Ask HN: Site that tells you if news/video link is starting down extremist path? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Site that tells you if news/video link is starting down extremist path?

2 pointssupernova87a5 comments

I wonder if anyone has created such a website, where you could submit a video link / news URL, and it would tell you to what extent this seems to be at the beginning of a fringe / extremist / reinforcing unhealthy "fake news" kind of directions?

I am especially interested in trying to help family / etc. who are not very sophisticated in their browsing habits be able to check themselves at least, with some kind of external measure of whether a website is reasonable or not. For example, based on the links / associations / authors / circles that some video or news site has, is this likely to be an objective source of info, or down a hole of extremism?

I would be really interested if someone has come across this.

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A related issue here is that the video you're watching may not be extremist content, but may be in a niche that extremist content gets recommended to. I've noticed this happens with YouTube and any video regarding Boxing for some reason.

I'd wager money that there's a bigger issue here than individual videos themselves; you can take down one video but you're not stopping the slow tide that converts people.

Much remains unknown about recommender systems and their alleged promotion of extremist content. I am not sure whether even people at Google fully understand the dynamics in YouTube. Here is one recent paper:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.11225.pdf

So while it seems that blindly relying on algorithms may indeed push people toward niche/extremist/pseudo-science/etc. content, people are more likely end to these rabbit holes through links posted on other websites, including social media. That is, some people deliberately want to consume such content.

But as said, much remains unclear.

How do you see this being different from fact checking sites (Politifact, etc.)?

There are several attempts to rank the reliability of newspapers. Check for instance:

https://iffy.news/

For US audiences and fact-checkers, RAND maintains a comprehensive catalog of lists and tools:

https://www.rand.org/research/projects/truth-decay/fighting-...

These lists have been frequently used in attempts to train ML models for detecting dis-/misinformation, but I think the results are somewhat questionable.

You can also enter into an endless debate over the reliability of the ranks and the rankers. Further limitations include limited geographic coverage, slow-pace curation and inability to pick-up "flash websites" designed for propaganda dissemination, and so forth.

Ground.news does give some background checks to an article

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