“Fake News” dataset on Kaggle
I&#x27;m livid about the abundant existence and spread of &#x27;fake news&#x27; and the inability people have to fact-check, but, I also want to play devil&#x27;s advocate here.<p>1) This data set mostly relies on a data-set called the &quot;BS Detector&quot; which describes itself as &quot;[a] hastily assembled...proof of concept...[that] searches all links on a given webpage for references to unreliable sources, checking against a manually compiled list of domains...[to] address the proliferation of fake news&quot;. While I agree with their choices in sites, the concept of manual curation deciding the legitimacy of news is horrifying and something that we hoped the internet would move us away from.<p>2) We run into this problem where we want places like Facebook to censor &#x27;fake news&#x27;. But, I imagine most of us can agree that as autonomous moral agents, we&#x27;d never want out access to information censored. Rather we&#x27;d want the tools to make an informed decision ourselves. In accepting that, you&#x27;d have to extend that same right of autonomy to other individuals no matter how &#x27;wrong&#x27; you think they may be.<p>A) We can&#x27;t manually curate legitimacy list. As that leads to more abuse, and let&#x27;s face it people who read fake news wouldn&#x27;t trust your list anyway.<p>B) We can&#x27;t let tech companies filter out websites based on their interpretation that leads to more bias especially politically.<p>C) We can&#x27;t let crowd-sourced intelligence do it without being locked into the tyranny of the majority, which as we&#x27;ve seen, spreads fake news.<p>In a time when traditional news agencies are hurting for views, lost in the digital noise and often slower to respond to breaking news than niche outlets, we can&#x27;t simply give them the benefit of the doubt either. (That would also enshrine them as some sort of news aristocracy which emerging outlets and voices couldn&#x27;t compete with).<p>It seems rather than try and interpret the news as fake based on the piece&#x2F;site itself, we need to take a step back and look and how on the consumption platform (browser, news channel, social media) you can display relevant facts to people.<p>[Unsubstantiated claim warning] I imagine most credible journalists have at one time another cited an irrefutable fact. A raw figure from a report, a percent by which a poll was won, or the weight of the Eiffel Tower. It seems that with data sets like WikiData and Firebase (old dump, not the new mobile platform) we would be able to locate claims of fact within the writings of journalists and outlets and compare those against the irrefutable fact.<p>If a journalist or outlet has a number of facts that are incorrectly stated well outside a margin of error, a little pop-up displays those to the user letting them decide how to interpret that.<p>I know we want to label things as &#x27;Fake&#x27; or &#x27;Manipulative&#x27; media, and I do think it should be a criminal offense to <i>knowingly</i> publish false information outside the protections of entertainment&#x2F;satire&#x2F;art etc. But, no matter how we spin it, categorizing media is more destructive than it is helpful.<p>We need to find ways to put the educated decision back in the hands of moral agents who are struggling to find facts in an overwhelming sea of noise.