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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.
Any browser that does this will instantly stop being my browser.
Show me websites, then fuck off.
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.
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.
No.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Why should I trust the people you say I should trust to say who I should trust?
Not only that, but the example sources are a bit laughable. From TFS:
one quick trip over to Wikipedia,
Ah yes, the encyclopedia that ANYONE -- including vandals, trolls, morons, and folks with agendas -- can edit. Seriously??
Snopes,
The site that started out back in the day as somewhat reasonable, but which seems now to have issues. It's still better than most, but I've found crap on there in the past (not political stuff that's debatable, I'm talking scientific errors).
an academic journal
Uh, first, how many people head to academic journals to do fact checking? Second, how many people have access to those journals? Third, the purpose of academic journals is often to present research in progress, which is often not the final word or consensus on something, just a current scholar's or lab's particular result. You really need experts to interpret specialist literature.
And then the idea just keeps getting worse. Again from TFS:
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.
Seriously? TFS just finished telling me of how millions of internet users are continuously hoodwinked by "inaccurate horsecrap," and now you want me to believe a rating system generated by those same internet users?!?
I could go on with detailed critiques, but let's cut to the chase:
Is this a good idea?
No.
Could it be made to work technically?
No.
Might a browser feature like this make the internet as a whole a "more factually accurate place" to get information from?
No. A browser feature doesn't magically make the internet "more factually accurate." Nonsense will always be out there no matter what.
I'm not opposed to someone trying to generate a browser plugin that tries to do something like this, though I can't imagine how it would be implemented to be useful. But definitely NOT a core browser function.
Fact-checking is REALLY hard work. And frankly, even the best sites make errors. How do you rate a webpage if it is largely accurate, but still has known (minor) fact errors? Or is this only for targeting sites that are known to disseminate nonsense and disinformation? What if those sites also carry some articles that are largely accurate?
I can't see how this ends up working without significant bias, overgeneralization, inaccuracy (in which case it's useless), and limited coverage. And even if it ends up roughly working well, what about all the "legends" that aren't in Snopes? -- like the way academic journals and experts sometimes have a different consensus about stuff than the interpretation you'd see in a book for a pop audience. We like to think the world can be easily parsed into self-contained "facts" that are objectively verifiable, but frankly there's a lot of interpretation that goes into most stuff.
Obama constantly speaks untruths. Maybe he should have a fact checker next to him.
Remember that puzzle where there's one guy who always lies, and one guy who always tells the truth, and they look the same? Politics is like that, except it's missing that second guy. (Wow, my .sig is on-topic for once.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.