As most of us here know, fake news is an incredibly tricky problem to address. You tell me the tool that solves it, and I'll tell you how it can be gamed.
Democracy's only hope is to build a culture of transparency and healthy skepticism.
I am reminded of the experiment where a cockroach had brain implants that allowed its movement to be controlled electronically. After a while the cockroach would figure out the signal the researchers were using and its brain ignored it effectively locking out the researchers. At some point it was figured out that if random noise (music) was constantly transmitted the cockroach could be controlled much longer before its brain figured out what signal to block. In the end it would always figure out what signal the researchers were using.
Right now fake news is merely manipulative signal wrapped in noise. If cockroaches can figure it out, so can every human on earth.
Alternatively we could start a reality tv show where every week fake news company executives are tried for treason and executed. Hell kick it up to 3x a week I'd watch it.
I agree. It's worth remembering that placing trust in the people--as a democracy does--is not perfect. It's just better than alternatives, like a corporatocracy--let Alphabet Inc. decide which ideas are OK--or other authoritarian models.
However, it is a truly difficult problem. It is difficult to say what penalties there should be for fake news. One thing I would propose is that civil liabilities associated with false reporting be extended to cover entire minority groups.
Maybe we should start with Dan Rather. His fake memo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy) was the first attempt (that was caught at the in real-time) in using fake news (literally a faked meo) to influence a Presidential election by a major network. A lot of today's distrust of media traces from that incident.
That was a failure of fact-checking, not fake news as it's typically understood. It has happened occasionally in otherwise-respectable publications. The network fired a number of people involved including Dan Rather not because they intentionally crafted a false narrative but because they claimed they had done fact-checking when they hadn't.
"Fake news", as typically understood, is news that is known to be fake by the publisher.
I remember this incident and what is striking about it is:
- How seriously the fake memo was taken by some in the media; and
- Just how bad a fake it was. Like it was literally just printed off from Word and photocopied at Kinkos. Had someone instead used a typewriter from the era and not been seen at Kinkos it could well have been a different story.
If it had been a reasonable fake it may well have changed the result of the election. People on the right like to argue the media has a "liberal bias". These sorts of incidents don't really help.
they had similar experiments with a bull and implant, where radio signal made it stop mid charge. i think people should also realise these days it's even possible to generate waves which interact with the low frequencies associated with brain function, where in times of this experiment that was more difficult to acheive, so theu put an implant to convert signals.
reallise, like you draw analogy with fake news being manipulative signals, all inputs which have interpreters behind it can be manipulated if one knows how the input is interpreted in detail. that's just the nature of interpreting signals, it opens possibility to 'fake' signals.
The disease is that our society is gullible and emotionally fragile, and the people bombarding us with propaganda know this. Fake news is tuned to our weaknesses and to fix this we need to improve ourselves as a society. If we don't then whatever media comes next will be similarly tuned, and the cycle will repeat itself (again), as it nearly always has.
That sounds like a big task, but look the (regretfully temporary) wave of intellectualism that swept across the US in the '60s, in response to russian Cold War Space Race shenanigans
We can do that again... maybe. (There were a lot less conveniences then) But something tells me our society has neither the heart nor the guts to do so.
The human brain is buggy, we're glorified monkeys. You can't tackle societal problems by saying that we need to fix the brains. The history of society and politics is about exploiting those bugs and then, through great deal of effort over centuries, establishing institutions and norms to prevent the exploitation of those bugs.
If the bug were entirely process, that might be true. But the bug is largely ignorance. Education, and even more simply communication, have a long way to go. Not to mention technological solutions like sharing a knowledge graph[1].
A genius Haskell programmer and good friend of mine in the south recently said something to the effect of "liberals should give up this effort to ban all guns". The news he watches had characterized liberals that way, and he believed them. I pointed out that almost nobody on the left is gunning for that outcome, as it were, the "bug" disappeared.
the disease is not that we are gullible or emotionally fragile, that is the 'weakness' which is being exploited.
the disease is that people actually want to exploit eachother for their own gains.
We need a site like askpatents where each claims are hyperlinked to supporting evidence, with ONE forum for debating one side or the other, and voting the best arguments to the top. Then, news stories containing reputable claims would link to the site. Those articles that would spread fake news could have their claims autolinked to the page debunking it.
To game this, you would have to create tons of accounts upvoting bad arguments, downvoting good ones, and overloading the links to biased secondary sources. But the arguments would still be there. Ultimately how does science avoid such sabotage?
>To game this, you would have to create tons of accounts upvoting bad arguments, downvoting good ones, and overloading the links to biased secondary sources. But the arguments would still be there.
This doesn't seem like much of a hurdle. It basically describes what happens on reddit, with varying degrees of success. I know of no large social site that's solved this problem.
I'd think the suggestion would be that each story would get one article. Reddit is a disorganized mish-mash of variations on a story, interfered with by biased moderators, and the "arguments" are rarely anything more than playground trash talk. To my knowledge, no one has made an attempt at making a truly as-objective-as-possible site for current events, I believe the idea has a lot of merit. Of course it wouldn't be perfect, but if it did get traction, I think it would improve things significantly.
I'm curious if anyone (who can see that Reddit is not what's being described) could point out flaws in the idea serious enough that it couldn't (as opposed to wouldn't) work.
> To game this, you would have to create tons of accounts upvoting bad arguments, downvoting good ones, and overloading the links to biased secondary sources.
Like what's happening in Reddit?
This is not too difficult to do.
The problem with fake news is anonymity. So long as it's possible to create tens of thousands of accounts without real world association to a human person, this problem, and all problems associated with trolling and brigading on the internet, will persist.
Anonymity is the best thing about the internet, and the worst thing about the internet.
Look, reputation can be gamed. The end. How do you know anything you can't directly verify is true? Did Columbus and the egg actually happen? Did Galileo actually whisper something? Did Napoleon exist??
Hard to believe that Facebook did not know about this? I imagine there are small account-management teams within facebook for large clients spending millions.
As most of us here know, fake news is an incredibly tricky problem to address. You tell me the tool that solves it, and I'll tell you how it can be gamed.
Democracy's only hope is to build a culture of transparency and healthy skepticism.