

Realtime Political Fact-Checking Becomes A Reality With WaPo’s ‘Truth Teller’ - mikeevans
http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/29/realtime-political-fact-checking-becomes-a-reality-with-wapos-truth-teller/

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talmand
Considering that most "fact checkers" that I've seen seem to write more
editorials than objective reports, I'm quite dubious about this kind of thing.
I've seen too many "he's technically correct but..." to believe anything these
checkers say.

How do we know the "facts" that the system is checking the statements against
are in fact themselves true?

Does the system take into account the actual definition of lying? As in that a
lie is knowingly making a false statement in an attempt to deceive. If the
person speaking believes what they state is true then it is not a matter of
lying or telling the truth, it's simply being mistaken or correct. Painting
"Liar, Liar" on the forehead of a politician simply because he's mistaken is
stupid and a bad thing for an election process.

If the system gets it wrong, will they publish a correction in an equally
visible manner and explain what the problem was? How can you trust such a
system if they don't?

These "fact checkers" have turned out to be an incredibly bad idea, especially
during an election. The idea of fact checking faster only makes it
exponentially worse.

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mseebach
Facts are fickle.

That Obama is christian is not a "fact" to people who believe that he's
secretly a muslim. Like all other good conspiracy theories, it's based on an
irrefutable possible situation. You can't "fact check" that.

Second example on the page, "House Speaker John Boehner claims that raising
taxes on the top 2% would kill 700,000 jobs", the link lists three bullet
points to refute this: one is completely unrelated to the statement made, the
second assumes that Boehner misrepresents rather than misbelieves Obama's
intention to only use the revenue to plug the deficit and editorializes that
the job loss would happen over a long period of time has an impact on the
truthfulness of the statement. The third claims that "relatively small"
effects on the economy is not enough to say that proposal will "would slow our
economy".

That's not a fact check, that's a counter argument.

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cleverjake
>> That Obama is christian is not a "fact" to people who believe that he's
secretly a muslim.

fact /fakt/ Noun - A thing that is indisputably the case.

Being separated from reality does not mean you get your own facts. facts are
facts.

While I will agree that you can't prove a negative, you can prove that he is
not a muslim, which is really the crux of the statement.

The second point is from factcheck.org, not from truth teller. It actually is
a counter argument.

~~~
mseebach
> While I will agree that you can't prove a negative, you can prove that he is
> not a muslim

That is contradictory? How do you, in fact, prove that? It is not indisputably
the case that Obama is a christian, because people are actively disputing it.

> The second point is from factcheck.org, not from truth teller. It actually
> is a counter argument.

I made a general reference to the fact-checking trend which factcheck.org is
very much a part of.

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drKarl
It's an interesting project, but since it depends on the data it is being fed,
its reliability is questionable. All media corporations have a large amount of
media at their disposal (tv, radio, newspapers, etc) which is used to support
the desired view on every piece of news, depending on the bias of the media.
All of the media are either way biased, and are both used to influence and
manipulate the consumers of these media to their line of thought, and as a
product to be consumed by the niche that is aligned with that line of thought.

If that project was fed with crowdsourced, objective, verified data, then it
would really be useful, but if it is fed with the databases of particular
media, it can only be trusted as much as that media can be trusted.

And I'm not for or against The Washington Post, since I'm not from USA, and
thus I don't really know the political stance or line of thought of The
Washington Post. I'm just talking in a general case.

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danso
Uh, where's the skepticism here?

Converting audio of variable clarity to accurate text is still a challenge
even for companies who specialize in it. As Siri has shown, it's even harder
to judge actual intent.

And then there is at least one other problem: producing the content for each
permutation of each political claim...it's not as if politicians phrase their
assertions in exactly one way...and properly mapping them to the true/false
evaluations.

And there's also the problem of the whole true/false content production, which
even the Pulitzer Prize winning Politifact has problems with.

Given these very difficult technical hurdles, either the WaPo has a massive
skunkworks budget. Or whoever came up with this has a poor, Jetsons-fueled
understanding of computing.

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micahmcfarland
Does anyone else think it's sad that "journalism" has degenerated so far that
now "fact checkers" are a thing? Isn't it the job of journalists to be fact
checkers?

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danso
No. That is a part of journalism, but not the only "job" of journalists. The
best journalism, for example, derives new facts from existing ones (or from
debunking lies)...this is an extrapolation beyond just reading through a list
of assertions and checking true/false. And a lot of journalism is the
conveyance of information for the record, factual or not.

Edit:

To use a software dev analogy, non-devs are bemused at the idea that some
developer jobs are focused almost exclusively on testing. "Isn't it the job of
a software developer to write software that doesn't crash?" they might ask.
Well, yes. That is a part of writing good software, and yet the best software
dev places have extensive testing practices. Making sure something is broken
is a skill all in itself.

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MisterBastahrd
I have to wonder what research says about confirming 'facts' so close to
hearing a statement from someone. This seems to me like it is worth more as a
propaganda tool than anything else, especially since statements can be taken
out of context before someone finishes their narrative.

