
Machine learning isn’t effective at identifying fake news - embit
https://www.fastcompany.com/90417625/machine-learning-isnt-effective-at-identifying-fake-news
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IronWolve
IMHO, I disagree. The problem is taking an entire article not filtering the
emotions out of it, tallying emotional hits and drives a score. If the article
has a high degree of emotional identifiers its most likely an opinion piece
not an entirely factual news article. Then articles from the same agency that
has low repeatedly scores (or writers) would be flagged.

Use media bias checker, pick the far left and far right news/blog agencies,
train them on picking out emotions arguments first, then statements of facts.

We train AI with xrays at work. Humans identify the issues on scans, then the
software learns from humans identification on the xrays. After training, it
can start to recognize what humans are identifying. Text has meaning, so you
have to defuzz the text into something simpler.

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notfromhere
Fake news is fake because the facts aren't real. machine learning isn't going
to learn how to identify it when sentient people have difficulty.

~~~
zxcmx
Hm. I think the kind of fake news most people are worried about on social
media has properties which distinguish it from merely "factually incorrect
information".

It's a kind of "supernormal stimulus" \- high virality, engineered to trigger
tribalism and strong emotions in susceptible recipients.

The properties which make it a "weapon" are the ones which you'd want to
mitigate. Unfortunately those properties also happen to goose the engagement
metrics of social media companies.

Source reputation, rate and pattern of viral spread should be taken into
account, as well as content itself and user flags. Also user engagement
behaviour - e.g. average user shared this after reading for less than 10
seconds.

Basically, highly partisan content spread quickly by unthinking users, from a
low reputation source.

Unfortunately the networks themselves have the best metadata to work this
stuff out... and the least genuine desire to do so.

I'm in the "solving the worst of this looks fairly tractable" camp, but I
agree that bare source text is going to be hard to work with.

