
Show HN: Stop the Bullshit - jnotarstefano
https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-bullshit
======
sbuttgereit
I find it fascinating how paternalistic this whole topic is, and "Stop the
Bullshit" is part of this. The goal is not developing independent thinkers,
but merely ensuring that blind trust is given to the "enlightened people".

The whole idea behind this sort of filtering and vetting is not about teaching
people how better to reason about the world and judging the truth of those
that would tell you what is happening and why, but rather it says that most
people are incapable of making those types of decisions for themselves and
that an informed elite should be in control of what information is available
to the plebs. Once you concede this, how far is it before we make "fake news",
or rather unapproved news, simply illegal? How long until news simply becomes
propaganda?

There absolutely is a problem with "fake news" from all quarters and it is
nothing new at all: whether that was "bat boy" at the grocery checkout, the
sinking of the Maine, or the news and characterizations during the recent
campaign. "Stop the Bullshit" and filtering efforts is not a solution to the
problem, merely the creation of new problems such an even less thoughtful
populous and a new set of arbiters of the truth that I for one won't trust any
more that the current ones.

------
centizen
Very nice project, I will definitely be using it and will try to contribute in
my spare time.

One recommendation I'd have is not to use the word 'safety' in this context,
it feels kind of overprotective. Perhaps the link should read "Take me back to
reality" instead?

~~~
jnotarstefano
I like "reality" : )

I chose "safety" because I think I copied Chrome's message when visiting a
website with an invalid certificate.

------
allemagne
There have been a lot of these projects lately. It's clever, but I am not
close to being convinced that fake news is a problem that we can engineer our
way out of.

~~~
aswanson
If it at least amplifies awareness in the general public about the problem,
it's done it's job.

~~~
devoply
People read what they want to read. For instance
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning)
You can get rid of the fake news outlets, but you can't get rid of fake news
as long as there is free speech.

~~~
pohl
Eliminating it would be an overly ambitious goal. We only need to mitigate its
effects.

------
mihok
Interesting project, Is censorship the best coarse of action? Bare with me for
a second, would it not be better to somehow overlay a meter or light
indicating that this story is likely false. Even better, some sort of
indicator that showed the # of sources (if any) and devised some sort of
rating of quality/truthfulness.

I'm against all the fake news in Facebook et all but if we dont teach people
to be good at detecting it we're just putting a bandaid over a broken bone so
to speak. Am I being overly optimistic of society, that learning how to detect
bullshit is better than doing the hard work for them?

~~~
chiefalchemist
Censorship is not the best way forward. People need to adjust (read: acquire)
critical thinking skills. But let's start with the media. For example, quoting
unvetted tweaks should be grounds for shaming, or worse.

In addition,it should be not that this tool can be used to apply any
prejudice, bias, etc. I certainly empathize with the sentiment here but this
can quickly becomes a case of be careful what you wish for.

~~~
tptacek
When Google blocks cialis spam from your inbox, do you consider that
censorship? Because that's what these sites are: spam.

~~~
mmbaghdad
doesn't google lable it and just put it in the spam folder?

------
caymanjim
Does anyone smart enough to install a browser plugin (much less visit GitHub)
really need something to identify fake news sites?

~~~
ecesena
You never know. Also, the smart enough person can install it on browsers on
less smart people.

------
jknoepfler
To people who believe this kind of project is "paternalistic" or that
filtering out noise is somehow weak or irresponsible, I disagree.

Time is finite. It is impossible to consume all of the information that is
published in the world. It's not just a little impossible: the fraction of
information that an individual can consume is very near zero. Most people who
have worked in an academic or scientific field know that it is impossible to
consume even a fraction of the domain-specific publications in their field,
much less "all the news that's fit to print."

It makes sense, therefore, to have a strategy for selecting a subset of
information that one trusts as "worth considering," which might include a spam
filter (just as email has, for good reason).

I personally very seldom read news articles shared online, because my
experience has been that they are consistently of very low quality. Speaking
for myself, I get big world event news from the Economist, which has earned
some trust, and the rare nytimes/wsj article that is about something it can't
possibly fuck up (anything outside the borders of the United States is
generally beyond NYT/WSJ).

Would I be wrong for filtering all of the shared news articles from my feed?
The only reason I keep them there is that I skim Facebook to get a feel for
what people are thinking about and feeling on a given day (to stay slightly
"in touch" with people, even if I think they wallow in a world of self-serving
garbage information and would be better served by finding something more
interesting to occupy their minds).

A better criticism of this kind of filtering might that it is intrinsically
arrogant, but I don't think it is any more paternalistic or irresponsible than
a spam filter for email.

------
CM30
How is the clustering analysis going to work?

Because the current hard coded list of URLs is a start, but it's not really a
scalable solution to the issue.

However, from what I can see in this file:

[https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-
bullshit/blob/master/d...](https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-
bullshit/blob/master/discriminating-fake-news-from-real-news.ipynb)

It just seems like it's going to compare examples of articles included in the
source files, as found here:

[https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-
bullshit/tree/master/d...](https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-
bullshit/tree/master/data)

So how is it going to detect the difference between a real or fake piece from
this?

~~~
jnotarstefano
Given two clusters, I can predict the class of a new article by choosing the
cluster whose centroid is closest to the article.

So, given some training data that produced two reasonable clusters with
respect to the ground truth, I have a model that I can expect to generalize
well on new data.

Now, this is not what that notebook shows, because it's missing the evaluating
on testing data! The main point of the notebook is that the Jaccard Distance
of the tokens of the HTML of the page, despite being very simple, appears to
generate a reasonable model.

------
wrongc0ntinent
While I like the friendly notification/explanation, any tool targeting fake
news should do a little better in establishing its own credibility. You want
to persuade, not block. I'm not sure the dollar amount is enough. We see it in
these very comments: show the user a sample of obvious falsehoods they
published. This way you could probably come up with a threshold where you just
give up.

~~~
jnotarstefano
That's an excellent idea. I wrote the copy on that page trying to convey "can
I get your help against these bad people?", rather than something blaming the
user, or a scary looking warning.

But showing them the _reason_ why a certain website is blocked can become an
opportunity to teach people critical thought, something that other comment
threads point out.

------
spejson
I was working on something similar, but with a database that would contain
credibility ratings from users and users would rate the website. The extension
was supposed to display the rating and ev. warnings on top of the website.

Nice project. I may use it :)

~~~
CM30
So in other words, Web of Trust for news sites.

Sounds like an interesting concept, though it'll need some really careful
moderation to stop it getting abused. I've seen sites get low WOT ratings
because the staff banned a few members and said members then took it out on
their WOT page.

You'll need a good way to stop these negative SEO type attacks from being
weaponised against a news site's rating by its competitors.

------
colllectorof
You need a browser extension for this nowadays? Is the target audience so
judgement-impaired that they can't, you know, not click on obvious clickbait
and think about what they're seeing on Facebook?

~~~
knowaveragejoe
> Is the target audience so judgement-impaired

As we've seen this last election, yes, they are. How else do you explain
millions of shares on "news" stories that are immediately, obviously false to
anyone looking past the headlines?

~~~
TheOsiris
are we really pretending that those people would've changed their vote had
they not seen the "fake" news?

I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of these shares were by people who
wanted the news to be true anyway. I have friends who shared some stuff like
that. they were never gonna change their vote/view. everyone else would just
roll their eyes.

I'm with Zuckerberg on this one. fake news did not affect the election. people
are just looking for an excuse to blame. I would love to see how many people
will still be against fake news come April first

~~~
eloel
You seem to enjoy pretending that Hillary lost because of fake news and
"clearly everyone else is just plain stupid" and not because she's the most
corrupt politician possibly in our country's history, so why not pretend about
more stuff?

~~~
sctb
Please don't post only snarky comments. We ask that HN users comment civilly
and substantively or not at all.

------
chiefalchemist
Fake news isn't the problem. People willing to think critically is. The
problem is, no one wants to know their baby is ugly. So the bury their heads
in their person echo chamber.

------
seanwilson
My feeling is that people with good critical thinking skills wouldn't buy into
fake news anyway so wouldn't need an app to help them and people that buy into
fake news don't want to improve their critical thinking skills so wouldn't use
an app to help them either. People like being surrounded by other people that
agree with them.

Are there any examples of subtle fake news stories? My feeling is they're
really obvious especially if not being covered by major news sites.

------
alvil
Define bullshit.

------
isuckatcoding
This will be subjective at some point beyond the BuzzFeeds of the Internet.

------
invisible
Nice! I love this idea. What happens when most sites that deliver news have at
least some bullshit?

~~~
devoply
That's really the issue. It's just a question of whose bullshit. Bullshit of
the rich media mughals? Right wing conservatives? Liberal elite?
Environmentalists? Alt-right nutters? At the end of the day, media has stopped
being about objectivity, just as long as there is a semblance, anything goes.
People tell lies, or next to lies in order to get people to see things their
ways. It's just a question of the level of sophistication of those lies.
Outright lies are the lowest level of sophistication, all the way up to
manufactured consent.

~~~
jjawssd
How can you distinguish between news that pisses a lot of people off and news
that is fake/spam?

If I write a blatant hit piece which is based entirely on factual information
a lot of people will report it because they are upset over it but it doesn't
change the fact that is truthful.

How do you prevent people from suppressing opposing view points by reporting
them as fake?

------
eloel
if anyone doesn't want to use a clunky browser addon, you can just ask me.
Like the author of the app, I too know what is true and what is not and I will
guide you on what news is safe for you to read.

Please, let me do your thinking for you.

------
elipsey
Zoom out one meta level: Show HN: Stop the Stop-the-Bullshit. A Fake Fake News
Detector Detector.

Wait, but then we would need Stop the Stop the Stop-the-Bullshit.... um... but
what if?!!

------
elihu
How does it work? Is it just a blacklist?

> "Also includes a clustering analysis that could lead to an algorithm to
> automatically detect Fake News."

This implies that they want to do automatic fake news detection, but aren't
quite there yet. Is that correct?

~~~
makepanic
Looks like it's currently using a hard coded list of urls that are considered
to be bad.

For general requests: [https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-
bullshit/blob/master/s...](https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-
bullshit/blob/master/src/js/background.js#L11-L34)

For facebook: [https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-
bullshit/blob/master/s...](https://github.com/jacquerie/stop-the-
bullshit/blob/master/src/js/facebook.js#L3-L25)

~~~
ultrasandwich
Yeah, it's just some arbitrary list of a few hardcoded URLs right now... Is
this really useful??

~~~
jnotarstefano
Consider that I built it this night for
[http://lauzhack.com/](http://lauzhack.com/), so it's not intended to be a
fully-featured solution to the problem.

The main issue I wanted to address is the fact that such a blocker must be
widely installed to be useful. Therefore, the Facebook message is intended to
prod current users of the extensions to ask that their friends install it as
well.

