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Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales is Launching an Online Publication To Fight Fake News (cnn.com)
Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia, is launching a new online publication which will aim to fight fake news by pairing professional journalists with an army of volunteer community contributors. The news site is called Wikitribune. From a report: "We want to make sure that you read fact-based articles that have a real impact in both local and global events," the publication's website states. The site will publish news stories written by professional journalists. But in a page borrowed from Wikipedia, internet users will be able to propose factual corrections and additions. The changes will be reviewed by volunteer fact checkers. Wikitribune says it will be transparent about its sources. It will post the full transcripts of interviews, as well as video and audio, "to the maximum extent possible." The language used will be "factual and neutral."
Because the idea that there are alternate facts and all viewpoints are equally valid needs to die. There really is objective truth and impartial journalism is entirely possible.
To be honest I'm not sure what this new site adds. Sources like the BBC are already very good. Yes, they screw up sometimes, but they fix it and 99% of the time are factually accurate and impartial. We don't really need more than that, what we need is a way to flag up fake news and opinion marketed as news.
Imagine if inaccurate statistics or misrepresentation of sources could be flagged up by wiki-style crowd sourcing. Kinda like what Facebook is doing but with volunteers and public oversight instead of Facebook staff, and for all sites.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There are a lot of problems with "fact-based news", the biggest one being identification of actual "facts."
Look at ProPublica as an example. Their MO is generally to take facts and build a giant lie without ever actually lying, technically. I've given them thorough dressings-down for their blatant attacks on the American Red Cross and Amazon, but nobody actually cares because ProPublica has a better hook: take something people trust and convince them that trust has been violated. There are a few good examples here, though.
The familiar American Red Cross attack article on their handling of Haiti claimed ARC lies about the amount of overhead because they hire independent contractors. The reasoning is that ARC keeps 9% of their revenue stream as operating expenses, but their real overhead is around 40% or higher because they hire contractors who also have operating expense--never mind that the contractors are more-efficient than any non-professional, non-expert option, or that the materials have "overhead" because they need to be mined, shipped, and sold. Things aren't magicked into existence, and ARC isn't a vertically-integrated organization with expertise in everything; they generally try to bring the most-efficient solution to a problem, and that means hiring the best contractors they can find, that being the ones who perform at the highest return per cost invested.
ProPublica has repeatedly published ARC internal documents and loudly shouted that ARC is hiding and ignoring serious defects in their organization's handling of major disasters. This one's even simpler: the documents they published were Lesson's Learned documentation. They discussed what problems they had, why they had problems, and any potential methods for avoiding those problems in future disaster scenarios. Many are marked for further review and discussion. The documents ProPublica published are explicitly for the purpose of identifying problems encountered and preventing them in the future, yet they managed to claim ARC is "hiding and ignoring" all of these problems.
Their article on Amazon's "Buy Box" claims they always put Amazon first, even if they're more-expensive. What actually happens is Amazon (almost) always displays the lowest price-plus-shipping option for a particular product by default; and Amazon uses the lowest-price shipping option for that, which is Amazon's Subscribe and Save shipping. You can get free shipping by having $25 of items in your box or having Prime; ProPublica unilaterally applied a non-free shipping option to inflate the total cost. They also nitpicked about Amazon always listing Shipped by Amazon options first in the full list of sellers, even when these aren't the lowest price options; if Amazon didn't do that, they could have instead attacked them for advertising "free shipping" but making it "difficult to find the Amazon-shipped items to actually get it".
Notice the facts. Facts, facts, facts. ARC spent $500 billion, built 6 houses, was going to build 50 but gave up (never mind that the project was determined wasteful and pointless, and people were dying of a cholera epidemic that ARC stopped instead). Amazon shows you their option first and doesn't count shipping in their prices (never mind that free shipping is an option but alternate sellers don't offer it). ProPublica gives facts and tells you what to think about them.
It gets worse.
Jimbo Wales thinks he can fix this sort of un-news. Does he think he can identify and gate out finicky reasoning and spin? Can he identify when facts are missing, or induce others to do so? For that matter, can we identify who has the most-correct and most-complete set of facts, and if they're disclosing them all without ordering them to create an alternate narrative?
It takes some inherent bias to break fake news. I tear down fake articles I understand, and I hit economics pretty hard because I like economics. Fake news isn'
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