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First Evidence That Social Bots Play a Major Role In Spreading Fake News (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers from Indiana University in Bloomington provide an answer for how social bots play a major role in spreading fake news. MIT Technology Review reports: "At issue is the publication of news that is false or misleading. So widespread has this become that a number of independent fact-checking organizations have emerged to establish the veracity of online information. These include snopes.com, politifact.com, and factcheck.org. These sites list 122 websites that routinely publish fake news. These fake news sites include infowars.com, breitbart.com, politicususa.com, and theonion.com. 'We did not exclude satire because many fake-news sources label their content as satirical, making the distinction problematic,' say researcher Chengcheng Shao and co. Shao and co then monitored some 400,000 claims made by these websites and studied the way they spread through Twitter. They did this by collecting some 14 million Twitter posts that mentioned these claims. At the same time, the team monitored some 15,000 stories written by fact-checking organizations and over a million Twitter posts that mention them. Next, Shao and co looked at the Twitter accounts that spread this news, collecting up to 200 of each account's most recent tweets. In this way, the team could study the tweeting behavior and work out whether the accounts were most likely run by humans or by bots. Having made a judgment on the ownership of each account, the team finally looked at the way humans and bots spread fake news and fact-checked news.
'Accounts that actively spread misinformation are significantly more likely to be bots,' say Shao and co. 'Social bots play a key role in the spread of fake news.' Shad and co say bots play a particularly significant role in the spread of fake news soon after it is published. What's more, these bots are programmed to direct their tweets at influential users. 'Automated accounts are particularly active in the early spreading phases of viral claims, and tend to target influential users,' say Shao and co."
'Accounts that actively spread misinformation are significantly more likely to be bots,' say Shao and co. 'Social bots play a key role in the spread of fake news.' Shad and co say bots play a particularly significant role in the spread of fake news soon after it is published. What's more, these bots are programmed to direct their tweets at influential users. 'Automated accounts are particularly active in the early spreading phases of viral claims, and tend to target influential users,' say Shao and co."
Even after several news organizations apologized and retracted their statements about "17 intelligence organizations all agreeing", Politifact continued to offer apologetics for their favored media outlets, saying it wasn't a big deal (being factually incorrect), as long as the overall notion was in the right direction.
http://www.politifact.com/trut...
Contrast this to the near anal-retentive literal manner in which PolitiFact analyzes other stories.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Can someone link to a Breitbart article that's actually fake news?
From what I've read, their reporting is very tight, usually with references to whatever it is they're talking about.
Yes, they have a conservative bias, but bias is not the same thing as fake.
Nah, 90% of twitter accounts are bots. The social bots are just entertaining their fellow bots.
I'd run out of comment space before i'd get done with describing the issue, but i'll leave you with two words: Jayson Blair.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
These sites list 122 websites that routinely publish fake news. These fake news sites include infowars.com, breitbart.com, politicususa.com, and theonion.com.[emphasis added.]
Look, I get it: fake news, it's a problem. But let's not get carried away. The Onion publishes more factually correct stories than most major media outlets. Plus they are actually entertaining to read. Don't go messing with The Onion.
Here's something more recent: http://www.breitbart.com/big-g...
The title doesn't match the content. Calling it misleading would be an understatement.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Here's a link to the original paper.
A quick scan shows that they... apparently use every type of data representation. You'll find a scatter plot with non-linear regression, a joint distribution image, a histogram, line charts, diffusion networks, and a triangular distribution thingy where color indicates the log of the number of articles (what the heck is that called?).
It plots the Gini coefficient of the various tweets. (I'll save you the trouble.)
The paper goes from the introduction directly to the results, then the discussion, then talks about the methods afterwards. Is that typical? I always thought the methods section comes before the results.
As near as I can tell, there is no supplemental data that indicates what their data is. Their entire paper relies on the correctness of "hoaxy" and "botometer".
Taking "botometer" as an example, looking for an estimate of accuracy, I could find no papers in established journals about this service. There are a couple of conference papers though - will those do? None has an indication of how accurate the service is.
So if "botometer" has an accuracy of 80%, which would be pretty good, and "hoaxy" had an accuracy of 80%, which would also be pretty good, then the results of the cited paper would be... how good?
Looking at the paper, I have to wonder if it's an elaborate hoax.
There's a *lot* of... um... surprising things about this paper.
Other than with one story ("Spirit Cooking"), the paper itself doesn't seem to break anything out by site or by story. What if 95% of these retweets are Items from the Onion?
There's a hand-waving single statement at the end saying basically "we know people will complain about us including The Onion, so we left it out and looked again; but the results were all the same"... but without any actual data. If it didn't affect the results, why not show us? And, since it was indeed workable to leave The Onion out after all, why did the authors make a big deal regarding why they had to Include it in the first place?
#DeleteChrome
I'm waiting for machine learning to be applied to big data on individuals' browsing habits and message history to figure out what individuals are likely to click on, with machine-written fake news articles custom-made for each click, guaranteed to be conformed to your biases and preconceptions. Once this gets turned from "profit-generating clickbait" to "self-writing custom propaganda" it's going to go from a big problem to a huge one. Sure, people can just read/watch trusted static news, but there will be an increasing sense that this is biased, because it doesn't conform to the viewer's own biases.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The Singularity is upon us!
They don't specify in the article where they get the $3million claim, but that doesn't make it fake news. Maybe they simply read about it at another site.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
The paper calls out this Infowars spirit cooking article as an example of fake news and how it spreads. The diffusion chart for that one article takes up the entirety of page 4 of the paper.
I reviewed that article, and couldn't find anything that was in any way "fake".
John Podesta's brother forwarded an E-mail where Marina Abramovic invited them to a spirit cooking dinner. All of this is fact, made public when wikileaks published the actual E-mail.
There's some background on spirit cooking (which I didn't check - looks legit), and some references to innuendo (which I *did* check - they're legit).
Overall, there's nothing in the Infowars article that appears fake, or even blown out of proportion. Snopes.com pretty-much agrees with the facts laid out in the article.
John Podesta didn't go to that dinner or participate in spirit cooking, and InforWars didn't say that he did!
Not to take partisan shots here, but what part of that article is fake news?
Um, What seems to be your beef with that article?
Then title appears to me to correlate well with the article. $3 million will be spent by PP to support the Democratic nominee. That's what the article says. The article references a Washington Post article which says the same thing.
Caution: Contents under pressure
Slashdot has lost it a few years ago when it was overrun not with conservatives (nothing against them) but first with hordes of Putinbots and then with absolutely retarded alt-right followers who want to push their bizarre agenda. People who are full of hatred and don't give a shit about reality at all. These posters have successfully destroyed /. Talking about the political spectrum, it used to play no role and there also used to be many reasonable and well educated conservatives on this site, say 10-15 years ago, but most of them are long gone. I don't know what happened to them, maybe some of them got polarized and radicalized by recent US politics so much that they are no longer recognizable. US lefties have become more radical, too, of course, and these political 'debates' have become so vitriolic, they are no longer bearable for people outside the US. Let me assure you that nobody outside the US gives a shit about your president or your religious fanatism.
What's going on on /. is just a mirror of what's going on in the US in general, but at least for /. my outlook is bleak. Strictly banning all political topics might help, but frankly speaking it would be best to close down the site. The current user demographics is no longer suitable for a tech-related site driven by user-submissions. I won't tell anyone here which other forums I use, for fear of attracting the trolls to them. Suffices to say that there are way better places nowadays than /.
or maybe they are all running to get as much clicks (and ads revenue) as possible by quickly re-posting some sensationalist trash without much checking.
The next step would to check the source mentioned in each of them and build a graph of the propagation.
Then several possible outcome :
- you'll go up stream until you find an actual report (the planned parenthood listing 3M spent on this politician on their taxt returns)
- you'll go up stream until you find something that remotely looks like this if you squinit enough, which then got completely emplified along the buzz-click mill.
(see PhDCommics' entry about news cycle).
- you'll just see a giant cycle of people reposting each other's crap (with perhaps some tabloid citing "anonymous sources") (or outright telling that the info was leaked out of the secret base of Illuminati thanks to the action of alien spies)
Mainstream news probably reached the same conclusion and that's why they aren't interested in reposting this shit :
- they are not trying to "hide truth so the reptilian can keep opression the people"
- they have simply found out that the fact don't add up and the information isn't worth publishing.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The list of 'fake news' sites should have included Slashdot, CNN, and MSNBC. Snopes is not trustworthy either.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
OK, humoring you for a moment... name ONE credible conservative fact-checking site. Seriously. Just one.
Does Just Facts count? They're a little different than the sites listed in TFS, but they're conservative and typically accurate.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
There is a bias evident in the sites not listed there but those are certainly fake news sites. Slashdot is user submitted links to other sources so not really a fake news site. CNN, FOX, and NBC should all be listed. They aren't sites per say but factual and deliberately misrepresented news would include the Daily Show and The John Oliver show.
The integrity of these shows ranks right up there with Ancient Aliens and UFO related shows on the History channel. Events and words presented may have actually taken place but they slice and dice them like a movie trailer to tell any story they want.
And the fact that they're owned by the Miami Herald, which in turn is owned by the Poynter Institute for Journalism, which is openly left wing.
I trust Snopes over Politifact. Politifact may bring objective facts to the table, but in the end, their final judgments are still subjective in terms of what constitutes a "mostly false vs. half true" type rating or similar, and it's in those judgments that their bias, however subtle, is often evident.
Case in point, Michelle Obama's statement that the White House was "built by slaves"; Politifact rated this "Mostly True" despite their own article citing that slaves worked in the quarry cutting and supplying raw stone for the masons to refine and lay; as well as did some of the whitewashing (painting) on the finished building. No actual mention of them doing any of the actual masonry, carpentry, woodworking, metalworking, tiling, or plasterwork, and certainly none of the architecture/design. No actual building, as the word is understood. Most or all of this was done by local and European contractors (electricity and plumbing came later, I believe).
That should reasonably earn her statement a "mostly false", or "half true" at best, as slaves were forced to work primarily in the capacity of suppliers, not builders.
Her statement also entirely discounts the work of the non-slaves involved and overall gives a very incorrect impression; in addition, FWIW, the slaves were paid for their work as well, though they were not given a choice in the matter of doing the work.
Somehow, they saw fit to give this a "Mostly True".
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.