It's impossible to assign a "true"/"fake" value to all news stories... especially with our increasingly biased and divided media.
Here's an example of what happens when we try: Politifact, a consistently liberal-biased source, didn't like that Trump took credit for a hard and proven fact. So they called it "mostly false" even though nothing he said was false.
"Fake-news" was from the start a tool for censorship with a political agenda.
Now we can vote "disputed" if you do not agree with something. Great.
If it is fully democratic: "Any climate change news is fake".
Or if it is Technocratic (only certain scientists and companies are allowed to mark fake news): "Patents are great. Open source is bad. Monsanto never does any bad things."
Or a CIA echo chamber: "Iraq (or Syria or Iran) has Weapons of Mass Destruction." (Not really, but we don't know until we have invaded it).
We have a similar problem in the UK, the news has to give all parties a say. So we get almost equal air time to UKIP (who are tiny) as to the Tories (who are in power) ... it's a bit crazy.
Which leads us on to Brexit, the news gave equal air time to both sides. Now, I say both, but for something as complex as Brexit there are way more than two sides but the public didn't really get a view on Left-exit, right-exit, left-remain, right-remain and all the bits in the middle.
Fake news? Opinion? Not enough time to inform the masses? I don't envy Facebook, they're throw their hat into the ring. Nothing good can come of this for them. You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't.
> So we get almost equal air time to UKIP (who are tiny) as to the Tories (who are in power)
I don't like either of those parties, and they don't get even remotely equal airtime, but UKIP were the third most popular party in the 2015 election. Hardly "tiny", except by virtue of the bent UK electoral system which gave them only one seat.
Personally I'd prefer minor parties were given more exposure than bigger parties - that we all know about and are sick of already - than the reverse.
I don't agree with your analogy, but I still found it very interesting to consider.
I think the fundamental difference is that spam detectors are seen as acting on their users behalf. If I say an email isn't spam, then it isn't and that's the final word on the matter.
Fake news classifiers don't give one classification per user. They don't try to predict for every single user whether that user would find it credible. Instead, they output a single value for the whole community. They act on the community's behalf. Because of this, some people will always disagree, and they will feel that the system is imposing on them. That's why it's political when spam detectors are not.
The real world is vastly more complex than "true or fake". The Trump tweet you mentioned is a perfect example. His tweet was not a simple statement of fact:
> The media has not reported that the National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Obama first mo.
That's a claim: "I have lowered the debt in my first month while Obama raised it". While the facts are true (the debt did go down), the claim is false. Trump has taken no action that would cause the debt to be lowered; it's not unusual for the debt level to fluctuate in the short term.
The real problem we have is that most people aren't interested in this kind of nuance at all. A statement that makes your team look like the winners, or the other team look like the losers, is easy to accept without much thought or analysis.
The next level of nuance, of course, is separating Trump's propensity of associating everything positive he sees with himself and the completely true words of that tweet. The fact stated is a legitimate starting point for a policy discussion that is easily and cleanly distinct for the implied claim you referred to.
Isn't that the problem at hand? Layering this seemingly objective "fact" checking on top of a political statements ("the way he wants to spin it"). Then picking a side. If they don't like the side then "technically" true is not enough, now the fact checker has to agree with the politics and the intent to mark it as "true".
I am pretty sure if Clinton or Obama made that statement there would be very little discussion in marking it as "true" and claiming "yeah it is technically true, what she/he might have implied is up to interpretation, but statement on its own is a fact".
This is a good illustration of the problem of purported fact checking organizations using the supposed fact check actually as a headline for political/social commentary. If the product you're selling is commentary, don't claim you are a fact checking service.
Not saying it's true but an argument can be made (and I assume this is the one he's thinking) that growth was higher with his winning the election because the market is anticipating his policies. It is perfectly reasonable and a matter of opinion. You simply cannot write it off as factually incorrect.
But if you read the actual tweet he simply says debt when down in his first month vs. up in Obama's. Which is true. He doesn't say it was because of his policies. Politifact just found a way to try to spin it (which is what it is) as "false" so they could add it to the "Trump's a compulsive liar" column.
To paraphrase someone else: I didn't leave the liberals, the liberals left me.
It's true that Trump didn't claim it was a result of his actions or policies (enacted or planned), but that is clearly the intended unstated message. Otherwise, why did he tweet it?
> It's impossible to assign a "true"/"fake" value to all news stories... especially with our increasingly biased and divided media.
This is an absolutely irrational argument, which is not to say it is incorrect. It is possible to assign levels of truths to information - we do it all the time in infrastructure. OTOH, it matters not if biases exist in media - those biases can be "truths" as well to the groups of entities who share the biases.
Truths don't imply absolute labeling however, as you so well point out. We all knew Fox News was biased toward the Republican's views. In hindsight, Fox looks quaint compared to Breitbart. Supporting Breitbart or Infowars is another thing entirely, given they support continued, or self-referential irrationality. Irrationality that spreads itself, in other words. I consider this harmful to humans.
The only people who don't want truths to exist is people whose intent is to spread their irrationality to gain control over others.
What will happen, and you can mark my words on this, is that AI will be known primarily in assisting humans in their final effort to reduce the amount of damage those-who-speak-for-others cause the larger group, primarily by detecting their intent in FUCKING with the way we all communicate with each other in a trusted manner.
When, not if, this happens, those who played this game will learn the real price of dissonance.
It's really a great approach that they're taking. I do think classification of "True" is very difficult, although "Disputed" seems reasonable. For instance, if I wrote an article saying I was a billionaire, I'd assume this would eventually receive the "Disputed" label. Articles not marked as "Disputed" are clearly not necessarily "True".
Politifact is a consistently fact-biased source. What you're objecting to is their inclusion of the clear implications of a claim, not just the letter. Here Trump was clearly implying that his administration is more fiscally responsible than Obama's in the first month. That is mostly false. These things are not impossible.
> didn't like that Trump took credit for a hard and proven fact
Since you, yourself, note that Trump is trying to take credit for it, perhaps you should explain why their reasoning is wrong.
"The national debt fluctuates up and down depending on the day. While the debt is "down" after one month, experts say that trend will reverse and the debt will continue to rise.
This factoid is a gross misrepresentation of the state of the debt and the role the new president had in shaping the figure."
I imagine their hands are kind of tied- if they don't do anything, then people complain. If they do something, it is possibly not perfect, unless they can come up with some amazing spam reducing innovation which probably close to an AGI fake news bouncer.
The only thing to really do is throw some tools up, and adjust them as adversaries (fake news makers) get more tricky, until finally, after a long time, you get the big innovation.
In any case, deciding to take a stand is clearly better than doing nothing at all.
If the person who was supposed to win the election had won the election there wouldn't have been this huge fake news crisis. The system was working just fine until it wasn't doing what it was supposed to do. The tsunami like immune reaction of all the players in the political system to the incorrect person being elected president is certainly awesome to behold.
(Already mentioned it in another post below) I think companies like Google and Facebook perceived this vacuum created by the failure of the traditional news media to manufacture consent and control people's opinions. They want to send a strong message to those in power that they are better positioned at manufacturing consent in the future than those crusty old dinosaurs like CNN, NBC, etc.
There are obviously a lot of money to be made from campaigns and having powerful and wealthy candidates, or just companies marketing their products and ideas, rely on your platform. Think of it as their way to advertise the ability to "properly" (wink, wink) filter and bias news to suit their customers' demands.
There are a set of inputs that go into the voters mind that produce a certain output: the voting decision. The technology inputs to produce the correct candidate choice has been somehow thwarted by a bug in the system. The bug has been identified as fake news. To restore the proper functioning of the system the bug has to be fixed by implementing AI systems, overseen by properly vetted quality control personnel, in order to detect and remove fake news. The quality control personnel should be properly vetted to make sure that they are not under the influence of fake news which may cause errors in voting behavior to leak through. You see, people having an incorrect voting decision is evidence that there is a bug in the system that feeds them information. That, or there is a fundamental flaw in their cognitive systems which is why they have been called "deplorables". /end of the movie evil guy speech
Incorrect opinion? Who gets to decide the incorrect opinion?
The side that thinks Trump is a racist/xenophobe/terrorist? Or the side that thinks Hillary Benghazi/Emails/Charity? Or the side that thinks Bernie Venezuela/Socialist/etc? Or the side that think Stein ... Or the side that think Johnson... or... or...
What makes a Trump Supporters opinion wrong and a Clinton supporters opinion right? Or Bern? Stein? Johnson?
We should absolutely work on getting rid of "Fake" news... but what is fake news? What is true news that is obviously biased (CNN/Fox/etc)? What is satire (Onion)?
Who is producing "Non" fake news? CNN? Fox? CBS? NBC? Politico? I can look at news stories on all of the above and see "True" information spun to make one side look good and the other bad...
I love how people think their opinion is OBVIOUSLY right... their opponents opinion is OBVIOUSLY wrong and anyone who doesn't agree with them is a Terrorist/Xenophobe/Islamaphobe/Racist/etc'ad'naseum.
As seen by a foreigner, me, it is quite clear that the status quo and the powers that be had chosen Hillary Clinton as the next US president. But Trump won, so the system has to be corrected so similar things do not happen again in the future. It has nothing to do with who is right or wrong.
The person who won made repeated claims the system was rigged. I can't say if the correct person won. I can say it's clear to the winner there is a public system for show, and a secret system for actually selecting the president.
And the other side said the system was fair. We can trust the results. Anyone who challenges the results is a threat to Democracy.
BEFORE the election everyone was confident and trusting of the election. It wasn't until AFTER the Election that we all of a sudden started to care about Russia "hacking" the election.
I mean... which is it? it's fair and trustworthy if you win but it's not trustworthy and fair if you lose?
Honestly though... if there is a secret system for "actually" selecting the President... do you think those secret puppet masters would choose Trump?
There's also little to no mainstream doubt about the outcome of the vote (of course the President has raised concerns that the vote was not accurate, but most responses to that, for example from Secretaries of State, have tried to emphasize that there is no evidence of major issues with the election). The controversy is all about how Russia may have acted to influence voters.
Supposedly Obama knew for Months/Years... that Russia was trying to influence the election. And by his admission BEFORE the election, you could trust the results. Hillary has a well known quote that "If you don't trust the election results, you are a threat to democracy" (Paraphrased).
If the Obama Administration was worried about Russia influence in the election, why didn't we hear about it BEFORE the results that they didn't like? Why is all the outrage about Russia AFTER the election?
It's hard to hit such a large topic in a short blurb... but where is the anger about Obama influencing elections (Brexit, Israel, etc)? It's okay for Obama to do it but not Putin?
My main point is this: Why is the problem NOW everywhere when the issue was known BEFORE the election and the previous administration did nothing then?
Second point is this: Everyone is trying to influence each others shit. Why is Russia so much worse? Where is the outrage that Obama worked on influencing the elections of other democracies?
There is still plenty of question about the "mechanics". Plenty of places where people are registered who shouldn't (registered in multiple places, etc). People who shouldn't be voting that is (dead people, immigrants, etc).
The left says "There is no issue. at all. If you disagree, you are trying to subvert and you are a racist."
The right says "MILLIONS AND MILLIONS! ZOMG!"
The truth is somewhere in the middle as far as the "mechanics". There is plenty that can be done to insure the accuracy and veracity of the voting booth.
I think one can have this attitude with a lot of things. The job which you were supposed to get is the one you got, etc. It must then be that 'supposed to' doesn't really have any meaning, or the opposite, that things are going according to whatever grand plan there exists for us. Who knows.
I think they meant it sarcastically. You can't deny it that the majority of mass media has overwhelmingly picked one candidate. Even down to passing her debate questions in advance and so on.
I don't think anyone would be surprised to know that Hillary as far as the media was concerned was supposed to be the winner, not just because they simply wished it to be true, but because they went out of their way to make it so.
In the end they failed. The result of that was a backlash called "Fake News". It is a censorship system designed to bring the influence of media back on-line.
One interesting thing is that traditional media's failure to manufacture consent is perceived to be broken so that left a vacuum for social media to jump in. We saw how quickly Facebook and Google rushed in. I think deep down they want to signal to those in power that "we'll do a better job manufacturing consent for you than those old crusty news channels".
Here's an example of what happens when we try: Politifact, a consistently liberal-biased source, didn't like that Trump took credit for a hard and proven fact. So they called it "mostly false" even though nothing he said was false.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/feb/...
This thing Facebook is doing is bound to just end up becoming crowd-sourced echo-chamber censorship. And they probably know that.