It's impossible to assign a "true"/"fake" value to all news stories... especially with our increasingly biased and divided media.
Here's an example of what happens when we try: Politifact, a consistently liberal-biased source, didn't like that Trump took credit for a hard and proven fact. So they called it "mostly false" even though nothing he said was false.
The real world is vastly more complex than "true or fake". The Trump tweet you mentioned is a perfect example. His tweet was not a simple statement of fact:
> The media has not reported that the National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Obama first mo.
That's a claim: "I have lowered the debt in my first month while Obama raised it". While the facts are true (the debt did go down), the claim is false. Trump has taken no action that would cause the debt to be lowered; it's not unusual for the debt level to fluctuate in the short term.
The real problem we have is that most people aren't interested in this kind of nuance at all. A statement that makes your team look like the winners, or the other team look like the losers, is easy to accept without much thought or analysis.
The next level of nuance, of course, is separating Trump's propensity of associating everything positive he sees with himself and the completely true words of that tweet. The fact stated is a legitimate starting point for a policy discussion that is easily and cleanly distinct for the implied claim you referred to.
Isn't that the problem at hand? Layering this seemingly objective "fact" checking on top of a political statements ("the way he wants to spin it"). Then picking a side. If they don't like the side then "technically" true is not enough, now the fact checker has to agree with the politics and the intent to mark it as "true".
I am pretty sure if Clinton or Obama made that statement there would be very little discussion in marking it as "true" and claiming "yeah it is technically true, what she/he might have implied is up to interpretation, but statement on its own is a fact".
Yes. Isolated facts in and of themselves, without considering either the narrative into which they are embedded, or the world-views they invoke in recipients of those messages, are at best only a part of the much larger picture.
This is why fact-checking, at the very least alone, is not a total solution.
This is a good illustration of the problem of purported fact checking organizations using the supposed fact check actually as a headline for political/social commentary. If the product you're selling is commentary, don't claim you are a fact checking service.
No, it's neither. It's analyzing the consistency between the different levels of narrative. Meaning and understanding don't happen merely at the level of denotation. This is why we need to listen to the advice of poets.
Not saying it's true but an argument can be made (and I assume this is the one he's thinking) that growth was higher with his winning the election because the market is anticipating his policies. It is perfectly reasonable and a matter of opinion. You simply cannot write it off as factually incorrect.
But if you read the actual tweet he simply says debt when down in his first month vs. up in Obama's. Which is true. He doesn't say it was because of his policies. Politifact just found a way to try to spin it (which is what it is) as "false" so they could add it to the "Trump's a compulsive liar" column.
To paraphrase someone else: I didn't leave the liberals, the liberals left me.
I would say that you will return to the fold soon enough.
Firstly, no political speech is made for its truth value. Let us disabuse everyone of this notion.
1) all human beings have a very limited attention short term span which has to be managed and husbanded.
2) full technically and practically faithful statements of a problem easily crush those human neural limits.
3) emotional messaging subverts all rational checks and balances, and has a disproportion impact on the brain, and such messaging can be made to scale.
Given the 3 points above, without a constant third party or legal intervention to prevent abuse, political messaging will always devolve into emotional button pushing.
The people who deal in politics will be so far removed in skill and native talent in this field, that it would be like comparing a newbie high school graduate vs someone who writes and optimizes game engine code.
Simply put, most communication by politicians will be designed to take these considerations,at the minimum, into mind.
these are the functional limits of the world we live in.
It's true that Trump didn't claim it was a result of his actions or policies (enacted or planned), but that is clearly the intended unstated message. Otherwise, why did he tweet it?
For the reasons stated IN the tweet? To show how the media didn't report it because it could be conceived as something good that happened under his first month?
"Fake-news" was from the start a tool for censorship with a political agenda.
Now we can vote "disputed" if you do not agree with something. Great.
If it is fully democratic: "Any climate change news is fake".
Or if it is Technocratic (only certain scientists and companies are allowed to mark fake news): "Patents are great. Open source is bad. Monsanto never does any bad things."
Or a CIA echo chamber: "Iraq (or Syria or Iran) has Weapons of Mass Destruction." (Not really, but we don't know until we have invaded it).
We have a similar problem in the UK, the news has to give all parties a say. So we get almost equal air time to UKIP (who are tiny) as to the Tories (who are in power) ... it's a bit crazy.
Which leads us on to Brexit, the news gave equal air time to both sides. Now, I say both, but for something as complex as Brexit there are way more than two sides but the public didn't really get a view on Left-exit, right-exit, left-remain, right-remain and all the bits in the middle.
Fake news? Opinion? Not enough time to inform the masses? I don't envy Facebook, they're throw their hat into the ring. Nothing good can come of this for them. You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't.
> So we get almost equal air time to UKIP (who are tiny) as to the Tories (who are in power)
I don't like either of those parties, and they don't get even remotely equal airtime, but UKIP were the third most popular party in the 2015 election. Hardly "tiny", except by virtue of the bent UK electoral system which gave them only one seat.
Personally I'd prefer minor parties were given more exposure than bigger parties - that we all know about and are sick of already - than the reverse.
I don't agree with your analogy, but I still found it very interesting to consider.
I think the fundamental difference is that spam detectors are seen as acting on their users behalf. If I say an email isn't spam, then it isn't and that's the final word on the matter.
Fake news classifiers don't give one classification per user. They don't try to predict for every single user whether that user would find it credible. Instead, they output a single value for the whole community. They act on the community's behalf. Because of this, some people will always disagree, and they will feel that the system is imposing on them. That's why it's political when spam detectors are not.
That's a pretty naive view on spam detection. Haven't you ever found something filed in your spam box that you wanted, like this month's newsletter from your favorite club?
While you are right that the "ground truth" of spam vs ham comes from you, the process of classifying your mail relies on a lot of data provided by the community.
During the election, Trump Rally's always sold out of tickets(free so not sold) so as soon as they became available I requested the max per email(2) on several email accounts. They went to spam on my Google apps for business and Gmail accounts. I signed up to do campaign calls, they went to spam. Newsletters, spam. He became the president and sent updates - spam. (Whitehouse.gov) email. I manually whitelisted every single time. Parents inauguration invitation reminders - spam. Not to mention there are reports from all over the country of inauguration invitations showing up as much as a month after the event.(USPS) Weird. I guess the Gmail thing didn't really surprise me, seeing as Eric Schmidt was on Hillary's team and shared resources...
You realize that google 100% censors everything that supports Donald Trump or his policies. Let me give you an example.
In mid October, James O'Keefe releases his undercover videos. This is the video on Day 2. The video hits #1 on youtube 2 or 3 hours after release. The second it hits #1 spot, it is completely removed from youtube trending. Not demoted, but entirely removed from the list, taking the 1 and 2 spots are 2 pro-hillary videos with 1/10th the views and they are 8 times older.. The video's views then start counting backwards. There are dozens of archive.is on reddit if you'd like to see but that isn't what I want to show here.
The story, like all other stories, is completely absent from google news. The stories announcing Michael Moore's documentary were timed (fine, not for sure purposely), to coincide with the 2nd day of O'Keefe videos. Upon visiting trends.google.com, James Okeefe never even made the list. You can scroll down through the top several hundred queries, and it wasn't in the list at all. The #1 story was Michael Moore anti-Trump doc for the past 24 hours. However, if you clicked on the michael moore link, and click compare, and start to type in james okeefe, and click on the autocomplete, it shows the true story. James okeefe stories dominated those about michael moore for the entirety of the past 24 hours. If you click on the michael moore story (in the 3 spot in my screenshots with sports above it), you can see that search interest hits 100 at 5pm, meaning, there is nothing bigger then it. However, once you add in james okeefe stories manually, you realize it was fudged. The day before that issue didn't exist, but starting after the first day of the james okeefe undercover videos, all the big pro trump/anti hillary stories never ever made the trending list through the election.
In summary James okeefe videos werent trending at all, got totally hidden from the youtube trending page, every single day, along with just about every big pro trump video, and literally hundreds of hashtags were hidden from twitter. I will link some screenshots below. If you think they are somehow manipulated, they are taken from a 20 minute video of me explaining how to see all of this for a noob. If you were actually interested, please just say so, so i can re-upload to an anonymous youtube account (its private right now, was meant as an instruction for a friend in the media to replicate the comparison for news.) I didn't compare with the wrong michael moore, they are all from the same exact time, etc. Like i said if you really think i am messing with you, i will upload the video this afternoon.. However I am assuming this will just get downvoted and ignored, but who knows.
P.S. I know it doesn't say 'Michael Moore, Donald trump' as it does in the trending list, but the absolute figures correspond exactly, the ui just doesn't display the full combination of queries on the details page's chart title, again in the video if you don't believe.
http://imgur.com/a/TX0T2
What is spam and what is valuable mail is more or less unambiguous.
Even if it's not easy to know algorithmically, it is very easy to know a spam message when one sees the message.
News on the other hand, especially on political issues with differing opinions, are not that clear. And the underlying facts are not that major a factor either, because journalists can lie with statistics, be selective, omit things, put a false spin on the impact of real facts, etc.
And even who measures the "facts" can be political (e.g. a researcher paid by some mega-corporation, a government agency that wants to make the government look good, etc), and seemingly 100% accurate stats (e.g. on the "level of unemployment") cannot always be trusted and sometimes differ to reality by a huge margin (e.g. the level of unemployment can be manipulated in 100 different ways, based on the definition on unemployment, and various countries play all kinds of tricks with that.
I'd go ahead and say that a lot of ambiguous news will not be marked anyway. Although any news that says I've made alien babies should obviously be marked disputed.
> didn't like that Trump took credit for a hard and proven fact
Since you, yourself, note that Trump is trying to take credit for it, perhaps you should explain why their reasoning is wrong.
"The national debt fluctuates up and down depending on the day. While the debt is "down" after one month, experts say that trend will reverse and the debt will continue to rise.
This factoid is a gross misrepresentation of the state of the debt and the role the new president had in shaping the figure."
To clarify my reason for asking artursapek to explain
- the tweet isn't a "hard and proven fact", it is a claim - albeit an implicit claim, but a claim nonetheless
- as such, Politifact is evaluating the claim
If artursapek disagrees with the analysis, he should either
- explain why the Tweet is not a claim, or
- explain why Politifact's evaluation of the claim is incorrect, misleading or otherwise wrong
Otherwise, this is not an example of "a consistently liberal-biased source"
It's really a great approach that they're taking. I do think classification of "True" is very difficult, although "Disputed" seems reasonable. For instance, if I wrote an article saying I was a billionaire, I'd assume this would eventually receive the "Disputed" label. Articles not marked as "Disputed" are clearly not necessarily "True".
The main underlying "evil" of censorship is that it obscures the truth and rallies people behind ideas that aren't accurate, ideas that also have some upside to another party. It's weaponized information essentially.
That's where Facebook finds itself already. The utter amount of garbage facts that then color people's perspective -- falsely. Facebook is then left to choose their reality -- do they want to try to fight off this crap even if it means potential controversy, or do they want to endure ongoing controversy over what they could be doing. There's no winning so they have to choose how they lose.
They're also not a government, so, their duty in all of this is pretty minimal. If Facebook takes action and it's seen as less trustful in regards to news, I have to think they'd be okay with that. Who cares. At that point it's not their problem, go somewhere else for unbiased news. At least they don't have the active problem of being a clearinghouse for false facts.
Politifact is a consistently fact-biased source. What you're objecting to is their inclusion of the clear implications of a claim, not just the letter. Here Trump was clearly implying that his administration is more fiscally responsible than Obama's in the first month. That is mostly false. These things are not impossible.
> It's impossible to assign a "true"/"fake" value to all news stories... especially with our increasingly biased and divided media.
This is an absolutely irrational argument, which is not to say it is incorrect. It is possible to assign levels of truths to information - we do it all the time in infrastructure. OTOH, it matters not if biases exist in media - those biases can be "truths" as well to the groups of entities who share the biases.
Truths don't imply absolute labeling however, as you so well point out. We all knew Fox News was biased toward the Republican's views. In hindsight, Fox looks quaint compared to Breitbart. Supporting Breitbart or Infowars is another thing entirely, given they support continued, or self-referential irrationality. Irrationality that spreads itself, in other words. I consider this harmful to humans.
The only people who don't want truths to exist is people whose intent is to spread their irrationality to gain control over others.
What will happen, and you can mark my words on this, is that AI will be known primarily in assisting humans in their final effort to reduce the amount of damage those-who-speak-for-others cause the larger group, primarily by detecting their intent in FUCKING with the way we all communicate with each other in a trusted manner.
When, not if, this happens, those who played this game will learn the real price of dissonance.
I agree with everything you said, except, critically the last part.
I too believe that Intent identification is the holy grail of any algorithmic way of solving this.
I think the creation of such a system will be then of us. Not our savior.
All of the websites, tracking, micro targeting in current and future elections were ostensibly created to make the world a better place.
People believed that code would allow humanity to break the restraints of old nation states, and keep ahead of them.
But eventually nation states did catch up, and we see what that has resulted in.
I think AI is far too overused a term for statistical modeling and categorization. But creating any tool to "help" people understand each other will only result in its insights being used to target people open/vulnerable to having their opinions changed.
And that will result in MORE control. Not less.
Don't create a tool until you understand how it will be used against you.
> I think the creation of such a system will be then of us. Not our savior.
Absolutely. The intent to create rational transfer of information will result in creating a new type of life that is us, yet is not us. This will likely result in the "end" of us, but that's the nature of things anyway.
Nothing is forever, but it sure as hell seems it could have been put off so I didn't have to deal with it.
I imagine their hands are kind of tied- if they don't do anything, then people complain. If they do something, it is possibly not perfect, unless they can come up with some amazing spam reducing innovation which probably close to an AGI fake news bouncer.
The only thing to really do is throw some tools up, and adjust them as adversaries (fake news makers) get more tricky, until finally, after a long time, you get the big innovation.
In any case, deciding to take a stand is clearly better than doing nothing at all.
If the person who was supposed to win the election had won the election there wouldn't have been this huge fake news crisis. The system was working just fine until it wasn't doing what it was supposed to do. The tsunami like immune reaction of all the players in the political system to the incorrect person being elected president is certainly awesome to behold.
There are a set of inputs that go into the voters mind that produce a certain output: the voting decision. The technology inputs to produce the correct candidate choice has been somehow thwarted by a bug in the system. The bug has been identified as fake news. To restore the proper functioning of the system the bug has to be fixed by implementing AI systems, overseen by properly vetted quality control personnel, in order to detect and remove fake news. The quality control personnel should be properly vetted to make sure that they are not under the influence of fake news which may cause errors in voting behavior to leak through. You see, people having an incorrect voting decision is evidence that there is a bug in the system that feeds them information. That, or there is a fundamental flaw in their cognitive systems which is why they have been called "deplorables". /end of the movie evil guy speech
Incorrect opinion? Who gets to decide the incorrect opinion?
The side that thinks Trump is a racist/xenophobe/terrorist? Or the side that thinks Hillary Benghazi/Emails/Charity? Or the side that thinks Bernie Venezuela/Socialist/etc? Or the side that think Stein ... Or the side that think Johnson... or... or...
What makes a Trump Supporters opinion wrong and a Clinton supporters opinion right? Or Bern? Stein? Johnson?
We should absolutely work on getting rid of "Fake" news... but what is fake news? What is true news that is obviously biased (CNN/Fox/etc)? What is satire (Onion)?
Who is producing "Non" fake news? CNN? Fox? CBS? NBC? Politico? I can look at news stories on all of the above and see "True" information spun to make one side look good and the other bad...
I love how people think their opinion is OBVIOUSLY right... their opponents opinion is OBVIOUSLY wrong and anyone who doesn't agree with them is a Terrorist/Xenophobe/Islamaphobe/Racist/etc'ad'naseum.
As seen by a foreigner, me, it is quite clear that the status quo and the powers that be had chosen Hillary Clinton as the next US president. But Trump won, so the system has to be corrected so similar things do not happen again in the future. It has nothing to do with who is right or wrong.
Only if the status quo you are referring to is the political, which was the same as TPTB, and not the social. This country did not want more of the old administration and took option B.
I am distinguishing the TPTB from the masses. The TPTB failed and Trump was chosen. Now they need to ensure that a similar thing does not happen again in the future.
And the TPTB exceed the political leaders. I mean the ones that really run the country.
The person who won made repeated claims the system was rigged. I can't say if the correct person won. I can say it's clear to the winner there is a public system for show, and a secret system for actually selecting the president.
And the other side said the system was fair. We can trust the results. Anyone who challenges the results is a threat to Democracy.
BEFORE the election everyone was confident and trusting of the election. It wasn't until AFTER the Election that we all of a sudden started to care about Russia "hacking" the election.
I mean... which is it? it's fair and trustworthy if you win but it's not trustworthy and fair if you lose?
Honestly though... if there is a secret system for "actually" selecting the President... do you think those secret puppet masters would choose Trump?
There's also little to no mainstream doubt about the outcome of the vote (of course the President has raised concerns that the vote was not accurate, but most responses to that, for example from Secretaries of State, have tried to emphasize that there is no evidence of major issues with the election). The controversy is all about how Russia may have acted to influence voters.
Supposedly Obama knew for Months/Years... that Russia was trying to influence the election. And by his admission BEFORE the election, you could trust the results. Hillary has a well known quote that "If you don't trust the election results, you are a threat to democracy" (Paraphrased).
If the Obama Administration was worried about Russia influence in the election, why didn't we hear about it BEFORE the results that they didn't like? Why is all the outrage about Russia AFTER the election?
It's hard to hit such a large topic in a short blurb... but where is the anger about Obama influencing elections (Brexit, Israel, etc)? It's okay for Obama to do it but not Putin?
My main point is this: Why is the problem NOW everywhere when the issue was known BEFORE the election and the previous administration did nothing then?
Second point is this: Everyone is trying to influence each others shit. Why is Russia so much worse? Where is the outrage that Obama worked on influencing the elections of other democracies?
> Supposedly Obama knew for Months/Years... that Russia was trying to influence the election. And by his admission BEFORE the election, you could trust the results. Hillary has a well known quote that "If you don't trust the election results, you are a threat to democracy" (Paraphrased).
> If the Obama Administration was worried about Russia influence in the election, why didn't we hear about it BEFORE the results that they didn't like? Why is all the outrage about Russia AFTER the election?
There are two different things going on here, which the right likes to conflate.
Russia influenced the election by manipulating voters' opinions, with means that many consider illegitimate (hacking).
Nobody falsified the election results, by hacking or otherwise. When Clinton said not accepting the results was a threat to democracy, she was referring to that - specifically, Trump's claim that the election was "rigged" through voter fraud. And she did accept the results. Democrats today like to argue that Trump doesn't deserve to be president, but nobody credible is saying that the election was literally invalid and the courts should throw him out of office, or anything like that.
Obama did claim Russia was trying to influence the election before the election occurred - on October 7. [1] It's true that he didn't do more in part because he thought Clinton would win, but he also didn't want to seem to be unfairly influencing the election himself.
There are significant differences between Obama influencing the elections of other democracies and what Russia did: the Russian hacking was (1) covert, not overt, and (2) a violation of US law. Of course, you don't have to agree that those differences matter.
There is still plenty of question about the "mechanics". Plenty of places where people are registered who shouldn't (registered in multiple places, etc). People who shouldn't be voting that is (dead people, immigrants, etc).
The left says "There is no issue. at all. If you disagree, you are trying to subvert and you are a racist."
The right says "MILLIONS AND MILLIONS! ZOMG!"
The truth is somewhere in the middle as far as the "mechanics". There is plenty that can be done to insure the accuracy and veracity of the voting booth.
Sure, there are lots of people in a given year that move or die and are not immediately purged from their previous voter roll. There's no one serious suggesting that multiple registrations and fraud have impacted any election results.
The President and some of his followers have made baseless claims about millions of illegal votes. No evidence and lots of election officials contradicting them, but no retraction of the baseless statements.
You are (at length) confounding Trump's express statements prior to the election that he might not accept the results, with those of others to ensure that the results were trustable.
Verifying a process isn't casting doubt on it.
(Blocking attempts to verify it, as the GOP has repeatedly done, including the 2000 election's split and partisan SCOTUS decision, on the other hand, very much does.)
And the fact is that Clinton did not seek and did not assist the few election recount efforts which were made, at the insistence and initiation of Jill Stein. Clinton's campaign did provide observers to that process, but AFAIU didn't otherwise participate significantly.
(A category error on her part, in my opinion.)
You have (and repeat here) miscategorisation of the state of concern over Russian interference in the election process, though not in the election mechanics. Distinguishing process as propaganda, media manipulation, and voter manipulation through the media, and mechanics as the process of vote collection and tabulation itself.
There are numerous other ways in which votes and elections can be, and are, influenced, including gerrymandering (not a factor in US presidential or Senate elections, but very much so in US House, statehouse, and local elections), and voter suppression through elegibility (e.g., felons' loss of voting rights over their entire lifetime), suppression (ID and registration systems), and the location and outfitting of polling places (requiring hours of wait or miles of travel to vote), and support or rejection of automatic or late registration, or of voting by mail.
Your participation in this thread hasn't particularly enhanced your own credibility.
The results of the actual polling machines can be trusted. Nobody is claiming that Russia hacked into the polling stations and changed the results, which is what Trump supporters were going on about prior to the election.
That does not mean that Russia did not interfere in our election, which is what the left is angry about today. The evidence of ties between Russia and people involved in the Trump campaign was public knowledge during the campaign and connections between Trump and Russia were topics on the campaign trail and were even discussed in the debates.
I think one can have this attitude with a lot of things. The job which you were supposed to get is the one you got, etc. It must then be that 'supposed to' doesn't really have any meaning, or the opposite, that things are going according to whatever grand plan there exists for us. Who knows.
(Already mentioned it in another post below) I think companies like Google and Facebook perceived this vacuum created by the failure of the traditional news media to manufacture consent and control people's opinions. They want to send a strong message to those in power that they are better positioned at manufacturing consent in the future than those crusty old dinosaurs like CNN, NBC, etc.
There are obviously a lot of money to be made from campaigns and having powerful and wealthy candidates, or just companies marketing their products and ideas, rely on your platform. Think of it as their way to advertise the ability to "properly" (wink, wink) filter and bias news to suit their customers' demands.
I think they meant it sarcastically. You can't deny it that the majority of mass media has overwhelmingly picked one candidate. Even down to passing her debate questions in advance and so on.
I don't think anyone would be surprised to know that Hillary as far as the media was concerned was supposed to be the winner, not just because they simply wished it to be true, but because they went out of their way to make it so.
In the end they failed. The result of that was a backlash called "Fake News". It is a censorship system designed to bring the influence of media back on-line.
One interesting thing is that traditional media's failure to manufacture consent is perceived to be broken so that left a vacuum for social media to jump in. We saw how quickly Facebook and Google rushed in. I think deep down they want to signal to those in power that "we'll do a better job manufacturing consent for you than those old crusty news channels".
That's where facts are important. Those "fake news" are completely disconnected from reality. I mean North Korean government news agency type of disconnected from reality.
You really think they need to be treated as a better source of information than professional journalists with verifiable sources etc ?
I think biased information, whatever the bias is, as long as it is based on facts is way better than the random bat-shit crazy news we saw popping up all over the place.
Yeah? And I voted for her. Doesn't mean I turned off my critical faculties. Politifact is even less objective than an organization with obvious ideological commitments might be expected to be (given their explicit aim for objectivity).
> Doesn't mean I turned off my critical faculties.
If a media org whose entire claim to credibility is based around being impartial decided it was a good idea to publicly endorse a candidate, than they're pretty invested in that candidate.
From that point, they don't have to forgo critical thinking to manipulate public opinion if they choose to. They could just be selective about the "facts" they fact-check.
Here's an example of what happens when we try: Politifact, a consistently liberal-biased source, didn't like that Trump took credit for a hard and proven fact. So they called it "mostly false" even though nothing he said was false.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/feb/...
This thing Facebook is doing is bound to just end up becoming crowd-sourced echo-chamber censorship. And they probably know that.