Hey Fellow Community members,
I have been recently reading about fake news and how it is turning out to be the biggest issue we have in our world today.
Fake news doesn’t seem to be the issue with only countries with low-literacy rates, even European countries and United States, which have very high literacy rates are suffering from this.
In my country i.e India, i observe how Social Media Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Whatsapp are being used to circulate various superstitious beliefs, which seem to be dangerous, as well as, news from unknown sites which are fake. Even my classmates and other friends tend to believe many of the fake news’ as true.
How can my skill as a web developer be useful in fight against fake news?
Will be pleased to hear your views on how technology can help in eradicating fake news ?
Are there any current technologies available against fake news?
And one last thing, how does someone identify between a news which is true and one which is fake?
How can my skill as a web developer be useful in fight against fake news?
I can’t answer this yet because I’m still learning web development.
Will be pleased to hear your views on how technology can help in eradicating fake news ?Are there any current technologies available against fake news?
I don’t think technology alone can eradicate fake news. News is a kind of content that has to be evaluated and revised to be as close as possible to the truth. You should talk to a journalist. They can tell you the distinction between truth and false since that is their craft.
And one last thing, how does someone identify between a news which is true and one which is fake?
This is basically how do you know which news is fake and true. This requires research, comparing sources of news and evaluating the type of content that is being published. Generally, when news is published, it is generally accepted it’s probably true but to make a “distinction” requires the “human element” of critical thinking, analyzing, comparing, and different types of evaluation. A machine cannot do this. I think we can create tools to assist in evaluating news, but the best resource is the public domain while slowly narrowing it down to what is true and false.
But the final output is always censorship, so bolshevism. How could you meassure the some information is silented.
fox example man murder women, The silented informations were the man was cop and the women terrorist.
I was thinking about some trust numbers based on citation, linking, formal informations, but I am sure it will be compromised by goverment. Actually as I see the mainstream is biggest fake news generators.
Since I’m from social sciences, I know about the difficulties of the subject.
This is a great example:
In fact, the heading “Man murders women” is correct.
But the human interpretation is a big problem.
And the media uses this lack of interpretation skills.
From a technical point, I think there is some Machine Learning going on,
some Supervised Learning, that is fed with data.
Seems like a very difficult problem to solve properly, but an interesting and topical problem for sure. Many people themselves have a hard time telling which news is fake (mostly because they do 0 research), so making a program to do that well must surely be a huge challenge. I guess you’d need strong knowledge in machine learning and AI, and a large set of fake and non-fake news articles to use as training data for your program. And whatever you end up making will certainly be accused of being biased. As for how people decide if the news is fake, I think they consider several factors: reputation of the source, evidence presented, and whether other sources corroborate the story. The first one would probably be the hardest to do right because of the somewhat subjective nature of reputation. Certain people find all sorts of cooky ‘news outlets’ to be reputable.
If you work for the United States government or some state government which respects free speech, I suggest you forget it and find something else to do with your time. “Fake News”, by itself, does fall under free speech protections in that the falsity of the information by itself does not imply that the government can censor it.
If you don’t work for a government, or work for a government which doesn’t protect free speech, what gets considered “fake news” will depend in part on the narrative that your organization seeks to push. So, there’s no universally applicable way to censor “fake news”.
Finally, news is new. That makes the very status of news as correct or incorrect rather contentious in general, since relevant facts can get missed when part of a situation initially gets reported.
Fake news has always been around. In authoritarian states people call it propaganda. In democracies they call it public relations. In the pre-internet days, a few newspapers and media companies had a monopoly on ‘news’. Nowadays the situation is a lot more pluralistic. Even though the mainstream or corporate media is in the hands of a few giant companies, we also have 1000s of independent reporters and bloggers challenging the orthodoxy. Some of those people are batshit crazy. Some of them are foreign agents. And some of them are incredibly smart, courageous and independent journalists. Its our human responsibility to understand the difference. If we want an algorithm to do it, we are just giving up our freedom to some corporation or government.
