Americans Woke on Fake News

[DBTrek]

Sure ... but per your Google analogy, Google works well enough that we all use it for searching the web. We just need a news-fact distiller that works well enough to displace CNN/MSNBC.

The approaches you suggest are along the same lines I’d explore, while also including obvious heuristics (like any sentence ending in a question mark is discarded from evaluation - simple stuff).

Not perfect, but if the program could splice together a news story fact sheet nearly as well as Google splices together search results you’d be doing great.

[Speaker to Animals]

Sure ... but per your Google analogy, Google works well enough that we all use it for searching the web. We just need a news-fact distiller that works well enough to displace CNN/MSNBC.

The approaches you suggest are along the same lines I’d explore, while also including obvious heuristics (like any sentence ending in a question mark is discarded from evaluation - simple stuff).

Not perfect, but if the program could splice together a news story fact sheet nearly as well as Google splices together search results you’d be doing great.

Google is part of the problem, though. They control the narrative as well by promoting the narrative and making it a little more difficult to find the things they don't want you to know about.

And the pagerank idea cannot work when all the corporate outlets are really just different masks to the deep state, all peddling the exact same "facts" that aren't facts at all.

[DBTrek]

News is Bad for You.

From ... the news.

[kybkh]

Less hard if a fact-database can be assembled to test against (behold, the internet).
Less hard if a basic fact evaluation algorithm can be written implemented.

You’ll never achieve perfection, but that’s not the goal. The goal is more accuracy and less bias than the current media. Achieving that shouldn’t require too many MIT grads.

Isn't the problem that the "facts" would likely be determined by some researchers at Stanford?

[nmoore63]

Sure ... but per your Google analogy, Google works well enough that we all use it for searching the web. We just need a news-fact distiller that works well enough to displace CNN/MSNBC.

The approaches you suggest are along the same lines I’d explore, while also including obvious heuristics (like any sentence ending in a question mark is discarded from evaluation - simple stuff).

Not perfect, but if the program could splice together a news story fact sheet nearly as well as Google splices together search results you’d be doing great.

https://www.facebook.com/LibertyMemesPa ... =3&theater

[DBTrek]

Facts could be checked against a pre-existing fact database (things like the start of WW2), or by polling for a consensus among trusted sources (if something happens today, how many trusted sources agree it happened? Enough = fact).

Guys ... it just has to be better than the MSM. We’re not trying to land on Mars here.

[nmoore63]

Facts could be checked against a pre-existing fact database (things like the start of WW2), or by polling for a consensus among trusted sources (if something happens today, how many trusted sources agree it happened? Enough = fact).

Guys ... it just has to be better than the MSM. We’re not trying to land on Mars here.

It will come, but it takes time.

Decades really.

Pretty much no one has that level of trust. A bit like government. People take these institutions for granted but it suprisingly difficult to build public trust.

[de officiis]

When it comes to news, America is in a state of ‘pure polarization,’ physicist says

Americans are consuming more news than ever — and it’s driving us further and further apart.

That’s according to a new paper from Neil Johnson, a physicist who now runs the University of Miami’s Complexity interdisciplinary group, which is examining collective behavior in a number of fields.

Johnson and his team have found that when it comes to digesting news of any kind, Americans now exist in a state of pure polarization: the size of the extremes of the left and right are now so large that they outnumber those in the middle ground.

As a physicist, Johnson is used to seeing populations sorting into bell curves — think of heights and weights, he says. So one might expect that people would naturally sort into this normal distribution when it comes to ideology.

Not so. It doesn’t even matter whether news is real or fake, let alone left or right: The mere act of absorbing news that everyone else is seeing causes a polarizing effect.

“Even on issues for which there is no conceivable counter-evidence, a surprisingly large number of people may [take] an ‘anti-crowd’ viewpoint, e.g. the many people who believe the world is flat and attended the 2017 Flat Earth International Conference,” Johnson and his team write. “Even within the community of professional scientists, there is a non-zero ‘anti-crowd’ that are skeptical about global warming.”

What causes this to occur? Johnson’s finding hinges on a basic assumption: that people make decisions based on rewards. . . .

Johnson finds that if you assume news consumers act on a piece of information using their own mental rewards system to make a decision like, say, voting, they will naturally polarize. Johnson’s model reproduces what Facebook researchers themselves have observed in their own data in terms of a U-shape showing large sub-populations with beliefs towards the extremes. It’s also confirmation of a 2014 Pew Research Center study that found a strong correlation between political engagement and polarization.

Johnson says that it’s not clear whether the polarization represents a new phenomenon, or whether it’s now just easier to model. But he has a hunch that more Americans now consume news than in the past — and that’s bringing out latent polarization that’s always been there.

“I think it has to do with common information — everybody hears the same news, whereas in the past, it was, ‘Have you seen the news, or read the paper,’” he said. “More people are seeing news that they wouldn’t have seen in the past.”

Is there any sign of hope? Johnson says: Not really — Facebook and other social media companies currently have plans to change their algorithms to draw people together more than before, by connecting people who are friends of friends. While that will draw together a lot of people, t will also likely increase the probability for extremism.

...

So how can we unglue people? Johnson says a way to start would be to somehow assign less value to the news that’s coming out.

“[If] our first connection is through information, that’s the tie that’s go to be broken.”

I don't know, but I have a sense that people might be starting to realize how unhealthy our patterns of behavior have become.

[kybkh]

It all goes back to the Smart Phones.

People are literally gas lighting themselves when ever the urge hits. I don't know why, but I always gotta listen to CNN or MSNBC in the morning on the way to work even though I know they are trash.

Around 2014 something changed. There are so many polls that reflect this divergence in fundamental political views.

[kybkh]

Inside the Univision-Clinton network...The ties between the Clintons and the Spanish language television network run deep

The relationship between the Clintons and Univision is deep — from owner Haim Saban’s unabashed support for Hillary Clinton’s election effort to a partnership between Univision and the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, to the network’s newscasts that have bashed Republicans and, most recently, praised Hillary’s new position on immigration — putting her squarely in line with the network’s stance on the issue.

The importance of Univision for the Latino electorate and 2016 is hard to overstate.

“You have to go to Univision to get to Latino voters,”

Univision and the Clinton Foundation joined forces in 2014 for a multiyear early childhood initiative dubbed Pequeños y Valiosos (or Young and Valuable). The relationship proved of immediate value to Hillary Clinton, whose face was featured in five of seven slides on Univision’s website promoting the initiative in February 2014. She also held a New York media event at which reporters couldn’t ask her questions.

https://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/ ... ton-117851