
Slaying Fake News - smiljo
https://medium.com/@marinsmiljanic/slaying-fake-news-2aabdae06f57
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scottishcow
PageRank is a popularity contest, not sure why you’d put so much trust into it
as a reliable proxy for content quality. Lots of crap can be popular. Perhaps
Google is doing a decent job eliminating crap from their search results
(debatable), but that’s not an outcome of a naive application of PageRank.

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smiljo
Author here, thanks for the thoughtful reply!

> Perhaps Google is doing a decent job eliminating crap from their search
> results (debatable), but that’s not an outcome of a naive application of
> PageRank.

Is this actually the case? We don't have a good way to test it, but I believe
that you wouldn't see the crappy articles I referred in the first N results
even with vanilla PageRank (and for a very large N at that).

Keep in mind that my definition of fake news is pretty narrow here: it's "Pope
Francis endorses Trump" rather than "Fox dismisses COVID-19 threat" or spin of
that sort, which is probably what you meant by crap.

There will certainly be blind spots like the ones above, but my goal is to
eliminate the most egregious miscreants and the method outlined will achieve
that (well, we'll test it and see how it goes).

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pfd1986
This event happening tomorrow might be of interest:
[https://www.usfca.edu/event/2020-04-29-1200/misinformation-a...](https://www.usfca.edu/event/2020-04-29-1200/misinformation-
and-covid-19-critical-data-science-approach)

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smiljo
Great subject, great panelists, thanks!

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adamjsorensen
Interesting - good read on the ramifications of fake news today. Love the idea
of a "reputation score"

