Reuters Built An Algorithm That Can Identify Real News On Twitter (popsci.com)

Reuters has built an algorithm called News Tracer that flags and verifies breaking news on Twitter. The algorithm weeds through all 500 million tweets that are posted on a daily basis to "sort real news from spam, nonsense, ads, and noise," writes Corinne Iozzio via Popular Science: In development since 2014, reports the Columbia Journalism Review, News Tracer's work starts by identifying clusters of tweets that are topically similar. Politics goes with politics; sports with sports; and so on. The system then uses language-processing to produce a coherent summary of each cluster. What differentiates News Tracer from other popular monitoring tools, is that it was built to think like a reporter. That virtual mindset takes 40 factors into account, according to Harvard's NiemanLab. It uses information like the location and status of the original poster (e.g. is she verified?) and how the news is spreading to establish a "credibility" rating for the news item in question. The system also does a kind of cross-check against sources that reporters have identified as reliable, and uses that initial network to identify other potentially reliable sources. News Tracer can also tell the difference between a trending hashtag and real news. The mix of data points News Tracer takes into account means it works best with actual, physical events -- crashes, protests, bombings -- as opposed to the he-said-she-said that can dominate news cycles.

Comments

The source code

[Anonymous Coward]

if (article.agenda() != ourAgenda) article.fake = true

The litmus test

[ckatko]

Does anything on Huff, and WaPo pass?

You know the funniest thing about everyone talking about "fake news"? They make it look like it's only a conservative rag problem. People's memories are so razor short these days, they've already forgotten that The Rolling Stone published literal, fake "news" about a campus rape story, ruined peoples lives, and were sued for 8 (reduced to 3) million dollars.

If people here were half as skeptical as they claim to be, they'd have no respect for conservative AND liberal "journalists." Science demands proof. It doesn't care if the lack-of-data is coming from people you like.

Re:"Built to think like a reporter"...

[elrous0]

Yeah, if it's from Reuters and "thinks like a reporter" then the algorithm will be quite simple

IF (newsSource = conservative)
    THEN (fakeNews = true;)
    ELSE IF (newsSource = liberal;) THEN (fakeNews = false;)
    ELSE {SEND(story,DNC,vetting);}

That was not fake news again

[aepervius]

Fake news are hoax news made especially to lie to people. The rolling stone stories was not fake news it was somebody which lied about being raped. That is not the same thing. Again, if I pretend I was raped by a NFL quarterback, and give an interview to CNN, it isn't fake news, because they do the interview in good faith. That is the hinging point : the publisher publish in good faith - at worst you can say they are a crap journal because they did not check properly. But if CNN start publishing a news that republican have a special club where they fiddle kiddies, and manage to get it spread, while fully knowing it is wrong, it is fake news.