Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Should Web Browsers Have 'Fact Checking' Capability Built-In?
Reader dryriver writes: There is no shortage of internet websites these days that peddle "information", "knowledge", "analysis", "explanations" or even supposed "facts" that don't hold up to even the most basic scrutiny -- one quick trip over to Wikipedia, Snopes, an academic journal or another reasonably factual/unbiased source, and you realize that you've just been fed a triple dose of factually inaccurate horsecrap masquerading as "fact". Unfortunately, many millions of more naive internet users appear to frequent sites daily that very blatantly peddle "untruths", "pseudo-facts" or even "agitprop-like disinformation", the latter sometimes paid for by someone somewhere. No small number of these more gullible internet users then wind up believing just about everything they read or watch on these sites, and in some cases cause other gullible people in the offline world to believe in them too. Now here is an interesting idea: What if your internet browser -- whether Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Opera or other -- was able provide an "information accuracy rating" of some sort when you visit a certain URL. Perhaps something like "11,992 internet users give this website a factual accuracy rating of 3.7/10. This may mean that the website you are visiting is prone to presenting information that may not be factually accurate." You could also take this 2 steps further. You could have a small army of "certified fact checkers" -- people with scientific credentials, positions in academia or similar -- provide a rolling "expert rating" on the very worst of these websites, displayed as "warning scores" by the web browser. Or you could have a keyword analysis algorithm/AI/web crawler go through the webpage you are looking at, try to cross-reference the information presented to you against a selection of "more trusted sources" in the background, and warn you if information presented on a webpage as "fact" simply does not check out. Is this a good idea? Could it be made to work technically? Might a browser feature like this make the internet as a whole a "more factually accurate place" to get information from?That's a remarkable idea. It appears to me that many companies are working on it -- albeit not fast enough, many can say. Google, for instance, recently began adding "Fact check" to some stories in search results. I am not sure how every participating player in this game could implement this in their respective web browsers though. Then there is this fundamental issue: the ability to quickly check whether or not something is indeed accurate. There's too much noise out there, and many publications and blogs report on things (upcoming products, for instance) before things are official. How do you verify such stories? If the NYTimes says, for instance, Apple is not going to launch any iPhone next year, and every website cites NYTimes and republishes it, how do you fact check that? And at last, a lot of fake stories circulate on Facebook. You may think it's a problem. Obama may think it's a problem, but does Facebook see it as a problem? For all it care, those stories are still generating engagement on its site.
No.
Obama constantly speaks untruths. Maybe he should have a fact checker next to him.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Why should I trust the people you say I should trust to say who I should trust?
First and foremost, you're probably looking at a major free speech concern the second something is listed incorrectly. You've got to quantify partial truths, exaggerations, etc. You've got to be able to fully reference the fact checkers themselves and on top of that you've got to monitor their sources for accuracy that could later change things. Verified vs unverified info gets crazy with journalist using anonymous sources or protecting their sources. Others, such as leaked info from inside an organization that leaves no means of actually fact checking it becomes even crazier.
Then you take a historical topic that requires a lot of study and context to fully understand what a statement on the subject even means and that's left to the devices/spare time of the people who are supposed to be doing it.
Distinctly complicated road to hoe.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
No
Try adding it to humans first. Starting with slashdot editors.
At the bottom of the
Stop scope creep. A browser should be a BROWSER.
You want to learn the facts and the truth, do your own research. You want to see all sides of the story you can't trust ANY big company regardless of how hands off they are with any of their web browsers.
No one is truthful, everyone lies. Seek the truth yourself and make an informed opinion on what you read on various sites.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Any browser that does this will instantly stop being my browser.
Show me websites, then fuck off.
We just had a Slashdot article about only 1 in 4 articles on Wikipedia being free from bias; what makes you think the "fact check" sites are better?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Never believe anything that's been "fact checked".
Yes, we desperately need this, but we need to make sure that there's a tailored subscription process before use so that the "correct" facts are used by the checking process. I want to make sure that my specific political views, religion, and cultural expectations are reflected in the "objective truth" as shown by teh interwebs.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Why not just have a browser that only displays correct truths? China already does this, we can't allow them to beat us in the crucial field of thought control.
In the voice of Darth Vader.
We already trust the browsers to tell us which CAs are trustworthy, so why not let them pick the arbitrary standard of truth? What could possibly go wrong...
Wouldn't that be great!
There is already an entire industry concerning opinion shaping that includes using social media bots, generating false reviews, identifying which words manipulates the target audience the best, and so on. Basically good old marketing put in hyperdrive.
So, more than anything else I think that's just gonna be one more arrow in the marketers' quiver to legitimize false information.
Maybe "meta" fact checking..? ... or give up and join the dark side.
If the fact-checkers are experts, then identifying (and paying) true experts is a non-trivial undertaking, as is ensuring that they are unbiased. If automated fact checking were done, it would be easily spoofed by increased spurious content (e.g. natural news). The nature of current newspaper-based fact checkers highlights the problem. They are great at dispensing cocktail party conventional wisdom, but much less good at determining actual facts on contested issues.
Otherwise you can ask your browser also to find the best price, delete useless emails and the likes.
AI doesn't mean you have to ditch your NI (natural intelligence, if any!)
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
If I wanted my browsers opinion about anything, I'd have told it one.
Hells^no
I'm sorry, but fact checking is what your brain is for.
Use it.
Glad I could help.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
and you're a fucking fagot
Wow. Someone used the words wikipedia, snopes and unbiased in the same sentence.
Would that be the New-York Times fact-checker, or the Fox News fact-checker ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Of course not.
Most halfway normal and educated people have no problems with discerning reality from imagination and propaganda, and the rest will not believe in extra 'checked' facts anyway. Yes, on the Internet conspiracy crackpots can easily find forums on which they reinforce their world views but they're not a new phenomenon. Most of them probably need a bit more sleep, the feeling of being needed and a bit less sorrows much more than facts.
The problem is that people aren't thinking for themselves, so you're proposing that the browser should do the thinking for them?
Dont let the title mislead you here, not trying to troll.
The issue this article is really about, is about people not having the time to self-educate, and as such, not having time to fact check their media consumption.
Firstly, this is feature creep in the browser. The browser allows you to consume the information of your choosing. It should not interfere in one's choice of information to consume, so "No."
This is a consequence of being overworked (Notice that this is for the United States, land of the 1-week a year "vacation."), and having insufficient time for personal improvement activities.
When there is a "Now you no longer have to do all that troublesome and time consuming fact checking and self-improvement, because you can use our convenient Truthiness App instead!", you just produce a channel by which "truth" (the political kind!) can be disseminated to the masses without question. So, "Hell no."
It also obviates yet another challenge against the time demands of the corporate interests against their workers, because now they dont really need all that time to themselves for self-improvement. Which brings us to the obligatory "Go fuck yourself."
The real solution is to stop robbing people of personal time, because that is what causes this problem to begin with.
Fact checking based on public consensus...hmmmmm...you get my drift ;-)
I've never seen to much crappola in my life, esp. anything dealing with herbs or anything "Eastern" (because "The West" is the new "white male").
Nothing ever has a single reference to anything, and all kinds of woo-woo can treat any disease. Anything dealing with herbs seems to fall into this uncritical, non-evidence-based trap, without fail.
Why should anyone else. Let's start with fact checking Wall Street then move on to conspiracy theories....
That ship sailed when Microsoft introduced the first browser that was a direct vector to the OS kernel.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The web browser should be as small and lean as possible. It's job is to render HTML. Fact checking is *NOT* the browser's job.
Your TV does not cook you dinner.
Your car does not raise your kids.
Your cell phone does not do your laundry.
Of course your browser should not check facts for you.
It's a browser.
It's sole function is to act as a gateway to information contained out on the web.
Period.
I do not need someone else ( or their magic algorithm ) to determine if what I'm looking at is:
1) The whole truth
2) A partial truth
3) Not even close to the truth
4) A National Enquirer worthy article
5) Approved for viewing in my country due to the subject matter
For what passes as the News these days ( and the folks who control them ) know this:
I would prefer my information to come to me unfiltered, uncensored, unbiased and sans any sort
of tracking to determine what I am reading or watching at any given time. I will make up my own
mind if I find it factual or otherwise.
It's bad enough I have to read a dozen different news sites ( across several countries ) to get multiple
viewpoints on the same story just to even out the bias since any single source tends to spin it one
way or another depending on the wishes of the parent corporation who happens to own the news
outlet in question.
Just . . . no.
Maybe, if there were even the slightest bit of journalistic integrity left, we would instead focus on
getting the damn facts straight BEFORE releasing the story instead of everyone scrambling to be
the news equivalent of your typical forum " First Post ".
As for relying upon opinionated blogs, Facebook, and the plethora of other news-wanna-be sites out
there, trust what you read and see at your own risk. Just remember their sole function in life is to
get you on their site. Eventually, it will self correct once enough folks figure out the sites are peddling
nothing but bullshit.
They'll simply quit showing up.
What are FACTS for some people (ie Democrats and Liberals) are utter bullshit for others. Like Slick Willie said 'it depends on what your definition of is is'.
Besides, if you build that in, you remove one more way for people to use their little gray cells and generate proper critical thinking skills. Then again, after what's up here in America with a blatant corrupt criminal possibly elected president, it's obvious critical thinking no longer exists.
Pax Vobiscum
You need to explain that in a way that isn't just clever.
I don't want propaganda built into my browser, THANKS.
There's enough of that from the media and the major websites (Facebook and Google in particular)
This is something broadly analogous to the Semantic Web on AI times 1,000, and the world decided it didn't want the Semantic Web, it wanted iPhones.
The difference between "real facts" and "pseudo facts" is often subjective. Darth Vader betrayed and murdered Anakin Skywalker - from a certain point of view.
... and Firefox, I'm looking at you. But to the point of this thread, fact-checking should be done by those who want to do it. It should not be trust upon everyone just because it can be.
We just had a Slashdot article [slashdot.org] about only 1 in 4 articles on Wikipedia being free from bias
Being free from bias is not the same as saying that it is factually correct.
Don't out and out preclude people from reading certain material -- just smear it with a big warning that it's the "wrong" way to think. Much more subtle than China/N. Korea/etc.
And think of the efficiencies. Today, the journalistic cadre actually has to go to the trouble to write out why something is "wrong," and then hope readers find it. Imagine the leverage if they could just declare the "right" framework once and have it applied across the board to the "wrong" sources!
Building on that, just think how easy it would then be to measure someone's potential for... er, "inconvenience" by aggregating the "factiness" scores of their browsing history.
If this doesn't scare the hell out of you, it's likely because you hold a worldview currently considered to be "right" (and have forgotten just how recently it may have been considered "wrong").
The obvious result is that stories will become unbiased enough to be a gray area for fact checkers, while still being biased enough to influence the reader.
Truth is difficult to pin down. In some cases truth is legitimately subjective.
A browser like this would inevitably just be another layer of bias and indirection, so the problem will just become one of "who watches the watchers?".
For example several sites have stated that snopes, traditionally the internet bastion of fact-checking, has a strong political bias.
http://dailycaller.com/2016/06...
http://www.angrypatriotmovemen...
People need to stop thinking they're superior to others and stop trying to regulate perceived stupidity. In a quest to do this, bias will develop. Selective use of facts, tilted statistics, etc.
The real problem here is that some people see things that they don't agree with. They think it's their duty to prevent such information from appearing because it encourages people to also lean ways that that person does not believe. While at the same time, said person sees no wrong with incorrect information that supports their beliefs.
Sorry, I don't want to live in a world where one type of thinking is imposed on everyone. Where people are not allowed to be free and speak as they wish. Where information is constrained to an algorithm controlled by a central committee. Let's give people some credit for being able to decipher information sources and debate topics.
Most people are looking for "facts" that validate their preconceived opinions. They tend to selectively read articles which have headlines for topics they already have an opinion on, if the article is in conflict with that opinion, they dismiss the article as rubbish, or perhaps comment on it to that effect. If the article is in line with their opinion, they share it proudly with all their social media friends as a proclamation on how "right" their opinions are, regardless of the factual accuracy of the article. It's particularly amusing when it's apparent they have only skimmed the article looking for a choice quote to validate their opinion, while the article on the whole is actually in disagreement with their opinion.
The real problem with herbal medicine (in the western tradition), is that dosage is not reliable.
It isn't that there arent active compounds in the plants, or even that the treatments cant be effective-- the problem is that they are not reliably effective.
Further, it requires that the practitioner essentially be a pharmacologist. Most people have no god-damned clue about how a drug (herbal or otherwise) works in the body, and thus have no fucking clue about interactions, minimal effective dosage, et al.
Throw in a heaping mountain of willful ignorance (aka, stupidity) concerning "Natural is safer and better!", and you have the festering shitpile of popularized herbal medicine.
Can foxglove extract help treat hypertension? Yes. Is it safe or reasonable to do so? FUCK NO. Effective dose is close to lethal dose! Does the fact that it came out of a plant make it somehow safer than the dosage controlled, purity assured, and highly tested synthetic preparations available through a doctor? FUCK NO.
If you are involved in a horrible plane crash, and need something antimicrobial, and need it right now, and do not have access to a properly dosed and reliable preparation, then using an herbal alternative is better than doing nothing. That is about where its usefulness in modern settings ends. Of course, that begs the question that the person using/making the herbal preparation knows what they are doing-- Very very few proponents of herbal remedies actually do.
Whether the people accept the data straight from TV, unverified web sites or a system of so-called fact checkers the underlying problem still exists. People relying on other people to think for them. The best method would be to teach and strive for critical thinking and for people to do some checking of their own, but in our instant gratification based society of today that is unlikely to happen.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
It's a monumentally stupid idea. And it is the worst day to ask about it.
The obvious reason is that whomever controls what is presented as facts, suddenly is perceived as having an ironclad grip on truth, and is by default perceived as unbiased. We've just seen (only by accident!) what happens when the media is trusted with this. Because this is election day, this will be a controversial statement, but in the light of several years, it will not be.
There are plenty of other problems- it means that referencing a site with some outlandish claim will ultimately result in a ping back to someone tracking all this. This is oppositional research- you'll know, based on the aggregate data, which sites are opposing the "truth", and you can just hand this data to someone behind the seen, for principle, power, or profit. It also means that the same types of weirdos who currently stomp around wikipedia will be given even more power to shape a narrative.
If you read this and immediately started to think of reasons why I'm wrong- again, this is ONLY because it is election season. Flip the script and assume that the media is colluding with whatever group you personally find distasteful, and you should see why it is a bad idea for everyone.
Speaking of Wikipedia being an "unbiased" source of information (OH THE LAWLZ), check out this article on why your idea is absolutely the worst possible way to implement things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Why don't we just lock everybody's homepage to https://www.factcheck.org/ and be done with it?
One only has to view the Wikipedia article for God, realise that the God article is wrong, and then realise that all other articles are therefore wrong because they are all descended from the God Article (descended from God).
...the human ability to bullshit, and to obfuscate that bullshit, is evolutionary: there's a direct and obvious competitive advantage to anyone who can do so.
To detect it would take massive heuristics capable of dealing with vagueness and uncertainty, and coming to conclusions that are at best only probable; I suspect that any such algorithm would ITSELF be vulnerable to confirmation bias, just like a person.
What happened to MS's Tay? She turned into a nazi sex robot within 24 hours. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tec...
Having such a system boil it down to a shorthand "this article is rated as 4 our of 5 stars of truthiness!" is not only absurdly reductionist, it ultimately adds another 'gameable' for those looking to take advantage of lazy people who just want someone to tell them what to think.
Sorry, evaluating "truth" in statements - like "I do not have a private email server" or "OK I have a private email server, but I didn't use it for official emails" or "well I used it for official emails but nothing secret" or "OK, yes, I used it for secret emails but nothing really secret"* - is something you as a human ACTUALLY HAVE TO DO THE OLD-FASHIONED HARD WAY.
*I'm sorry, were you thinking of another candidate whose statements need constant validation? Does it matter which I'm talking about? Or did my use of that example ALONE color your valuation of my words? Do I lose a truthy-star in your estimation?
-Styopa
Yes and no.
Fact Check: Donald Trump: "The sky is blue"
PANTS ON FIRE: Sky is black during the night and red/orange during the evenings! Sky is grey when overcast.
Fact Check: Hillary Clinton: "The sky is never blue"
Mostly True: Sky never appears blue for many colorblind people.
For example, when the MSM claimed that Donald Trump was a liar for saying that Hillary acid-washed her harddrives, because she "didn't acid-wash them, she used BleachBit!", or when Ted Cruz said "They're letting boys into the girl's showers" and the MSM fact-checked it saying that "boys that want to be girls aren't boys!" and "NOT ALL SCHOOLS FORCE THEM TO SHOWER!!!!" Oh -- big relief.
When one party (Democrats) have a national platform of rewriting definitions to fit popular lies, then the term "fact" loses all meaning.
Your question is as absurd as asking if the Golden Gate Bridge should be made of actual gold.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Beware the fact-checkers. In 2012 Politifact said the assertion that Obamacare premiums will rise was "Mostly False". This is demonstrably wrong.
Nauseating that such a thing would even be considered by a crowd that once prided itself on both doing and thinking for yourself. Who fact-checks the facts, for fsck's sake?
Almost every IT person I know, when queried in private or in groups sympathetic to their political views, would happily 'fix' voting software if given the opportunity.
I don't trust ANY of these bastards farther than I can throw them. Nor any of YOU for that sake!
**>>BELCH
The issue is everyone/every company is biased, including Wikipedia and definitely including Snopes. So ultimately even if browsers did have a "fact checker," it would be just another voice in the crowd, no more or less trustworthy than anyone else.
Why not just build it right into the Internet so that it will be available with any browser?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
as it has failed Fact-Checking version 666.3. If you still want to view your Dilbert cartoon, please acknowledge vulenerabilty and click here....
"Because all my facts are right. All your facts are wrong!" as we have witnessed over the years. Just keep the browser a browser. What I think needs improving are websites with useful information, none of this snazza frazza script stuff with cutesy little pics dancing around the screens. But I guess we would then argue about what info is useful or not.
mfwright@batnet.com
again: reputable sites provides sources and you are free to attempt to prove them wrong.
disreputable sites don't, and should be ignored.
but then, you usually link to the latter anyway so this who discussion is moot anyway.
Never believe anything until it is officially denied !
What could go wrong with this idea? No political body with an agenda would ever desecrate the moral sanctity of a 'fact checking' organization, pretty far fetched to say the least - about as as likely as the NYT, WP, NPR, ABC, NBC, CBS, LAT, and the BG taking sides with the Democrat Party to elect a grifting granny who facilitated the sale of 20% of US uranium (the stuff they make atom bombs out of) to a Russian holding company while pocketing millions of dollars.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04...
Sheesh, the next thing people will say is a news organization would stoop so low as to feed debate questions to the candidate they wanted to win.
http://dailycaller.com/2016/11...
The best thing is obviously to allow the state to control the facts, for that matter these web browsers are just dangerous and we should probably have to have a license to even use one, let alone a web server.
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
Sounds to me like some lefty who doesn't like people thinking differently to him wants to tell unsuspecting users that their favourite sites don't toe the line of the left-wing, liberal agenda, and that they need to be "reeducated".
No thanks.
Anyone who cares about truth, knows darned well how to verify if what is on their plate is verity or bullshit. Idiots will believe anything they read, doubly so if they read it on the Internet.
This proposal is foolish in that if you were to implement it, it would be a hugely energy wasteful system that wasted it's time and electricity trying to verify if a billion web sites specifically about fictional things was 'truthful'.
Even if it were possible to somehow get an unbiased fact engine (and I personally don't believe this is possible yet because all sources of information that would be the pool for this engine are human created), we would still be left with the problem of why?
I really don't believe that people are motivated by facts in any real sense.
Also, fact does not necessarily mean universal truth. For example, it is a fact that the sky is blue. But what if you are color blind? That is a fact that may not be true to you. You can have everyone in the world telling you that the sky is blue... but you know that it isn't. Which is the truth?
All I see this "facts in the browser" thing to be is a power grab to get people to think the same way as some other people.
Look, some people would look at this election and see a country divided. But I don't see it that way. I just see people with different personal truths. Half the population cannot be "wrong" and the other "right". Only different. Different is a good thing.
Quit trying to find technical "solutions" to ideological "problems"....
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Most good browsers have this feature built in. You just need to know how to find it:
1. Type 'snopes' into the address bar.
Does it bring up the Snopes website?
2. Type 'Politifact' into your address bar.
Does it bring up the Politifact website?
If you answered yes to these questions, then your browser supports fact-checking natively.
What I would really like to see is some kind of measure of reputability. Not a measure of how much people trust a particular resource, because that turns into a faith-based exercise. But some kind of algorithm that measures the degree to which other sources rely on a particular source of information, and how frequently they reference it relative to other sources. Kind of a PageRank for information sources. It would hardly be a perfect measure, but it would help people learn to assess the source.
If nothing else, it would pull the rug out from under the Macedonian troll site cottage industry.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
academic journals are biased. they have mechanisms to check the bias, but peer review is anything but fault-proof. in fact, it's often a clusterfuck. "legal fiction" is considered the law. should it be treated as fact? indicating what the source of the statements is would be enough information for anyone to make their own judgement on the validity of what they see. it would, however, be nice if the geographic location (not pinpoint, but general geographic area) of originating pages/comments were known. especially when it comes to political discussions of any kind.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Well said!
Kids today and their believe in "truth" as well as their nearly fascist behavior in silencing "lies". I shake my head, but also cringe at where this is headed based on history which these brats have virtually no understanding of.
"What is truth?" is as insightful a question today as it was 2000 years ago when supposedly uttered by a certain Roman to a certain Jew.
A trustworthiness / fact-checking service should be done by algorithms; FOSS algorithms that can be argued about and validated for neutrality by anyone.
Certain political parties that for the sake of avoiding trolling shall remain nameless would be vehemently opposed to this, since the truth has a well known liberal bias.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Between this and "abandon timezones" I have to imagine that election day is the worst time ever for tech news.
Keep things simple, make it an optional plugin. Stop cramming so much bells and whistles into browsers. It's a recipe for slowness, bloat, bugs, and difficulty in changing directions in the future, as too much baggage has to be ported.
Table-ized A.I.
I could see a grading system with grades issued by an unbiased respected third party but not an automatic algorithm.
If a grade of say b+ or a- were to be shown next to the url I think it would be helpful and successful. But the issuer would have to be clear and the display optional.
Part of the reason I would support this idea is bc I am so sceptical that I often dismiss these one-off sites until I know them better. And sometimes that includes legitimate sources.
It would be nice to see some effort to hold sites accountable and to weed out the awful offenders.
And they eventually lost the browser wars. Yeah, they beat Netscape, but in the move from IE10 to Edge, they've lost a lot of the market to either Chrome or FireFox
By all means bring on the fact checkers. At least that will cut down on the influx of climate bullshit articles.
You know what they should support? Dates. If not mentioned on the page, then filtered out of the headers, the headers of any subsequently loaded material, their EXIF data, yomama, or whatever. I don't know how many times I searched for a solution to a problem on the web, and found one, but then realised that I needed to know the date that such a page was produced at. Because I just couldn't tell whether or not that solution was relevant to me And the date would not be on the page. Terrible!
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
No kidding, the colleges are full of little Hitlers these days.
While on the surface this seems like a good idea, there is no getting through to ideologues. People flock to those questionable web sites because they provide a narrative that those people want to hear. It re-enforces their world view.
A browser fact checker would be derided as a tool 'of the man' or whatever other such nonsense. A censorship tool meant to marginalize and diminish those who dare to speak truth to power.
Having said that, a fact checker would go a long way towards helping those who are still on the fence about any particular issue. By building it into the browser, those who might not make the extra effort to check Snopes or Wikipedia will at least have some sort of sanity checking introduced into their lives.
These types of half truths or deliberately misleading wordings will not likely be caught by a computer and could make things worse by validating the lies with a "Verified by Google" or something similar. Truth is hard to detect when people make a living cleverly hiding it.
I wonder if dryriver is really Bennett Haselton. It's long and rambling and stupid like a Haselton post.
WHAT? Internet is full of fallacy of circular siting source, fact could be compiled base on bias of the person, and it's quite easy to take fact out of context
The only thing browser could do is find similar related information. Whether it's factual will depend on the user and their investigation.
Trump: I am not a racist pedophile communist who wants to murder baby puppies.
CNN: No, you are in fact a racist pedophile communist who does indeed want to kill all the puppies. We verified this with Howard Stern, and it checks out. You are in fact lying when you say you are not a communist racist...
Clinton: I will create a cohesive community of similarly like minded people to create a diverse inclusive community of caring motivated and wealthy individuals who strive for world peace and child rights.
CNN: Yes that checks out. That is pretty much been what your record shows you as having done for 30+ years now. Thanks Ms. Clinton for that insightful insight.
Take global warming for example... never mind that it is a hoax, most "scientific" sources will tell you otherwise because they have been gullible.
Your comment makes it clear that, once more, Betteridge's Law of Headlines is completely correct.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I got this covered
call me DARPA/VCs
Which set of 'facts' should be allowed and which one disallowed? A nice way to stifle speech that you disagree with.
Being free from bias is not the same as saying that it is factually correct.
That depends on what the meaning of "is" is.
More like Stalin, seeing as how they lean left so hard they're practically falling over.
Should be an add on, obviously, so you can choose to believe what you want to believe ... and not what TPTB *want* you to believe. If the current election has taught us anything it is that TPTB *are* biased and can't resist the temptation to practice mind control under the guise of "news" and "facts".
So what happens when one person is running facts 7 and refuses to upgrade because they hate Facts 8 and he is always fighting at modifying his registry settings because his computer is tying for force him to upgrade to facts 10?
maybe site specific meters and perhaps a adon but i dont think it should be embeded.
VERY bad idea! People believe what they read in their browsers and if something is erroneously showed to be either true or false, it will poison the well.
It would just be another popularity contest and a target for astroturfing. In the end it would be no more accurate than the stories it purports to fact-check. Can you imagine the cottage industry it would spawn? For only $9.95 we guarantee to increase the fact-rating rating of your page by 100%! Or we can reduce the rating of any page of your choice! Fact-checking is just a method of manipulation. It lulls the unwary into not thinking for themselves, and it insults everyone's intelligence. We need less punditry, not more. If anyone does implement this, I hope they also add a button to disable or hide it, because it would be very annoying.
Oh God yes, Please implement this on all browsers ASAP and make it a mandatory feature. Something you can't remove like the padlock or the HTTPS warning you get when you visit a self-signed site. I'll create the most bullshit websites ever, proving how earthworms are just covers for a line of marching ants and similar fucked up bullshit. Then when I have a zero truthfulness rating, I'll start severing real content to random visitors. So they come to my site, see a story about a real product recall or whatever, and their browser will rate it as completely false.
A fact-checking capability is a failure on so many levels it's frightening and I will instantly label anyone who supports this idea as and mindless drone. We are far, far from an AI that can do this. Humans can't even do it manually, we don't know enough about all the things that matter to be able to claim we know if something is a true fact. (By the way, facts can be true or false. Something being a fact doesn't imply it's true even though the majority of the population have that misbelief). Oh, and then there's factors outside your view. Does homeopathy work? No. Does homeopathy work? Yes. Both statements are correct since they don't contain enough information. Context matters and the people that will be rating all the sites will all be looking at them from different contents. Is Donald Trump an awesome, fun loving dad who plays video games with his kids? The answer is yes (though awesome, fun, and loving are all subjective), but you were probably thinking of a different Mr. Trump than the one I was referring to.
How about browsers spend more effort on security and efficiency? There aren't any browsers that can scale to 2000 tabs of static content without major usability and stability issues. Why do you need so many tabs? That question doesn't matter. The question you should be asking is with the massive increase in CPU, memory, and a more experienced software industry, why aren't browsers better? Remember, they can't do this with static HTML content without become unstable. But no, stability isn't popular and doesn't make the news, so they'll focus on bullshit features like impossible fact checking because they care more about share numbers than a quality product.
fact checking is right up there with statistics. you can twist the facts to make them
say whatever you want. please just stop talking about "fact checking"
Haven't we got that already figured out?
and be done with that.
Everyone knows this.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Einstein once famously said "it takes 1 experiment to prove me wrong". With so much man made global cooling ^H^H^H^H^H warming money at stake, selling a 'consensus as science' which only helps employ Activists I cant imagine what Einstein or even Galileo and the world would have not grown wiser from their work.
Activists will say anything to make their cause 'fact'. Repeating lies often, has anyone else notice the 97% "consensus" is now a 98% consensus?
The web browser would not inform you of that fact, nor would have the brains to explain how people invent problems to solve as its easier to fix real problems. And as knowledge improves, would the web browser understand that too or will it need to download the latest truthy bundle from the web?
I think what they actually need is someone to read out loud for them 'Chicken Little' and 'The boy who cried wolf' as well as 'The Emperor has no clothes'. And then educate them about the reason why we had witch trials - because some men thought witches controlled the environment and used language like 'skeptic' and 'denier' back then.
What good is fact checking when you get people who BELIEVE something and no amount of factual information can dislodge that belief.
Willful ignorance is what it is called. Have you ever laid out all the facts and evidence of irrefutable proof on some subject to someone and heard 'I don't believe that and nothing is going to change my mind' in response. Fact checking is useless to those who could care less about facts, truth and reality.
Microsoft is working on "assisted" citations in word via bing.
Otherwise somebody from the CBC might contact you and make fraudulent claims! Seriously, browsers should have a bias menu for all articles, with selections for left, center, right and conservative bias. You know, for the web that you can control.
1) Bill Clinton...
http://www.breitbart.com/big-j...
> Three years before Matt Drudge changed the world and how news would be
> consumed, President Bill Clinton's White House feared that the Internet was
> allowing average citizens, especially conservatives, to bypass legacy gatekeepers and
> access information that had previously been denied to them by the mainstream press.
2) Hillary Clinton...
http://www.freerepublic.com/fo...
> "We are all going to have to rethink how we deal with this, because there are ... Without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping
> all these competing values
> function, what does it mean to have the right to defend your reputation?" she said.
"Gatekeeping" mentioned in both articles above. And while we're at it, the Democrats claim that Breitbart dot com doesn't have a right to exist...
http://dailycaller.com/2016/08...
> Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's campaign has sent out a fundraising
> email arguing the website Breitbart News has no "right to exist,"
> and suggests that if elected, the website will be shut down entirely.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
As long as you have facts to check like "2 + 2 = 4", it'd work. Although that alone would blow your browser up to the size of Wolfram Alpha's software.
Browsers should have as little as possible built in.
I see no reason to assume non-fact based information as valueless. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
Regards Vulcan
Built in fact checking would severely limit my selection of browsers. I don't want Microsofts facts. I definitely don't want Googles facts. I'm not sure about Firefox' facts, they are starting to look too much like a copy of Googles facts.
When it comes to software, I don't want Gnomes facts, nor do I want KDEs facts. Just like if we were talking about editors, I neither Emacs' nor vi's facts. And I definitely don't want Poetterings facts.
Which browser would I need to get if I want independent, peer reviewed facts?
No, if the problem is sponsored POV-pushing, then the solution is to call out the monetary influence, not argue about a factual smokescreen.
If anything should be automated, it's making it clearer who is responsible for content, and how much they are paying to sponsor it.
Curso NR 10 online curso NR 10 curso NR 10 online
1984... coming to a browser near you.
Napoleon, snowball, all ready?
Best AC post ever.
Murphy was an optimist
Sounds a lot like a built-in peer-reviewed Wikki
PlaynBass
You can't browse the web right now. Your browser has taken the self-driving car to Swaziland to check out a dubious claim....
Isn't it enough if a browser could check HTML syntax and maybe someone will create a great feature to allow you to print web pages onto paper?
"Oy vey."
Attributed to Einstein when he learned the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima
Wikipedia, the source of all, often accurate information. (I made that up. Please attribute it to me if quoting).
I guess this means that the elements must have political clout. Last time I checked the molecular weight of gallium on Wikipedia, it was correct.
Generally, 'hard' facts, like those in the sciences, physics, chemistry, etc.and mathematics, whatever that category of facts it belongs to, have extremely high agreement. Anyone asserting otherwise about such facts has a high wall to climb over.
Other categories of knowledge have less or no consensus.
History: has facts. Lincoln existed as a fact, but checking it with the scientific method is different that checking out gallium. History also have opinions, and identity crisis: 50 years ago historians limited themselves largely to major national events, things surrounding the upper class, etc. but left out cultural history or history from the viewpoint of those with less clout.
Even TMZ has facts---not that I care.
That's a great idea, should have done this sooner - now I won't need my brain at all while browsing the Internet, I'll just let my browser tell me what I think - and I'll always be right!
If you use epistemically sound reasoning and knowledge gathering methods...
If you are explicitly aware of and ranking in a rational way your relatively levels of uncertainty about various propositions and various models...
If you are aware of the sources of utterances and the probable motivations of the sources, and the probable alliances of networks of propagators of information...
If you have a grounding in techniques of rhetoric that allows you to properly discount logically invalid but rhetorically convincing arguments, such as ad hominem attacks...
If you are explicitly aware of and know how to factor out, from what you are told and what you take from it, the many categories of cognitive biases...
If you form self-consistent theories of aspects of the physical and social world and incorporate the best results of well-tested scientific knowledge in those areas...
Then you can eventually make your way to good evaluations of which propositions are likely more factual than others, or, in the case of simple concrete propositions about scientifically testable aspects of the physical world, you can evaluate which propositions are factual to the best of our epistemically valid current scientific knowledge.
How you choose to value the various factual states of the world, or how you value peoples' actions on the world, or attitudes toward each other or the world... That is much more complex, and people can legitimately disagree about those things. If you disagree about the obvious testable facts, though, you're just being tactical, political, obstreperous, and trying to gain undue influence and power by lying essentially.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Have a look at rbutr. It isn't exactly what you have described, but provides the same outcome - a quick way of getting a correction to misinformation, or else a more nuanced discussion of a complex issue.
http://blog.rbutr.com/getting-...
and the zero of the Arabs
Surely you meant the Indians?
Ezekiel 23:20