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Crowdsourced Volunteers Search For Solutions To Fake News (wired.co.uk)
Upworthy co-founder Eli Pariser is leading a group of online volunteers hunting for ways to respond to the spread of fake news. An anonymous reader quotes Wired UK:
Inside a Google Doc, volunteers are gathering ideas and approaches to get a grip on the untruthful news stories. It is part analysis, part brainstorming, with those involved being encouraged to read widely around the topic before contributing. "This is a massive endeavour but well worth it," they say...
At present, the group is coming up with a list of potential solutions and approaches. Possible methods the group is looking at include: more human editors, fingerprinting viral stories then training algorithms on confirmed fakes, domain checking, the blockchain, a reliability algorithm, sentiment analysis, a Wikipedia for news sources, and more.
The article also suggests this effort may one day spawn fake news-fighting tech startups.
At present, the group is coming up with a list of potential solutions and approaches. Possible methods the group is looking at include: more human editors, fingerprinting viral stories then training algorithms on confirmed fakes, domain checking, the blockchain, a reliability algorithm, sentiment analysis, a Wikipedia for news sources, and more.
The article also suggests this effort may one day spawn fake news-fighting tech startups.
https://theintercept.com/2016/...
Seeing as the Fake News idea is being promoted by people who won't even come out into the open.
In other words, the individuals behind this newly created group are publicly branding journalists and news outlets as tools of Russian propaganda – even calling on the FBI to investigate them for espionage – while cowardly hiding their own identities.
The credentials of this supposed group of experts are impossible to verify, as none is provided either by the Post or by the group itself. The Intercept contacted PropOrNot and asked numerous questions about about its team, but received only this reply: “We’re getting a lot of requests for comment and can get back to you today =) [smiley face emoticon].” The group added: “We’re over 30 people, organized into teams, and we cannot confirm or deny anyone’s involvement.”
And if you really want to stop fake news, you can ask questions. A good one to start with, is where is the proof that Russia did any of this ?
Fake news is a distraction. Trump lost the vote, democracy requires the winner get more votes, that was not Trump.
Now you can say, 'well he won the electoral college vote', but *that* vote has not happened yet. And Bush and Obama ethics lawyers have both, united, reminded the electoral college of the constitution. He cannot be President and continue to run businesses that's illegal. If he tries again to appoint his family to run America that too is illegal.
The states need to recount, Putin's hackers hacked the electoral roles of several states and that was done for a purpose. You can't register the vote using that data, but you can fake an absentee ballot vote. So all the states with suddenly large numbers of absentee ballots cast need to be re-examined.
Trump lost, get over it Putin.
There are tools like Genius that allow web pages to be annotated beyond the control of the publisher (attaching comments to highlighted text), allowing lies to be challenged in-situ, before their sharing reaches critical mass.
But for this to make a difference, you'd have to ensure that the annotations are widely seen. An annotation system should come with the default install of web browsers (including the Facebook internal one), and if not enabled by default, the user should be asked whether they want it enabled.
But this wouldn't fix the problem of fake articles being popular simply because they tell people something shocking that panders to what they want to hear. Readers sometimes don't care about the truth. They want the entertainment, smugness, and social bonding of an interesting and validating lie. The National Enquirer problem. So it's acceptable if annotations just damp the problem down, rather than eliminate it.
As you said, you are NOT a USA person/citizen/American. CNN and MSNBC have decidedly supported Leftist causes to the detriment of reporting "all" the news. The reluctance to report concerning the Clinton email scandal (until they were "forced" to report). The ignoring of the Clinton health question (which could have actually reduced the impact of the reports on her health). The stated support for Leftist causes. As a person who can decide what to think, I greatly prefer a non-slanted news report. MSNBC is much the same but I don't carry the details around in my head.