
Fake News Challenge - phreeza
http://www.fakenewschallenge.org/
======
padseeker
The problem is not "fake news". The problem is people are treating the news
like a product in the capitalist paradigm.

If you don't like the way your local bakery makes their bread you go somewhere
else. Now if the media reports on something you don't like someone else will
tell you what you want to hear.

This issue happens on both sides of the political spectrum BUT it does seem to
be a lot worse on the conservative side of things. All the "liberal" news
sources like the NYT and The WashPo seem to be doing lots of reporting on
Trump supporters, discussing their fears and hopes, concerns and motivations.
Even more conservative sources like the WSJ, not including their editorial
page, are trying to take a bigger view of the world.

On the other hand my Apple News feed seems to perpetually have a FOX News
story. The one this morning was "Is Trump Bashing the new Celeb nude selfie?"

All I know is the people who seem prone to believing the stupidest stories
also believe global warming is a hoax and Obama was not born in this country.
A significant portion of the electorate has been drinking from the well and
cannot be reached.

~~~
enknamel
> The problem is not "fake news". The problem is people are treating the news
> like a product in the capitalist paradigm.

I would say a huge part of the problem is that news is no longer news. It's
all commentary. News organizations are not only incentivized to to
sensationalize stories to make money but they are also ran by people who have
extreme political views and want to essentially mind control the population.
They don't want to report the facts of a story. They want to make you accept
their interpretation of the facts.

A great example is how different news organizations cover the recent executive
order on immigration. Depending on where you get your news you were told there
was a Muslim ban, a ban from 7 Muslim majority countries, only accepting
Christian refugees from the Middle East, 7 countries that harbor terrorists
were banned, etc.

Wherever you fall on that issue there is a news org trying to force you into a
certain viewpoint one way or the other.

~~~
MaxfordAndSons
> They want to make you accept their interpretation of the facts.

Please, describe to me how someone can convey pure unadulterated facts in
language, without imposing an "interpretation" on them.

It's an absurd fantasy. There's no possibility for a disembodied, perfectly
objective voice conveying facts. So yes, in a sense, every news org favors a
certain interpretation of the facts. But these subtle variations used to be
accepted as par for the course.

The root cause of the widespread distrust of media is the turn on the right
towards a form of Orwellian doublespeak in their media outlets, beginning in
the 90s and ramping up heavily in the Bush years. You see it's most virulent
expression in the way Trump speaks: he accuses the interim AG of "betrayal"
for acting on her conscious. Or the way he talks about returning government
"to the people" while staffing his cabinet with billionaires. It badly
subverts the ability of people on the left and the right to meaningfully speak
to one another, because our words no longer signify the same thing.

~~~
woah
I'm personally opposed to almost everything Trump is trying to do, but don't
act like it's only a problem on the right. Wasn't it just a couple of weeks
ago that the left wing newspapers were reporting wild unsubstantiated rumors
of a full-on Moscow piss orgy?

~~~
untog
> Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago that the left wing newspapers were
> reporting wild unsubstantiated rumors of a full-on Moscow piss orgy?

Well, that's actually a pretty interesting example to look at. For one, the
dossier concerned contained a _lot_ of accusations to do with members of
Trump's team travelling to Eastern Europe to meet with Russian contacts,
suspect financial transactions and the like - you yourself are doing it a
disservice by describing it only as rumours of a "piss orgy".

But irrespective of that, the dossier had been known about for months. But the
media organisations _didn 't_ report on it, specifically because they couldn't
verify the information contained within it. But then Buzzfeed decided to
publish it anyway, and at that point any responsible news organisation is left
in a pretty impossible position - either don't report on the thing everyone is
talking about, or report unsubstantiated accusations.

~~~
dalbasal
If any story includes a presidential piss-orgy everything else is filler. The
journalists who ran that story did a lot of damage by running it the way they
did.

~~~
untog
I think it is at least more complicated than you are painting it. If it's
something that is widely known in media circles as well as political ones (at
least one Democratic senator alluded to it on one of the many occasions
Hillary's e-mails were brought up), the media holding it back from the public
isn't really a fantastic look either.

Sometimes it feels like the media is damned if it does, and damned if it
doesn't. Report unsubstantiated rumour? You're biased! Hold back information
because it isn't verified? You're biased!

------
JacobJans
You'll notice so many posts here that deny the existence of fake news, or
attempt to redefine it as "bias."

Frankly, I find it disturbing that so many well educated people aren't able to
objectively think about an actually objective problem.

The fake news that started the concept of "fake news" is not a subjective
problem. The problem is literal invention of facts not even related to
reality, combined with the mass distribution of those invented facts. It is a
problem of mass deception.

The classic example: Millions of people shared a post saying the Pope endorsed
Donald Trump.

This is objectively false. It's not about liberal vs. conservative. It's not
about whether it fits your worldview or not. It simply isn't true.

During the election there were so many literally false stories that got a very
large amount of attention.

That is the problem. And yet, so many people seem to think it is a political
issue.

It's a sad world we live in where even objective facts no longer matter.

I think that is why so many people are terrified of the direction things are
headed.

~~~
general_ai
Millions of people have branded Trump as a "homophobe", where in reality he's
the most pro-gay president of all time at the start of his term. Not just
republican, any US president, period. Obama was against gay marriage before he
was (reluctantly) for it. Trump sees no problem with it.

Same with xenophobia: a xenophobe doesn't marry an immigrant.

Same with misogyny: a misogynist does not appoint a woman to run his campaign.

Same with antisemitism: his daughter converted to Judaism to marry a Jew, who
also had a hand in running his campaign.

Same with racism: he wasn't in any way called "racist" by anybody until he ran
for president, and there are numerous photos of him with prominent members of
the black community dating back decades.

Much of the slander we've seen about the guy is totally fake. It seems HRC had
very little of substance other than the pussy grab tape (note that there's no
evidence it was anything other than talk), so they just made shit up and told
CNN to air it 24x7. And CNN gladly obliged.

When the same people that manufactured and spread fake news start lecturing us
about the harm of fake news, I just facepalm.

~~~
JacobJans
> When the same people that manufactured and spread fake news start lecturing
> us about the harm of fake news, I just facepalm.

This is exactly what I'm talking about.

The reason we're talking about fake news is NOT because of the traditional
mainstream media. It's not because of left wing websites such as Alternet or
extreme websites such as Breitbart.

The reason we're talking about fake news –– and the real problem that
absolutely has to be addressed –– has nothing to do with those websites, or
with nearly any media organization that has an easily identifiable group of
people running it.

Sure, those websites might post factually incorrect information on occasion.
But that's not why we're talking about fake news.

We're talking about fake news because there were –– and are –– websites that
repeatedly posted blatantly false "news", during the election, and got massive
distribution on social media networks such as Facebook.

That is a problem that has nothing to do with your opinion of Donald Trump. It
is not clear why you brought him up, except to distract from the issue.

~~~
general_ai
Breitbart is less insidious imo. If you go there, chances are pretty good you
know it's mostly horseshit. When it comes to e.g. CNN, way too many people
take it at face value.

I'm just pointing out that the "legitimate" news sources aren't that much
better than Breitbart these days, except a lot of people treat them as though
they are.

------
DanielBMarkham
It makes me sad to see yet another tech team go down the road of "machines
will help us filter the truth"

They will not, and the reason has to do with language. Ludwig Wittgenstein
tackled this 100 years ago. The best that machines will do for you is to label
something as true or not _as if you had consumed the article and decided on
your own_

 _That is a completely different thing from identifying fake news or truth_

There's some value here. There are also some hard stops. You'll find them :)
Best of luck, guys!

~~~
debt
Wittgenstein wasn't around when a president used Twitter to both control the
media and get elected.

Maybe news could rely on first principles approach. Quantify things like
political stability, information availability, cultural problems, etc. and
maybe apply a first principles approach and maybe an algorithm could tell use
what the hell is going on at any given moment and maybe give us some insight
into what may go on in the future as well.

I would assume intelligence agencies have something similar to the above. The
problem is things happen in realtime and if a regime falls or a state fails or
whatever, we have to adjust our models immediately.

Throwing out hands up and saying Wittgenstein solved it seems lazy but idk.

~~~
tokenizer
Good luck, sounds absolutely insane and unworkable. AI needs "Truth" inputs.

I imagine if we had this tool when George W invaded Iraq, this AI would have
said Weapons Existed, being all the CIA, and Politicians said so.

Isn't that how your filter works? Anti alternative media, pro establishment?

~~~
willstrafach
> being all the CIA, and Politicians said so.

This comes up often and is untrue. The Intelligence Community did not have
confidence in the WMD claim.

Good read regarding this:
[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/05/12/selective-
intel...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/05/12/selective-
intelligence/amp?client=safari)

------
lend000
How about a 'subjectiveness' ranking instead, with notations for "unable to
find link to a source of factual claims"? That's the best we could ever safely
do, and we would likely find interesting results (WaPo might be labeled more
subjective than Fox News, for example, even though both would generally have
low numbers of notations for 'unable to find link to source of factual
claim').

As I said in another post: The only thing you can possibly check for with any
reliability is the validity of the base, source event, if there is one. Any
higher derivation in the wrong hands (Facebook, for example) is systemic
censorship. How can we safely do that? Recursive link tracking, perhaps, to a
"primary source," which relies on the AI matching the factual claim to an
appropriate source, either a video, image, or text that can be considered the
legitimate source based on context (for example, an article about Apple's
earnings could link to a primary source of their press release).

Regardless, the most dangerous form of "fake news" is by the
selection/omission of stories, and that seems pretty impossible to quantify
with today's technology (and of course the most prevalent on all of our 'real
news' sources).

~~~
eplanit
> Regardless, the most dangerous form of "fake news" is by the
> selection/omission of stories

This. Very true, and woefully absent from most discussions regarding "fake
news".

~~~
zzzcpan
It's even worse, selection of stories is the whole point of news, they exist
for the sole purpose of influencing people's opinions. And the fight against
"fake news" looks nothing more than the fight for censorship in the space
those in power not yet control.

------
zeteo
>It should be possible to build a prototype post-facto “truth labeling” system
[...] Such a system would tentatively label a claim or story as true/false
based on the stances taken by various news organizations on the topic,
weighted by their credibility.

And of course nobody would love this technology more than the Chinese and
Russian governments. Is a system aimed at quickly identifying obscure blogs
that disagree with "high-credibility" sources supposed to _help_ democracy?

~~~
vvggff
Why China and Russia specifically?

~~~
KanyeBest
Because credible™ news sources such as CNN have confirmed that they are
villain states.

------
niftich
Their headline is a bit hyperbolic (oh, the irony, given stance detection!)
but the FAQ [1] covers what's really going on:

Q: _Why did you choose the stance detection task rather than the task of
labeling a claim, headline or story True /False, which seems to be what the
fake news problem is all about? _

A: (...) _Our extensive discussions with journalists and fact checkers made it
clear both how difficult "truth labeling" of claims really is, and how they'd
rather have reliable semi-automated tool to help them in do their job better
rather than fully-automated system whose performance will inevitably fall far
short of 100% accuracy._ (...)

Q: _OK, but what does stance detection have to do with detecting fake news?_

A: (...) _From our discussions with real-life fact checkers, we realized that
gathering the relevant background information about a claim or news story,
including all sides of the issue, is a critical initial step in a human fact
checker 's job. One goal of the Fake News Challenge is to push the state-of-
the-art in assisting human fact checkers, by helping them quickly gather the
information they need to make their assessment.

In particular, a good Stance Detection solution would allow a human fact
checker to enter a claim or headline and instantly retrieve the top articles
that agree, disagree or discuss the claim/headline in question. They could
then look at the arguments for and against the claim, and use their human
judgment and reasoning skills to assess the validity of the claim in question.
Such a tool would enable human fact checkers to be fast and effective._ (...)

This means they're very much aware that 'solving the fake news issue' in a
fully-automated way is a folly, so they are instead looking for tools to
classify and retrieve corroborating or dissenting reports about the same
topic. I feel this approach demonstrates an awareness of the problem,
addresses some of the criticisms raised in this thread, and could lead to
useful tools and datasets down the road.

[1]
[http://www.fakenewschallenge.org/#faq](http://www.fakenewschallenge.org/#faq)

------
3princip
Mainstream media and their corporate backers have already lost this battle.
This whole fake news attempt to remain relevant has backfired already, since
it's much easier to prove that the peddlers of fake news are those who
uncritically backed and still excuse the Iraq war, Libya catastrophe,
attempted overthrow of the Syrian government just to name a few recent
adventures.

They've been beaten at their own game by an opponent better at using
modern/popular methods of disseminating information.

~~~
draw_down
Yes, that is about the size of it.

------
hueving
>Such a system would tentatively label a claim or story as true/false based on
the stances taken by various news organizations on the topic, weighted by
their credibility.

Oh right, because we can all agree on which news organizations are credible.
/s

~~~
sageikosa
Obviously the ones that run a news program at 6:30 pm with a heavy
introductory drumbeat and lots of fanfare playing while a camera zooms in to a
concerned-looking anchor person.

------
rdtsc
Alas we are not supposed to use that term anymore:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/its-time-
to-r...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/its-time-to-retire-
the-tainted-term-fake-
news/2017/01/06/a5a7516c-d375-11e6-945a-76f69a399dd5_story.html?utm_term=.363d0eaa0da4)

Also somehow CNN shows in the front page of result for "fake news" image
search on Google. It wouldn't be totally wrong, depending on how the term is
defined.

~~~
necessity
Fact: 99% of "fake news website" classifications are in fact false.

~~~
rdtsc
Is that "fake news" ;-)

Heh, I think need an explicit meta-fake news category.

------
chippy
I'd prefer to see computer learning to identify political propaganda and state
the biases in the text as that would be truly unpartisan.

Does anyone know if this challenge has anything to do with Media Matters /
Shareblue?

~~~
chippy
From "America Matters" pdf:

"Media Matters has already secured access to raw data from Facebook,
Twitter...

Predictive Technology

Bringing this data analysis to scale will also allow Media Matters to identify
which individuals and outlets are the most destructive forces driving fake
news, misinformation and harrasment.

Cutting-edge advances in cloud computing and machine learning will enable us
to identify patterns and connections that would otherwise go under the radar.
... Media Matters' core budget for 2017 is $13.4 millions which covers a staff
of 81. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

This budget allows us to create a 34 person research deparment engaged in
media monitoring, research, deep dive analysis and rapid response... this
budget also alows us to invest in technological innovations like the creation
of an early warning system to identify in the profilerationof fake nws more
efficiently and to create cutting-edge predictive technology that allows us to
identify patterns and connections in order to asses how misinformation will
move and how we can neutralise it. "

~~~
DrDimension
Media matters is responsible for some of the fakest news the world has ever
seen.

------
HoppedUpMenace
Not to sound cliche but I believe the bigger problem in this country is
education, which apparently has failed many in this country on both sides of
the political spectrum, if the past couple of years are any indication. I
guarantee you fix people's problems with English, Math, and History in the
classroom, you will have no need for machines or algorithms to filter junk
that influences people online.

~~~
Lord_Yoda
Exactly what I was thinking today. Our laziness to read (longer articles,
books, etc) and think has caused this problem. Educate the people and this
will go away on its own.

~~~
mongmong
This is not something you can make people do through education though. Even
among people i know that are highly educated and have achieved top marks and
went to the best companies, there are those who just don't give a shot about
politics. They are not interested enough to look or dig further.

------
msielski
I am I missing something or is this challenge to produce a system which
determines if the headline agrees with a body of text? Many so called "fake
news" sites would pass this test with flying colors as their fake headlines
are supported by equally fake stories. This seems more like a test against
clickbait.

------
antiffan
It seems like Wikipedia would be familiar with a lot of the same challenges
that come with identifying fake news articles. Anyone more familiar than I am
with Wikipedia care to comment?

~~~
necessity
Wikipedia has a policy to only accept reliable secondary sources on
controversial political articles. What comprises a "reliable source" is
loosely defined, and what sources are considered reliable is ultimately
decided by the editors in a somewhat per-article basis, with some global
definitions which are not centrally listed anywhere but are enforced by senior
editors and their admin friends. Because of the systematic bias that Wikipedia
suffers from there is strong partisan bias in this selection, which resulted
in a number of wiki clones with their own bias (e.g. Conservapedia), forums
dedicated to show how bad this is (e.g. /r/wikiinaction) and has - among other
things - been leading to a steady decline in the number of editors in the last
couple years - everyone eventually gets bullied away from that place by a
clique of editors + admins.

Quoting Wikipedia policy itself:

>If Wikipedia had been available around the sixth century B.C., it would have
reported the view that the Earth is flat as a fact and without qualification.
And it would have reported the views of Eratosthenes (who correctly determined
the earth's circumference in 240BC) either as controversial, or a fringe view.
Similarly if available in Galileo's time, it would have reported the view that
the sun goes round the earth as a fact, and if Galileo had been a Vicipaedia
editor, his view would have been rejected as 'originale investigationis'.

~~~
smsm42
My personal rule is Wikipedia is very reliable in non-controversial topics,
and should be trusted only as much as source of links and search keywords and
information about _some_ of the existing opinions for controversial topics.
Which is something, but definitely not a full solution of a problem.

------
nl
I've been following this and somewhat involved on the Slack channel since late
last year.

A few comments based on what I've seen here so far:

"Fake News" might not be "the problem", but it is a problem. There is a real
set of completely fake stories with no supporting evidence. Taking this away
from politics for a minute, the archetype of this is "celebrities XX is moving
to town YY"[1]

Comments around "this is just mainstream news attempting to justify its role"
absolutely and completely have a point. There is plenty of room for new
players to fix this problem (and hopefully be rewarded for it), on both sides
of the political spectrum.

Comments around "The NYT does fake news - see their Iraq war advocacy" are
somewhat misguided IMHO. The NYT has a number of problems, but no one should
make the mistake of confusing opinion, analysis and forecasts for news. In the
NYT Iraq War case, their analysis and forecasts were completely wrong and
their opinion was misguided because of that. It is completely fair to make the
point that their reputation suffered because of this, but we need to separate
that from news reporting. This is something that news organizations don't do
very well at the moment, IMHO.

As has been pointed out, this won't fix the whole problem. Most of the "Yes,
but..." discussions here have been had when trying to come up with a
reasonable but helpful task. I think stance detection is a reasonable subset
of the problem.

[1] [http://www.snopes.com/celebrity-moving-small-
towns/](http://www.snopes.com/celebrity-moving-small-towns/)

------
lossolo
This is not solvable by humans or machine learning. For example "leonardo
dicaprio charity linked to 3 bil money laundering scandal", "raport says trump
spent night with hookers in Russia", "angelina jolie divorcig brad pitt",
"terrorist attack in Paris, 200 dead" etc. Some of those headlines seems like
clickbait and false news but they are not, good luck with classifying those
and similar.

~~~
snissn
Tomorrow's lottery ticket numbers will be 12345

~~~
sp332
Tomorrow's lottery ticket numbers will be 12345, snissn says

------
wyager
To detect "fake news", all you have to do is solve all problems in the field
of epistemology, especially the ill-founded ones.

~~~
sageikosa
If news were just information, anymore its a call to attention and likely
action.

------
drewkarri
‪#fakenews formula, sensation+celebrity+cause=fakenews‬ Use twitter to label
all #fakenews (a code hashtag that isn't visible to viewers by changing the
twitter foundation. The articles are then required to be vetted following
rules from a panel that provides clear check lists to be considered fake news.
Anytime news Is to be broadcast it must include standardized format,
citations, rules for ad revenue and a list of all contributors to prevent a
conflict of interest. Articles are not allowed to be written about companies
who contribute to an outlet. There also needs to be a limit on how many ads
can be displayed as well as how many a company can buy across platforms. Do
not allow them to perform any "news broadcasting" unless followed and if it is
violated, fine the culprit. The party identifying the "#codeword" would get
paid the fines minus an administrative fee paid to the ethics committee as a
commission. It's a system that ensures checks and balances in the journalism
world. This would have a political component basically requiring places like
twitter to follow these rules and guidelines. Otherwise they will not do it
because this solution takes away a major source of their income and then they
will actually have to compete for your subscriptions instead of just pumping
out continuously overwhelming sensationalism

------
Lord_Yoda
I applaud this initiative. I am sure something good will come out of it, even
though it does not completely resolve the problem. At least acknowledging and
stepping in that direction is more than doing nothing.

That said, I think the other part of this problem is how the news is consumed.
Our lazy minds are trained to read the shorter version if there is one
available. Every day more people are liking the 140 character version of news.
The more you read (from more people), the more you're reinforced in that
belief. So while we train the models on news articles, we should also attempt
to train on tweets. Just my two cents.

------
beatpanda
I don't think they're going about this the right way.

The first step to identifying 'fake news' (even in NYT or WSJ!) is to be able
to pull out attributions from the source text.

This would give you some idea of where the information in an article actually
came from. "Fake news" will tend to be either unattributed or misrepresent the
thing it's quoting.

But a good first step toward better media literacy would just be giving people
a representation of who actually said the the things in an article, and that
seems much easier.

------
brianbreslin
I would like to see a test/quiz that shows you headlines or how they would be
shared on facebook news feed and asks you to identify which you think are
real/fake.

------
CM30
> It should be possible to build a prototype post-facto “truth labeling”
> system from a “stance detection” system. Such a system would tentatively
> label a claim or story as true/false based on the stances taken by various
> news organizations on the topic, weighted by their credibility.

So who decides what organisations are credible? Or orders them by their
credibility? Someone has to create the list. Someone with obvious human biases
towards one view or another.

------
skc
So it seems logical to me that someone could become very, very, very rich if
they built a news platform that was effectively "fake news" free.

Even if all the platform did was accept "news stories" and transparently
verify it's authenticity I think people would clamor for it.

Of course the devil is in the details because that would require proper
investigative journalism, which may be prohibitively expensive.

------
intended
Goddamit. No.

Fake news is a meta problem, and it's solve by funding news agencies and
removing them from the advertising loop, as well as laws which make news vs
opinion different discussions.

Tech cannot solve it without also creating tools which will be used against
us.

The magic tech solution to solve fake news is essentially an assessment of the
intent of the author.

Any tool which even gets close to ascertaining this will be badly misused.

------
benmcnelly
I am concerned that we may have an AI breakthrough with this project, but no
matter how hard we try, not be able to remove its conservative bias.

------
eof

        function isFakeNews(news_piece){
         var list_of_legit_sources = _get_current_approved_sources(); // makes synchronous http request to illuminati.com/api
        if list_of_legit_sources.inArray(getSource(news_piece)) return false; else return true; 
        }
    

^---- Sadly this is the reality for how fake news is going to play out

------
EGreg
I think The goal shouldn't be to detect fake news. The goal should be to
detect whether a specific claim is true or false. For that, you simply need a
site, like a crowd sourced fact checking sites, where people are required to
source their arguments precisely, unlike fake news which doesn't. Then you
have a resource to turn to, similarly to how fact checkers are used in the
face of fake news.

After that, you can build an engine to crawl news articles or have them
submitted, and detect the claims being made. Those claims can be either auto-
matched to existing ones or create new ones (deduplication) and then the site
has a fresh new stream of claims to fact check.

StackOverflow could build this site on their existing engine. If someone here
knows them, can you reply and put me in touch?

------
MikeGale
From my observation the majority of news media manipulate much of what they
report in significant ways. When they're reporting on politicians they're
generally slanting something already manipulated.

Where the facts lie in many subjects is not immediately obvious.

Algorithms like this are a good idea provided that they're used wisely. I
expect them to detect conflicts between treatments (with false + and false -),
which would be useful to humans making their own judgements. Inflicting their
results, without a chance of additional vetting, would not be a good idea.

------
deboboy
Get money out of news. Sure money doesn't corrupt news as badly as politics
but it does bias what, how news is delivered.

And I'm not suggesting all news agencies [whatever this means in 2017] should
transform into NPR or PBS clones. I like MSNBC, FOX, CNN , ABC... news but
they all exist within media empires. Let's figure out how to spin them out
into entities not funded from media business models. Hard problem, sure. So
what. We have to figure this out.

------
milesf
So we're going to create bots to trust what is true/not true so when Skynet
goes live it will have an easier time defeating us?

I see what you did there ;)

In all seriousness, though, if people do not learn to read the news and media
critically then an AI system isn't going to make things better. I remember
back in high school, here in Canada, being taught media literacy. I think it
was because of our close proximity to the US, and how influential US media can
be.

------
michaelfeathers
Stance detection is nice but does anyone know of any effort to evaluate text
based on Russell Conjugation?

[https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27181](https://www.edge.org/response-
detail/27181)

------
jacquesm
As long as Google still puts Russia Today and plenty of other sites of
questionable plumage on display this is a futile effort. It only works if the
big names in news aggregation start by culling the worst offenders.

------
firefoxd
I think we are turning *term into a thing. The more we talk about it, and try
to combat it, the more it's roots grows and settle in.

This is not a new thing, and we used to simply ignore it. Now we made it a
thing.

------
busterarm
Fake News is just Culture Jamming done by media insiders.

------
draw_down
Just don't bring up Iraq WMDs. That was different, because, ummm... [mumbling]

------
alyx
If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.

------
Clanan
Is anyone else put off by this obsession with "solving" fake news? As if we
can simply throw technology at such a contentious and controversial issue and
then trust the results. It reads to me like the goal is censorship, where only
"approved" articles/authors are allowed, all in the name of "fact checking".
Never mind that it's incredibly easy to cherry-pick facts or exaggerations to
target "offensive" articles (by both/all sides).

~~~
yokisan
> Never mind that it's incredibly easy to cherry-pick facts or exaggerations
> to target "offensive" articles (by both/all sides).

Exactly. I'd argue that disingenuous news from mainstream news organisations
is worse than dedicated "fake news" websites because they exploit legitimacy
and reader-trust to peddle falsehoods. They are our port in a storm of
bullsh*t, and they're failing us.

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ziikutv
Fake News is indistinguishable when it is not a blatant lie, and when every
news group is on the same page. Think war on ISIS.

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gibbitz
fake_news !== click_bait

~~~
huehehue
I agree, but the distinction is really murky.

Consider the sensationalist headline "Trump Facing Impeachment for Muslim
Ban".

Okay, a lot of people (including politicians) are saying "yeah we should maybe
impeach that guy", and a lot of Muslims are affected by the order. But there's
no impeachment trial and it's not a direct ban on all Muslims.

I don't think it's appropriate to shift _all_ the blame to the publishers but,
when people just read the title, nod approvingly, and close their browser,
it's the same effect.

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coolspot
It is simple: everything that does not match your beliefs is a fake news.

~~~
slaunchwise
The day we believe that is the day the fascists win.

~~~
gukov
Not everyone that doesn't share your beliefs is a fascist.

~~~
Fauntleroy
That's definitely something that needs to be said. I've seen way too many
instances where people immediately label someone a fascist for giving even an
inkling of support for something Trump did. I wish people could calm down just
long enough to have something resembling useful discourse.

~~~
deckard1
> have something resembling useful discourse.

How do you debate a person that denies objective reality, and embraces their
very own alternative reality?

I don't think you can. For the same reason you can't negotiate with
terrorists. They aren't playing by the same rule book. You hold out a hand to
shake, they stab you in the face with a knife.

------
uppercasenut
OK, fake or real?

(background: Russia might have "kompromat" on President Trump...blah blah )

Headline: President Trump appoints "friend of Russia award" winner as
Secretary of State.

Just put a "Alert" or "Fake news" button. A lot of political writing can be
considered "fake news" depending on our biases.

------
sgustard
Fake news is generally identified by the reputation of its author (New York
Times vs Alt-Right Patriot Freedom Observer). Nothing published by the Times
or Wall Street Journal (despite any editorial bias) is fake, simply because we
know (except in the rare circumstance) that they apply journalistic integrity
in sourcing and writing articles. Much of what's published on "fringe" sites,
especially if no mainstream outlets cover it, is likely fake (i.e. if it's
making a factual claim about the world, not just expressing an opinion).

Obviously followers of these sites will fight back against any "fake" labels,
by arguing there is a "cover-up" by organized opposition, that their truth is
being suppressed, that any fake news classifier intrinsically has a liberal
bias, and so on. The difficulty for me is not identifying what's fake, but
convincing anyone else that it is.

~~~
dingo_bat
So in your assessment "fake" just means non-mainstream. Haven't seen the word
defined like this before.

~~~
cphoover
No I think he means... Articles that are not sourced (citations, reports,
interviews, journals).... etc have a higher likelihood of being false, than
those that do.

Mainstream news orgs tend to be better about including citations, and sources.
They are also better about publishing retractions, when they are caught saying
something factually wrong.

