithms..

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