Hacker News Reader

Comment by nahimn | Hacker News Reader

Finally something viable to combat fake news

I'm cautiously optimistic. I like that this emphasizes use of primary sources, but

1) Some primary sources are dubious, or manipulated. See the multiple versions of Acosta getting kicked out of a White House press briefing.

2) What happens when you have an article that repeatedly cites dubious secondary opinion pieces, but the reader accepts these pieces as fact?

1) Now that video deepfake is a thing, I currently only allow videos as primary sources in rare circumstances (such as the video being published by a verified account of the subject). 2) Only primary sources are accepted. Currently anyone can start contributing, but every claim is still reviewed by a team of verified fact checkers. I hope to scale this long term with a fact checking reputation score.

Aren't text and images more easily manipulated than videos?

Haha indeed, but you can't just submit any document and have it considered a primary source on the site. For example, if you're making an assertion about a piece of legislation, the primary source is that legislation hosted on that government's website. If your assertion is about a regulatory action, the primary source is that action hosted on that regulatory agency's website, etc.

Russian government backed trolls will use this system to spread fakes instead. Wikipedia has similar system and Russians abuse it a lot.

Can you back this up with examples?

Examples of hoaxes backed by Russian government trolls, or examples of abuse of Wikipedia and other sites by Russian government trolls? I have both.

The latter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com