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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.
Does it vote Democrat, as well?
I bet all their news is the "real" news!
if (article.agenda() != ourAgenda) article.fake = true
Nice try HUMA ABEDIN.
Reuters Built An Algorithm That Can Identify Real News On Twitter
Lies.
I hope it flagged itself.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
He's already creating jobs.
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.
By essentially blackmailing a defense contractor. Sure, it works, but you can't do this large scale. And threatening to take away some business with government if they don't do what they're told elsewhere is what many leftist/socialist governments do to force businesses to fall in line, which seems somewhat ironic here.
"Reuters Built An Algorithm That Can Identify Real News On Twitter"
No they haven't. Ask me how I know.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
[...] how the news is spreading to establish a "credibility" rating for the news item in question.
I wonder if it takes into account the old saw about how "A lie can travel around the world while the truth is lacing up it's boots."
I am really sick of people misusing the word algorithm.
Reuters did not build an algorithm. They devised an algorithm and then built a system based on that algorithm.
Algorithms are methods... processes... ways of doing things. Algorithms are not implementations. Algorithms are the conceptual steps, not the manifestation of those steps.
they're going so far out of their way to not be biased that they're giving a voice to absolutely apeshit ideas. That's what got us Trump.
What's the old joke? Reality has a liberal bias.
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I agree, since the DNC has adopted Nixonian tactics, then they should arrested just like those assholes were.
I wonder how such a system can cope when US Secretary of State claims Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. True or false?
they wrote something which validates what the narrative is and what free thought is. I bet they don't tell you which is which.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
If this was as good as it supposed to be, it'd put nearly everyone at Reuters out of a job. Their primary product is fake news.
The only thing this will do is use natural language to identify narrative-breaking articles before they can gain traction with the public.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Or you can simplify the forced boolean state in most languages for not-quite-boolean returns by using a double-not !! before the function name!
Also blacklist any article which starts with a number in the title. This will kill about 95% of buzzfeed bullshit right off the bat.
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,"
Has it found any, yet?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The DNC put millions of people in concentration camps and killed them?
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.
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As far as I can tell this whole fake news thing started because of an article claiming Trump would end up with more popular votes in the election. I read that article and would probably fall within the category of people where it may reinforce their political biases. Yet, it was so obviously wishful thinking anyone with any degree of critical thinking would see it for what it was. Its primary source was twitter, and it said so right up front. If using twitter to determine popular vote counts makes sense to most people then we have some serious issues. It did use some common misunderstandings of how votes are counted in the case of absentee ballots, but these were all easily debunked a little later on. I think most people who read the article quickly figured it out. The problem (I think) was many people did not read the article. They just sent it along on their Social media feeds which tricked a bunch of other search algorithms. On Slashdot we sometimes don't even read the summary, why would you expect average Joe to dig into a headline that already confirms their world view.
Poor A/C FauxNews is a painless form of Lobotomization.
Concentration Camps:
Japanese, German, and Italian Americans during WW2.
and Killed Them:
only the ones that enlisted in the military (Cannon Fodder).
227-3517
I'm guessing Reuters defines "real news" as anything reported by Reuters. Everything else is of course "fake news". Pretty simple algo, really.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Well, it was FDR who interned hundreds of thousands, it was Truman who dropped atomic bombs, so...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The facts are with him, not you...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I don't think that would suffice, though it's certainly a reasonable weighing consideration. And what they specified as the technique wouldn't suffice, either, though it would reduce the fake news considerably. And invite a "fake news" arms race.
At some point verification requires somebody you reasonably trust actually going and checking. I suppose a video might count, but you need to consider that every video is going to provide you with a biased view, selected by the angles from which observation happens. And fake videos aren't unknown, so you need to start including ways to detect whether the video was altered...which invites another arms race.
And you'll never be really sure. You shouldn't be sure of even things that you personally saw, because memory is fallible.
So consider this program as something that improves the signal-to-noise ratio. If that's the goal there are lots of things that can be done, and the early versions should be succeeded by more advanced versions for a long time. And even the early things are useful.
For comparison, consider the progress in e-mail filters. And the twin problems of false positives and false negatives. Now imagine trying to do without ANY e-mail filter.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Distinguish between fake and wrong. They don't mean the same thing.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
For this to be of any use, the criteria needs to be posted publicly. For example, very little proof has been proffered regarding Russia's supposed involvement in hacking the DNC. And many say it looks more like forces inside the U.S. intelligence community.
So how does this Reuter's tool handle such a case? Claiming that a politically appointed security chief of the government states something, therefore it must be factual or true is a very poor measure. What if a Trump appointed security chief states something. Will that be substantial enough for proof? Or will this really just be a tool that says "those articles that think like us will be deemed true, and those that do not will be deemed false"
This pretty much sums up the Al-Gore-ithm.
Was having the Democrat party engage in the largest mass voter disenfranchisement and fraud in U.S. history in order to push the most corrupt and corporate connected politician to ever run for POTUS.
THAT is what got us Trump.
We can label CNN, ABC, Fox, MSNBC, HuffPo pretty much ALL fake news outlets.
I am referring to the analysis where FauxNews made you more stupid than before you started listening to it; that is fact.