
Bitpress: An Open Protocol for Tracking the Credibility of News - lloydarmbrust
https://medium.com/@larmbrust/bitpress-an-open-protocol-for-tracking-the-credibility-of-news-2f8c961cd67c
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jeffmcmahan
How do we avoid the problem of 40% of people shouting "liberal bias!" when
they see the Times, the Post, and CNN dominating the graph?

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npcompl33t
Thats an excellent question, and one that we don't take lightly. We have
undertaken quite a bit of research to validate this idea by looking at the
current link economy between media organizations and running our proposed
algorithm on the resulting network, minus the negative link portion.

Our algorithm works by first identifying a set of powernodes (right now, about
1% of the total nodes). Each of these powernodes is then given the ability to
"vote" on whether content is trustworthy or not.

Using the MIT Media labs tags I can then quantify what % of the total trust is
held by the liberals and the conservatives. Currently, there amount of trust
between both sides is roughly equal, though on the liberal side most of the
trust tends to be in the "left-center", while on the conservative side it is
mostly held by more extremist outlets such as fox news, breitbart, and the
daily caller.

Interestingly, the most trusted content is often linked to by both parties,
and through the classifications its very easy to identify which articles are
partisan/are only being linked to by one side.

The conservative outlets don't appear to often support each other through
collectively linking to bad content. Totaling up all of the conservative votes
- the number one trusted source is unsurprisingly fox news, but the number 2
and number 3 sources are the Washington Post and the Times.

[https://imgur.com/O05eHfX](https://imgur.com/O05eHfX) (Most trusted overall)

[https://imgur.com/FCoJrWd](https://imgur.com/FCoJrWd) (Most trusted
conservative)

[https://imgur.com/SotcwD0](https://imgur.com/SotcwD0) (Most trusted center)

[https://imgur.com/kg9dmou](https://imgur.com/kg9dmou) (Most trusted liberal)

Its interesting that even with several hyperpartisan conservative outlets
given a "seat" at the voting table, these sources still bubble to the top.
Compare this to the results from Facebook's recent attempt to start ranking
publisher trust, using users' ratings:
[https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/993502674233577479](https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/993502674233577479)

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happyrock
> Our algorithm works by first identifying a set of powernodes (right now,
> about 1% of the total nodes). Each of these powernodes is then given the
> ability to "vote" on whether content is trustworthy or not.

Does this not all but ensure that the status quo will be maintained and
reinforced? "The 1%" can create a moat to keep unapproved sources out the
realm of "trusted" opinion. Hard to imagine any genuinely dissenting outlets
gaining any traction that way. Am I misunderstanding things?

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npcompl33t
Hey! Great Question. There are actually two steps:

1) The list of powernodes is derived from running a modified version of
Eigentrust on the network, and selecting the top n nodes. This is run at the
publisher/domain level.

2) After identifying the powernodes, they are used to rank news at the article
level, based on how many powernodes are linking to a source.

Therefore the powernodes are selected based on the entire graph, and can
change over time. Testing our ideas on the current media landscape seems to
show the algorithm does a good job of identifying local maxima.

For example: Our current list of around 60 powernodes was generated from a
graph of around 3.5 million articles from the last 3 years. It includes sites
bitcoin.com and coindesk, two sites that are relatively new compared to
several of the larger incumbents.

From the left, it includes sites like salon, vox, and msnbc.

From the right it includes sites like breitbart, the daily caller, and the
washington examiner.

All trustless cryptography based systems have a threshold of malicious
participants they can tolerate before failing. Bitcoin, for example, has a
well known threshold of 51%. The media, however, is diverse enough that the
idea they would all somehow collude with one another to game the system seems
unlikely.

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mltsy
This looks amazing! How will the blockchain transaction register be...
supported? I assume we don't want people "mining for trust" that they haven't
earned from others, so what's the incentive to verify / process these...
"trustactions"? :D

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npcompl33t
The financial incentives for running a node take the form of a "publishing
fee" \- similar to the transaction fees for other cryptocurrencies - that
block creators will receive.

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AustinEnigmatic
When's the ICO? I want it!

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adamcianfichi
Awesome

