
If you were asked to solve the 'fake news' problem, how would you solve it? - deepakravindran
I am working on a new idea Shrimp ( domain shri.mp), and our mission is to fix the fake news problem.<p>We have nailed down the user experience in three directions. I would love your thoughts on these three ideas - 
1)Build a secure browser so that it can work across the web and mobile devices which will automatically sync up with an online database of all the fake news articles, so whenever someone clicks on a link, he will be alerted. We initially built a Chrome extension and decided to scale it up using Firefox source code.<p>2)Develop a software like an antivirus which scans every link that you receive through social media especially via messengers such as WhatsApp and Fb where they spread the fake news. There is also a synergy that I see using existing networks such as Reddit or Jelly user&#x27;s to vote down the new articles which are fake and not just sending out patches or updates.<p>3)Build a rating system for journalists where we can rate the authenticity of articles based on that like NY times will embed our code just like how they do for like button - it will act like a trust score.<p>Do let me know your thoughts :)
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philiphodgen
"How do you 'solve' fake news?" is a question fraught with peril.

What does "solve" mean?

What does "fake news" mean?

Is it possible that opinions may vary on what these two things mean?

On these points, reasonable people of good will can have differing points of
view.

In my more cynical moments, however, I hear the echoes of the beginnings of
the war on drugs. Except far more frightening -- because this is a war on
thinking. By people who sincerely think they are doing a noble act.

If you want to do something about the problem, cut demand. Make smarter
readers.

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pcvarmint
You can't solve it anymore than you can have 100% "objective" news.

People need to be free to read all viewpoints and come up with their own
opinions.

Most of the time, news is called "fake" because it says things which, in the
context of our preconceived values, leads to contradictions or absurdities.
Viewed from a different value system, the same facts can have totally
different meanings and consequences. Other times, "fake news" is just smear
tactics for a larger political agenda.

A site claiming to identify or prevent "fake news" just winds up being another
opinion site.

~~~
NeutronBoy
I agree. You need to be able to differentiate between 'types' of fake news. It
means different things to different people. Three perspectives I can think of
at the top of my head, but it's a sliding scale:

1\. Flatout lies with no factual basis (Hillary Clinton/Donald Trump is a
lizard person from Mars)

2\. Mis-truths of accepted facts, or mis-representation of statistics (climate
change)

3\. Opinions that you don't agree with (ACA is good/bad, or The Media is
good/bad)

~~~
sheepmullet
We are already very good at detecting and routing around #1.

The problem is people use #2 and #3 to build up ideologies in the same way
that advertisers build up brands.

Take for example the wage gap between genders.

There is a moderate wage gap (20-30%) if you look at unadjusted figures.

Fringe feminists try and use this stat to build a general sense of unease with
their followers.

This primes the reader for a few anecdotes of women being unfairly passed over
for promotion and the reader walks away thinking there is a widespread issue
of women being treated poorly in the workplace.

White nationalists do the same thing. It is a fact that African Americans make
up a disproportionate amount of murderers by race.

White nationalists will then use a few anecdotes of African Americans killing
innocent white families and the reader walks away with a negative impression
of African Americans.

And now see what I've just done with my comment: I've linked white
nationalists and feminists.

By placing these two examples together I am connecting them for the reader and
subtly discrediting these feminists.

------
20years
My biggest concern is who determines what is fake news? Seems as though people
are now shouting "fake news" if a story doesn't fit within their belief system
or agenda.

I don't think a voting platform is the solution either because you then get
the herd mentality and it can so easily be gamed.

I am not even convinced that "fake news" is the issue. I am more on the side
that our society has lost its ability to truly evaluate what they read or have
any real level of critical thinking at all. If more of our society questioned
what they read or even took the time to truly read things, I am not so sure
this would be an issue. Rather, so many simply go by what an excerpt says in
their Facebook or Twitter feed or what their followers are saying.

------
pizza
Cryptography - centralized/decentralized certification of special <article
news-UUID=<some long hash> > elements. User can install cert authorities like
[NYT, RT, Reuters] or whatever their preference, who serve as independent
consensus auditors of sorts. To prevent leakage of which user is reading which
article, maybe repurpose some kind of provably-anonymous voting scheme like
[0]. Then use the look up of the hash of the article to name it

[0]
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.05000.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.05000.pdf)

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jelliclesfarm
I am not a technical person. This is a non coder/lay person's point of view,
okay?

With that disclaimer, there are some things you have to do: 1. Determine a lie
detection strategy. Memes mutate. Tracking the way news changes and differs
ever so slightly would require some kind of crawler bot that constantly
compares and contrasts several versions and iterations of the same news. Can
real news mutate? Probably not. Fake news would keep changing with each
pattern because that's it's purpose..to spread and it would use every
advantage it can find..2. Pattern recognition. There is a certain pattern to
how fake news channels spreads before it comes main stream. 3. Reputation
system or rankings. 4. Humans develop deception detection methods as we get
more exposed to more deception. So to detect fake news, expose your (what I
can only imagine) code or bots or whatever to fake news. 5. Karl popper's
falsifiability. Science has the demarcation problem to distinguish between
science and pseudoscience. I would like to think of it as science vs
unexplained phenomena or non-science.(example: I don't think homeopathy is
pseudo science and am reluctant to label it as such..I am also reluctant to
label it science) Study scientific method in theory before getting into
technical code.

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stephancoral
The most effective and proven way to deal with "fake news" is to establish a
Ministry of Truth.

~~~
deepakravindran
"Ministry of Truth." Love it! :)

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RikNieu
I'm afraid that you might need to validate this idea before jumping in and
spending a lot of time and money on it.

The problem is people who fall for and spread fake news don't want to be told
it's fake news, they just want to have their world views validated.

~~~
deepakravindran
Agree with your point on how people fall for it - but the most important thing
we are trying to solve here are the actual credible facts - and not opinions
of those facts. :)

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rchaud
After attending a recent hackathon focused on this topic, I came away thinking
most of the solutions were emphasizing some kind of automated fact checking
solution.

I don't know if that alone will fix it. Fake news exists because people want
to believe it, and are willing to lower their bullshit meters in order to use
the article as "ammunition" in a political argument with their
friends/family/Twitter egg. People aren't looking for "antivirus" tools to
stop fake news; they're actively looking to share links that confirm their
view of the world. It doesn't even matter if the link has a "wordpress.org" or
"blogspot.com" domain. We live in a time when people don't even read the
articles, they just look at the headline and jump into the comments to fight
someone.

To fight fake news effectively, perhaps we need to do a better job of
uncovering why people apparently have so much time to spend on the Internet to
argue with people they'll never meet. Perhaps while we're at it, we could also
look into why we have a political system where legalized bribery ('lobbying')
gives preferential access to the powerful. We're at the point where winning
elections is based less on getting enough people to agree with your vision,
and more on playing one group of disaffected voters off against another.

I wish you luck, but I believe this is a people problem, not a tech problem.

------
wazanator
Rate the writer not the publisher. Get your users interested in the writings
of individuals instead of who they write for. News providing companies are
like any other, some workers are lazy and others actually really care.

If Bob is posting fake news block him instead of blocking company XYZ because
Cindy who also works for XYZ actually puts out good articles.

Be careful of straying into defamation territory. Don't name and shame. For
lack of a better term shadow ban the writer.

~~~
grzm
I agree that keeping track of writers is important. I currently don't have an
easy way to do that. Anyone aware of a source that rates journalists in a
centralized manner?

I think it is important to keep in mind the publisher, as they do have a
responsibility for choosing the articles and journalists they publish. If it
becomes clear that a publisher has a tendency to publish low quality (for
various measures of quality), I think it does make sense to take that into
account for anything else the publisher may publish.

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dimodi9
I believe one of the hardest elements here is to battle with the incentives of
those that publish such news. In effect a "crowd" based approach could help to
distinguish signal from noise, that said, fake-new publishers will inevitably
use bot-nets to counter act any crowd-based check.

Aside from human curation by a trusted group - which is extremely expensive -
the only solution I can think of is a share-profit system to be implemented in
already trusted news services and brands, so that more people can monetize
their news articles. That way, you can use existing journalists to validate
all news, and their brand to distribute, while providing incentives to niche-
authors.

Any technological solution like the ones you are describing 1-3 can be
attacked.

~~~
deepakravindran
Thanks. Yes, the incentives should be based on building yourself a credible
profile on the internet - like a trust button. A lot of community-based
websites including Reddit, Jelly and others are moving in this direction but
the challenge is how fast a community can move and how they can stop it in
other networks such as facebook and whatsapp where this spread.

------
ev_rolfe
I don't think this is something which can be solved by some "killer
algorithm".

It seems that this whole fake-news thing is largely because of hacker news-ey
type people wanting to use algorithms to make everything better and
introducing them into as many aspects of our lives as they can.

Maybe then the solution isn't more algorithms to fix what the existing
algorithms are doing wrong but changing the culture of news sources to
encourage more stringent journalistic standards? This would require a lot of
hard work amongst many people in influential position but most problems are
not solved by coming up with the right code.

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f_allwein
I think a lot of this could simply be done on a domain level, i.e a site that
publishes fake news once is likely to be generally less trustworthy. Then it
would be up to sites like Google and FB to remove them from their listings (as
is already done with spam) and not accept any ads linking to them (as is done
for all kinds of illegal goods).

Come to think of it, even a site's PageRank should be a useful signal, as it
(ideally) reflects the trust other sites have in this site.

~~~
deepakravindran
Our initial try was that by building a Chrome plugin called 'fakeornot' which
will just tell you if its a fake site or not. But this was not working
accurately as we saw sites like Mashable and others write articles which are
not even verified and they quote to a source.

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babyrainbow
Use a very limited version of the english language. Something like the one
used in sending Telegrams in old days. Also, use same size fonts for all the
news.

Also, put the details of the news behind a NLP software and let the users ask
it more details about a certain news and let it answer then in one or two
words...

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nnn1234
Applaud your effort. The Comment from dimodi9 does make sense. I would think
long and hard about the incentive structure.

What do you think of initiatives like Steem?

The Problem of using the crowd to annotate the news is a secondary solution is
good but having a source of truth is the final solution

~~~
deepakravindran
The route of community building is interesting and I can see many people
following that. If you see the latest development at Biz Stone's Jelly, their
vision is to make a trust score on users and build credibility. The challenge
is how quick a community can respond. Fake news is growing like the snowball
effect the more it spread on the social media the more it becomes a problem.
We need to put a filter before we share the news inside our network - like a
verified posting :)

~~~
nnn1234
One little push back, someone had to write the fake news for other people to
share it.

Massive click farms and hate baiting are the issues that can be solved.
Options like where the content originated from, who the writer was and why are
they anon if so?

Tech solutions are a first approximation to solve this question. Deeper
solutions require scale and some mustache twirling

------
DrNuke
Fake news = never happened is different from fake news = exotic (stretched,
unconsequential, illogic, etc.) point of views. The former may be technically
approachable, the latter I fear we technically can't.

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jenkstom
Isn't this what the "Web of Trust" issue addresses? Sure, it's complex and
would take a lot of time to understand and propagate, but it's a possible
solution.

------
itamarst
A lot of sites accused of being fake news are not. Be prepared to be sued for
defamation, quite possibly with good reason.

------
KanyeBest
>our mission is to fix the fake news problem.

Sincere question: Why is it a problem?

~~~
deepakravindran
the whole internet and social media in general is getting polluted because of
this.

------
BentFranklin
Perhaps some sort of blockchain technology

------
erik998
Pay more taxes and strengthen public schools. Push public school education as
John Dewey intended, for the betterment of civic society.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey#On_education_and_te...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey#On_education_and_teacher_education)
""" According to Dewey, the emphasis is placed on producing these attributes
in children for use in their contemporary life because it is “impossible to
foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now”
(Dewey, MPC, 2010, p. 25). However, although Dewey is steadfast in his beliefs
that education serves an immediate purpose (Dewey, DRT, 2010; Dewey, MPC,
2010; Dewey, TTP, 2010), he is not ignorant of the impact imparting these
qualities of intelligence, skill and character on young children in their
present life will have on the future society. While addressing the state of
educative and economic affairs during a 1935 radio broadcast, Dewey linked the
ensuing economic depression to a “lack of sufficient production of
intelligence, skill and character” (Dewey, TAP, 2010, p. 242) of the nation’s
workforce. As Dewey notes, there is a lack of these goods in the present
society and teachers have a responsibility to create them in their students,
who, we can assume, will grow into the adults who will ultimately go on to
participate in whatever industrial or economical civilization awaits them.
According to Dewey, the profession of the classroom teacher is to produce the
intelligence, skill and character within each student so that the democratic
community is composed of citizens who can think, do and act intelligently and
morally. """

We have many people that were taught to trust the mainstream news
organizations. Twenty years ago no one would have thought of blogs, news
summary sites, gossip sites. We have a large proportion of society that never
used library index cards, book glossaries, or used more than one source to
study anything. They take any news given as true because it derives from some
source of authority.

A child's education should not be focused on making money in the future. It's
to create individuals that can function in a democratic society.

Yes you can have links and rate journalists but that won't solve the problem.
I can legally change my name to Tom Brokaw and then what would you do... The
issue has a striking correspondence to the difficulty of using the OpenPGP
Public Key Infrastructure... Sure you can sign keys of journalists and have
them sign their articles but it does not mean what they wrote is true. What if
their editor took their key/password and published in their name? Or if upon
expiration of key they just make another key using some journalist's name? You
really want readers checking key fingerprints?

Maybe you can present the various sources of information and try to show links
to research notes and such but I never see that provided on any news sources.
Oh and what about anonymous insider tips... I see that often in the NYTimes...
Why would your source of Truth in the times "Trump" my source of truth...?

Jay Rosen [http://pressthink.org/](http://pressthink.org/) has struggled with
this as well. I think he is for journalists just doing their jobs. He had an
interesting discussion on the Bill Moyers show you should watch.

[http://pressthink.org/board/](http://pressthink.org/board/)

Journalists can only do so much. People need to take responsibility as well.
In the 1990s would you take someone seriously that said "Hillary Clinton
adopts an extraterrestrial"? [http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/04/weekly-
world-news-c...](http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/04/weekly-world-news-
clintons-aliens) The articles might not be so outlandish now but give enough
doubt to the mainstream coverage to confuse most people.

