
Fact Checks - fanf2
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/factcheck
======
patrickaljord
I wonder how far they are willing to go with this. How about these kinds of
claims:

"Increasing the minimum wage helps improve the economy"

* Fact check by Conservative-example: false

* Fact check by Progressive-example: true

Another good one:

"God exists":

* Fact check by Conservative-example: true

* Fact check by Progressive-example: false

This is going to be fun. This is typical of Google, providing a technical
solution to a human problem that can't be solved easily. Not everything can be
tweaked with an algorithm.

~~~
dvdhnt
> “God exists ... > Fact check by Progressive-example: false

I know you’re making an observation so this isn’t directed at you, but to
those who got us to this segregation - so no offense intended towards you
friend.

It makes me so sad that this is the assumption. Yes, the traditional
definition of God is not one many of us subscribe to, but to generally group
progressives and atheists together, conservatives and religion together is
just as much the problem as “fake news”.

Reference, myself, a progressive who found his spirituality in his late
twenties while working at a startup and finding the church of consumerism
unacceptable. Yet, look at that, still progressive.

~~~
icebraining
Well, in the US, most people believe in God, regardless of political
affiliation. The % of Democrats that are also atheists is larger, but it's
still under 15%.

~~~
jboynyc
True, but "nones" (those with no religious affiliation) are on the rise, now
accounting for a fifth of the U.S. population, and the overwhelming reason for
that is a backlash against the religious right.

Sources: Gallup, [https://www.sociologicalscience.com/articles-
vol1-24-423/](https://www.sociologicalscience.com/articles-vol1-24-423/)

~~~
skissane
The "Nones" are actually two different groups of people:

(1) Those with religious belief but no religious affiliation. They believe in
God and/or an afterlife, but they don't participate in or identify with any
organised religion.

(2) Those with neither religious belief nor affiliation. They say that there
is no good reason to believe that God exists and that when we die we
irreversibly cease to exist.

Both groups are growing, but group (1) is significantly bigger than group (2).

I'm not sure how helpful it really is to lump these two groups together.

------
age_bronze
This will be abused by trolls more than used by the "good guys". It's just a
matter of time before some trolls decide to use this feature to create more
lies about elections, hitler, holocaust, immigrants, and every conspiracy
theory out there. You're going to search "who did 9/11" and have false
websites trying to "fact check" the top pages (which at least today seem to be
sane).

~~~
mitchty
Yep, 4chan will have a field day with this. I think the goal of this is to
harness the wisdom of experts, but can't help but think the end result of this
will just be more noise in signal to noise search ratio.

Without human input as to what is correct and real of these inputs, its just
another input that can be gamed.

~~~
username223
Pretty much. Google was sad when it realized that 10^x layers of "Deep
Learning" couldn't detect propaganda, and it will be sad when trying to get
people to do it for free doesn't work, either.

~~~
jkeat
I could see this working if sites with a good track record were trusted more
when making claims.

A site's trustability could be punished when one of its fact checks is flagged
for review and discovered to be wrong.

Will be interesting with Wikipedia in the mix. It could be the web's fact
checking backbone.

~~~
JetSpiegel
> I could see this working if sites with a good track record were trusted more
> when making claims.

Google mentions this in the docs, but if it's page ranking, that can be gamed,
and if it's "pay us to be a fact checker", well...

~~~
jkeat
It could be "if your fact check gets flagged a lot we'll review it and punish
your reputation if it's inaccurate."

Not ideal to leave Google in control of Truth (and they might not want the
burden), so it'd be interesting to offload that responsibility to Wikipedia,
which seems to have a pretty good system for coming to a consensus.

------
westurner
Indeed, fact checking systems are only as good as the link between identity
credentialing services and a person.

[http://schema.org/ClaimReview](http://schema.org/ClaimReview) (as mentioned
in this article) is a good start.

A few other approaches to be aware of:

"Reality Check is a crowd-sourced on-chain smart contract oracle system"
[built on the Ethereum smart contracts and blockchain].
[https://realitykeys.github.io/realitycheck/docs/html/](https://realitykeys.github.io/realitycheck/docs/html/)

And standards-based approaches are not far behind:

W3C Credentials Community Group
[https://w3c-ccg.github.io/](https://w3c-ccg.github.io/)

W3C Verifiable Claims Working Group
[https://www.w3.org/2017/vc/WG/](https://www.w3.org/2017/vc/WG/)

W3C Verifiable News [https://github.com/w3c-ccg/verifiable-
news](https://github.com/w3c-ccg/verifiable-news)

~~~
westurner
In terms of verifying (or validating) subjective opinions, correlational
observations, and inferences of causal relations; #LinkedMetaAnalyses of
documents (notebooks) containing structured links to their data as premises
would be ideal. Unfortunately, PDF is not very helpful in accomplishing that
objective (in addition to being a terrible format for review with screen
reader and mobile devices): I think HTML with RDFa (and/or CSVW JSONLD) is our
best hope of making at least partially automated verification of meta analyses
a reality.

------
swanson
Everyone: "We've got a problem with fake news and journalistic integrity on
the internet."

Google engineers: "Oh, I can make an API for that!"

~~~
worldsayshi
Well, this _is_ a problem caused by technology to begin with.

I don't get the negativity directed to the intention of this. Sure you can
criticise the particular execution.

~~~
swanson
Partisan fact checking -- which this effort intends to standardize and elevate
-- is part of the _problem_ , not the solution.

~~~
zimpenfish
Can you explain this?

------
gweinberg
This sounds very useful, and I can think of at least one claim I would very
much like Google to fact check. It involves an alleged difference in the
distribution of personality rates between men and women.

~~~
taysic
That assumes such a question could be definitively answered. First you’d need
to quantify the scale of personality traits. Too much of the discussion around
this is hand wavey.

~~~
dwaltrip
My understanding is that the big 5 personality traits have been shown to be
fairly robust and quantifiable.

Caveat: I have only recently begun digging into this area.

------
olivermarks
I'd love to know how you would check 'true or false' on logic based
speculation such as this article on the recent Las Vegas shootings
[https://www.veteranstoday.com/2017/10/20/las-vegas-
massacre-...](https://www.veteranstoday.com/2017/10/20/las-vegas-massacre-
analysis/)

~~~
waegawegawe
-1 => "Not even wrong/conspiracy theory"

Honestly, this isn't the sort of thing that needs to be fact-checked. It just
needs to be tagged as being baseless. It's a little different than the types
of things this solution is aimed at.

~~~
olivermarks
I disagree. this is Google's tools being used to speculate on why there are so
many discrepancies and unexplained things in the 'official' narrative of what
happened. As I said previously, how do you 'fact check' something which is
questioning those logic lapses.

'Being tagged as baseless' reminds me of the old Soviet Union.

------
gleenn
I think the trolls will obviously come out to attack this but it seems like a
nice extra data point from sites. They aren't obligated to show the data, they
could just whitelist sites that they believe are 100% not trolls and then
consider other sources based on a history of correctness or human
verification. Imagine if they just added the top 10 news sites as valid
sources. Then I bet some site like Snopes would pop up as valid because they
had a history of agreement with some credible source. It's like Pagerank with
trust instead of inbound links.

~~~
monocasa
Google has a logistical leg up here, in that the internet isn't a sea of
faceless IP addresses like it might be for a startup in the same position.

Google has a lot of information on us explaining how to rate this new
information.

------
quotemstr
What could possibly go wrong?

~~~
worldsayshi
I guess there's no point in trying? /s

~~~
Spivak
Right, but when the most likely outcome is that it will make the problem worse
rather than solving the argument for not trying becomes a little stronger.

------
droopybuns
The only winning strategy is skepticism of all claims.

The idea that computers will help discern absolute truth in matters that
mostly are based on opinions and prejudice is pitiable and arrogant.

------
emerged
Big Brother further pressing their place in defining what is and isn't true.

------
pizza
It's a good thing Eddie Bernays never ran Google

~~~
sitkack
Pretty sure Schmidt has read all of his books.

------
chiaro
A good attempt, and it's good to see some CSR in this domain along with the
demonetization drive going on in youtube. Kids (and adults) may be slowly
getting better at discerning truth from motivated narratives in advertising,
but these critical literacy skills are some way underdeveloped with regards to
making such a discernment when truth is algorithmically generated. Whether
this will be an extension of this problem or a partial solution, we'll have to
wait and see.

Those hoping that it will stem some of the reactionary influence we've seen
establish itself over the last two years will be disappointed, I fear. A fact
checker avails you little against a fiercely anti-intellectual movement.

------
JetSpiegel
This leads to this interesting page:

[https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/4582731#sat...](https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/4582731#satire)

------
exelius
Looks like this is only for approved Google News sources. It’s a good start,
but I’d be worried about relying on something like this.

~~~
geofft
Given that Google News literally showed a 4chan thread about an invented
Islamic terrorist as a news source during the Las Vegas shooting, I'm
extremely skeptical that this will end well.

~~~
Spivak
Sure, but at some point Google has to decide whether they're a search engine
and should return relevant results based on what the _user_ is looking for or
a publisher that curates results and is therefore responsible for the content
that appears in their results.

------
tscs37
I don't really think this is even remotely useful and will probably be abused
within the hour.

Plus, I'm not sure if I want to trust Google to check what my website or blog
says is true. I don't see any extensive track record of being a fully neutral
entity when it comes to things they care about, which would only hamper
discussion on the topic.

------
taytus
We don’t need technology to fix this. We need better education. This is a
problem not created by technology but by ignorance.

~~~
Spivak
Arguments that are based on the premise that everyone else is stupid are
condescending and wrong.

[https://xkcd.com/1901/](https://xkcd.com/1901/)

------
tmaly
How do we solve the issue of trust? This is the fundamental issue I think is
at stake here.

It reminds me of the two generals problem
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem)

------
zitterbewegung
This is an interesting idea that seems like a good attempt in informing others
.

But the big issue people don’t believe facts whether they are presented with
information that refutes it. They believe facts because it aligns with their
ideology.

~~~
Spivak
But of course _you_ are above that sort of thing. Condescension isn't an
argument.

------
swiley
I think the best method for detecting propaganda or fake news is to look for
rhetoric. If the author is overly verbose or presents something other than
basic facts or logic they're probably lying.

~~~
JetSpiegel
This a great way to dismiss in-depth investigations and listen only to
soundbytes.

------
gcb0
pretty much Google is sending out the message that they have failed.

can we expect the overly hyped palantir stocks to crash now that they publicly
stated they can't do even basic text/sentiment analysis?

------
sedeki
Supercool idea! I wonder what the W3C has to say about it though.

~~~
notatoad
Why should the W3C have anything to say about it? It doesn't conflict with
html in any way, it's just structured content inside html.

------
noway421
Ministry of Truth as a Service, now that's something google can get behind!

Either way, this factbook would greatly improve Siri, Cortana and the google
counterpart.

------
cisanti
It's absurd for content creators to implement it. Google will leech your work
and use it to build their Google brain bigger, when you're not necessary
anymore, Google will ditch you.

Same with the stupid Google catchas that make me sick.

------
eradicatethots
Suppose a left leaning fact checker is more critical of conservatives? Many
believe this is common.

"Conservatives just lie more"

Suppose they are more critical regardless of this (of truth)

And what about statements which _can_ be interpreted as false by an
uncharitable reader? This is extremely common.

------
cateye
Someone at Google should have read and understand this first:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology)

------
idibidiart
Quasi-distributed censorship.

------
tangue
We don't need russians anymore. Google's new mission : organising the world
fake information and making it accessible to everyone.

