Fake News
BY Herschel Smith8 years ago
When Nabanita De scrolled through her Facebook feed recently, she felt afraid. There were so many posts with competing information and accusations about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton that she didn’t know how to begin deciphering the fearmongering from the reality.
The social media site has faced criticism since the presidential election for its role in disseminating fake and misleading stories that are indistinguishable from real news. Because Facebook’s algorithm is designed to determine what its individual users want to see, people often see only that which validates their existing beliefs regardless of whether the information being shared is true.
So when De, an international second-year master’s student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, attended a hackathon at Princeton University this week with a simple prompt to develop a technology project in 36 hours, she suggested to her three teammates that they try to build an algorithm that authenticates what is real and what is fake on Facebook.
And they were able to do it.
De, with Anant Goel, a freshman at Purdue University, and Mark Craft and Qinglin Chen, sophomores at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, built a Chrome browser extension that tags links in Facebook feeds as verified or not verified by taking into account factors such as the source’s credibility and cross-checking the content with other news stories. Where a post appears to be false, the plug-in will provide a summary of more credible information on the topic online.
They’ve called it FiB.
Since the students developed it in only a day and a half (and have classes and schoolwork to worry about), they’ve released it as an “open-source project,” asking anyone with development experience to help them improve it. The plugin is available for download to the public, but the demand was so great that their limited operation couldn’t handle it.
So you’ve learned absolutely nothing from this “article.” Perhaps it ought to be relegated to the bin of fake news. Consider for a moment what you’ve witnessed over the last several days. Reporters are sitting in the bottom of Trump tower watching to see who enters the building and goes up the elevator. For hours, and hours, and hours. Perhaps they could liven it up a bit and add spice to this “news” by telling us the favorite colors of the folks riding the elevator.
What you’re witnessing is the result of the death of investigative reporting. For the “reporters” and news “editors” out there, why don’t you go to Iraq and do some reporting on what the Muslims have done to the Christian church in Mesopotamia? Oh, I see. That might involve going to Mosul. Does that frighten you? Are you scared? It should, and you should be.
Or why don’t you travel to Haiti to investigate why a budding anthropologist headed there to study the child kidnapping and pedophilia ring born out of Haiti and its relationship to the Clinton foundation, only to turn up dead under suspicious circumstances? Is that scary to you? Bless your heart.
Or why don’t you investigate why a pizzeria in Washington. D.C., owned by James Alefantis, called Comet Ping Pong, and associated with the Podesta brothers, advertised as “family friendly,” has drag shows? Or why don’t you investigate what Wikileaks shows about the relationship between the Clinton Foundation and its corollary of massive corruption? Is that scary to you? Are you afraid you’ll end up like Seth Rich?
Yea, I would be too. That’s why I carry guns. But you progressives don’t believe in those things, so there’s that.
Look, for those who haven’t learned this yet, there is no news being reported by the MSM any more. All investigative journalism is being done by 4Chan and Reddit. It is a dead art within the MSM. If you aren’t studying the results of the analysis at Reddit, you don’t know anything about the news. For the MSM to try to tell us anything about fake news is pathetic.
As for what Wikileaks tells us, they only release raw data. Others do the analysis. Wikileaks has been proven accurate and above reproach for a decade. If you’re going to try to tell us that Wikileaks is not real, you’re calling black white and white black. You’re embarrassing yourself, and you’re possibly too stupid to know it.
In summary, I can’t say it better than Paul Joseph Watson.
On November 18, 2016 at 5:41 pm, silver cowboy said:
“When Nabanita De scrolled through her Facebook feed recently, she felt afraid.”
Afraid of what? Afraid that all the nasty things that were said would come true? that’s still different from them actually being true or happening. All I keep hearing is “THIS is going to happen”… well I heard that the earth would warm so much that the coastal cities would be under water for sea level rising… still waiting on that one too.
It’s as if the Democrats had labled Trump as the Anti-Christ and then chickens came home to roost. They’ve believed it for so long they now think he is the Ant-Christ. The irony is that they’re the only ones who believe their rhetoric and now they’ve “scared themselves”.
So hey, let’s just censor stuff we don’t like…that way we’ll all know what the “real” news is… do they not see the hypocrisy of that?
On November 18, 2016 at 7:44 pm, Jack said:
Of course, before the recent hyperventilating over ‘fake news’, the left’s most trusted source of news was the Comedy Chanel!
On November 19, 2016 at 5:33 pm, Fred said:
Progressives always project. Never forget this. Everything they say about their ‘enemy’ is what they actually desire. Knowing this could save your life.
On December 15, 2016 at 10:20 pm, vladdy said:
The NYT is so dumb these days it doesn’t even realize how stupid it sounds leading with the part about her being afraid and then describing her as a Master’s student at Amherst. Duh. Honey, maybe you need to go back and take a few research classes….same for the reporter who wrote the drivel.
“Afraid”? Hey , I get enraged by Huffpo’s lies, but certainly not “afraid.”
And the idea about the software. Yeah, ‘cos we really trust 3 college students to write software that tells us what is “true” according to matches with other stories.
The whole thing would have been laughed out of class when I was a journalism major, and that was only 25 years ago. (only?) Anyway, it’s pretty obvious why no one reads these rags anymore.
Pizza, anyone?