
A Stylometric Inquiry into Hyperpartisan and Fake News - laretluval
https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.05638
======
mafribe

       manually fact-checked by professional
       journalists from BuzzFeed.
    

The article seems to accept -- uncritically -- "professional journalists from
BuzzFeed" as arbiters of fake news. Not a good start.

That said, and anecdotally, style is often a fair heuristic for political
agenda. It should be possible to improve the methodology of such research so
it is insightful without such arbiters.

As an aside, it is not surprising that "that the style of left-wing and right-
wing news have a lot more in common than any of the two have with the
mainstream", for they often use the same, or similar tools to undermine
society, a goal both have in common. They read the same literature about how
do this, typically following a Lenisist approach.

~~~
ubernostrum
1\. If anybody would recognize what manufactured clickbait looks like, it
would be Buzzfeed.

2\. Buzzfeed, and a number of other traditionally disreputable sites, have
really stepped up their journalism game over the last year or so. If all you
know about them is listicles, you might be surprised at some of the stuff they
turn out nowadays.

~~~
mafribe
Your (1) is a very good point ... as the saying goes "It takes one to know
one!". But I find "were manually fact-checked by professional journalists..."
a bit of an unfortunate way of describing BF's expertise.

I would not be familiar with (2) as I gave up on BF a long time ago.

~~~
maxerickson
They put their names on the work:

[https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-
an...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-analysis)

Which of the journalists there do you think is just the worst? I mean, they
work for Buzzfeed right?

------
ivraatiems
"Fake news detectors" just sounds like a way to abrogate the responsibility of
the individual to understand and analyze sources. It's not a good idea to
mentally outsource this kind of critical thinking.

Also, Buzzfeed, while sometimes capable of strong journalism, is not the
organization I'd pick to help with this. Why not Politifact, Reuters, 538,
etc.?

~~~
scholia
It's really not hard to identify partizan news _sources_ , which is what this
is based on. They often self-identify themselves.

It's really not hard for professional journalists to fact-check partizan
articles, and I'd assume the ones hired by Buzzfeed used several well-known
fact-checking sites, including Politifact.

 _> sounds like a way to abrogate the responsibility of the individual to
understand and analyze sources_

But of course it doesn't do that. It's just a way of getting a machine to
identify partizan stories that are statistically likely to contain a higher
proportion of lies, especially if they are from right-wing sources (Table 1).

As we know all too well, individuals commonly abrogate the responsibility to
understand and analyze sources all by themselves.

~~~
Coincoin
> It's just a way of getting a machine to identify partizan stories that are
> statistically likely to contain a higher proportion of lies, especially if
> they are from right-wing sources (Table 1).

So, anything from the right should be a lie by default? Then google or whoever
can just unrank the article to oblivion, since it statistically contains
"lies" according to a biased majority? Do you see how dangerous this is?

~~~
scholia
No: see Table 1. It's possible to write partizan stories without using false
facts. The Other 98% does it. However, the right-wing sources used -- Eagle
Rising, Right Wing News, Freedom Daily -- had a higher proportion of false
facts than the left-wing sources.

You must surely know that many right-wing sources are notorious for lying,
especially Breitbart and Infowars. Being a right-wing source shouldn't mean
your lies get a free pass.

For some interesting information on how right-wing sources are _obliged to
lie_ or be rejected by their target audience, see
[http://uk.businessinsider.com/conservative-media-trump-
drudg...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/conservative-media-trump-drudge-
coulter-2016-8?op=1?r=US&IR=T)

------
uncletaco
In my opinion a lot of comments here are too hung up on the fact that the
researchers used data collected by Buzzfeed. I'm not a fan of clickbait
either, but their corpus is publicly available here:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ysnzawW6pDGBEqbXqeYu...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ysnzawW6pDGBEqbXqeYuzWa7Rx2mQUip6CXUUUk4jIk/edit#gid=1756764129)

So as far as I'm concerned, so long as the authors acknowledge their source
(which they did) then there's nothing wrong here. Even FiveThirtyEight builds
most of their models from datasets obtained from third parties. A lot of data
science research is carried out using public datasets because collection is
often an expensive or time-consuming endeavor, especially for social science
research. The authors even say in their acknowledgement "We thank Craig
Silverman, Lauren Strapagiel, Hamza Shaban, Ellie Hall, and Jeremy Singer-Vine
from BuzzFeed for making their data available, enabling our research".

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uuilly
From the article: "It presents a large corpus of 1,627 articles that were
manually fact-checked by professional journalists from BuzzFeed."

At first I thought this was an onion article. It turns out they're serious.

~~~
webmaven
Much as I dislike BuzzFeed's clickbait headlines and articles, they are using
their considerable profits to fund serious journalism:
[https://www.poynter.org/2016/how-buzzfeed-built-an-
investiga...](https://www.poynter.org/2016/how-buzzfeed-built-an-
investigative-team-from-the-ground-up/396656/)

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failrate
I find it refreshing that they admit it isn't good enough right in the
abstract (although they do point out that it is good enough to supplement an
additional method).

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zachrose
The next step here is that the marketplace adapts gets to some kind of
stylometric equilibrium where Breitbart sounds like NPR.

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draugadrotten
I wonder how well the Amazon Mechanical Turk would do if you put it to the
test to determine what is fake news or not.

------
rdtsc
> were manually fact-checked by professional journalists from BuzzFeed.

Anyone else stopped reading there? Because I did.

~~~
webmaven
Understandable, but BuzzFeed's considerable profits from clickbait articles
are being used to fund serious journalism: [https://www.poynter.org/2016/how-
buzzfeed-built-an-investiga...](https://www.poynter.org/2016/how-buzzfeed-
built-an-investigative-team-from-the-ground-up/396656/)

