It takes a village to identify false news

Filloux: A credibility scorecard
Liberal democracies are being tested around the world by the rapid diffusion of misleading or false information designed to influence voters.

It has happened in France, Catalonia, the U.K., and, of course, the U.S.

Many have proposed--for example, the World Economic Forum--that two of the most powerful vehicles for spreading information, Facebook and Google, should be responsible for filtering out material that is demonstrably false or misleading.

Versi�n en espa�ol.

But it turns out that this is not easy to do. False information is often irresistibly appealing and moves too fast to be stopped.
Why we're Still in the Dark about Facebook's Fight Against Fake News -- Mother Jones
Nine experts offer opinions on how to fix Facebook -- New York Times

Not an editor, but a scorecard

What's more, it is hard to define false news in a way that can be automated by algorithms. Journalist and media consultant Frederic Filloux has developed the News Quality Scoring Project, which attempts to use automated systems to evaluate the likely credibility of a piece of news content. It doesn't label news as false or fake. It simply gives a credibility score based on a series of indicators such as a publisher's or a journalist's previous reliability.

Filloux's Publication Quality Score criteria


Facebook, Google, and Twitter themselves are working with the Trust Project on an automated system to display "trust indicators" alongside information they share with users.

Read more �

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wesley Weber � Canada�s Master Counterfeiter

Wesley Weber who was one of the world�s most famous counterfeiters (forging millions of bank notes) is arguably the first image that comes to mind when counterfeiting is being discussed. From the start, Wesley Weber�s goal was to live the good life�fast cars, beautiful women, lavish parties. But that took money, lots of it. He tried financing his dreams with a series of petty thefts, growing marijuana, and forgery until he was busted in 1997 and spent three months in jail. Two years later his marijuana operation netted 18 months of house arrest and 240 hours of community service. Weber needed a better way to subsidize his ambitions. Then it hit him. Why not print his own money? Putting Technology to Work Weber had always been a computer geek. As a kid, he�d tried duplicating Canadian 10s and 20s but decided doing it on a large scale wouldn�t be practical with the equipment he had. After several years of science and engineering classes, he thought it was worth another try. He scanned an...
Read more