No. There's not even a good definition of what "fake" and "news" is as separate terms. Not trying to be contrarian here, but the "news" of a Bill Cosby's rape allegations, as disseminated by a shaky bootleg YouTube video of an old Hannibal Burress routine would have been considered "fake news" by many standards of newsworthiness: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/who-is-hannibal-buress-and-why-d...
I mean, obviously, it was Googleable, as Buress said in his routine. And yet the question isn't whether or not it is "fake" -- though clearly many people thought it was fake, or outrageous, which is why it was such a funny bit in Buress's routine. But there's also the question of whether it was news. Because it was a big deal, and then it dropped off the news cycle because nothing big came from it. And then Buress simply reminded people that the cases existed and then it blew up in such a way that it's hard to believe that Bill Cosby, just a few years ago, was pretty much a hero.
The rape claims were such old news that a highly senior CNN journalist wrote Cosby's biography and just left out the rape accusations because he "didn't want to print allegations that I couldn't confirm independently". The Buress incident came about the time that the biography was published, and the biography pretty much died on the shelves:
Hell, you could make the case that the famous Boston Globe Pulitzer-winning investigation [0] into the Catholic Church would have been deemed "fake news" at the time. The Globe itself covered accusations of priest abuse a decade earlier and the Church argued that such cases were horrific anomalies, and the Globe editor at the time apparently agreed that there wasn't a systemic scandal. It wasn't until the Globe got a brand new editor that a renewed focus was made on cases that victims' lawyers had revealed years prior.
General consensus? No, but it seems that nearly everything emanating from a conservative-leaning source is labeled as such. _Purely a coincidence_, I'm sure.
Who decides it? Well right now traditional media sources are leading the charge, and our benevolent Silicon Valley overlords are working feverishly to help out. Media and tech companies are both filled with people of a left-leaning persuasion. Again, pure coincidence I'm sure, and we all know these people are above injecting their own personal biases into protecting us from fake news, so we're in good hands.
Had the same sentiment in my post but got down voted and flagged. Called out the thousands of globalist who will use Google's power to censor content they deem unfit for the public to see. This is a systemic problem in silicon valley.
Stuff that's from conservative-leaning sources can be accepted just fine, so long as it's anti-Trump. So for example really dubious claims from Louise Mensch, a conservative who thinks Russia is involved in literally everything, are fairly widely accepted. Likewise, people were quite happy to take Glenn Beck at his word as soon as he came out against Trump. It's bizarre.
> Likewise, people were quite happy to take Glenn Beck at his word as soon as he came out against Trump.
What's even funnier is to see people on r/politics say "you know I always thought Beck was an OK guy, just a little misunderstood" after he went nuts about Trump.
Its probably not that hard to detect. Suddenly, a new ___domain appears out of nowhere full of articles using specific language (absolutes, 'shocking' terms, etc) and linked to by various low reputation IPs, botnets, etc and you just panda its SEO and go on with your life.
There are probably other factors here that make this even easier. These sites use fairly shady advertising networks so that's another factor to tie in. They have English language articles but with the grammatical mistakes a 'real' news outlet wouldn't allow due to being written by algorithms or ESL writers.
Fake news detection probably isn't as much about the content but of the methods used to spread it. That's my guess. Unless Google has some incredible AI, they'll just weigh it like they do with other sites abusing SEO. Seems like just a refinement of their panda system focused more on 'news' sites than link farms.
The 10,000 staff just are there to handle edge cases and help tweak the system. They're not going to read every moldovian fake news outlet scammer. In fact, considering most of this is autogenerated by the tens of thousands, they simply can't keep up.
I kinda of see this like spam filtering for the web. Eventually it becomes economically feasible to generate and promote tens of thousands of fake whatevers (it doesnt have to be news) and Google is just trying to keep up. The larger political issues are moot as it doesn't matter what your bias is in politics. If your search engine keeps feeding you low-information or outright false crap most of the time, you'll think about moving to a different search engine.
The definition isn't difficult: the dissemination of news stories that are known by the author to be false, or something, would work well enough.
The problem is identifying the fake news, which isn't something people are going to ever agree on fully. You can use a reputational test, which works well for keeping out the Alex Jones-level stuff, but it's not going to keep out stuff like like mainstream media promulgating stories about Al Quida working with Saddam Hussein, or Iraq having chemical weapons, or something.
There is a lot of hand-wringing about the exact definition that I think is mostly unnecessary. Yes, there are a fair few edge cases, but most of 'fake news' is pretty easy to spot. Examples include the Pizzagate nonsense, the Bowling Green crazyness, anti-vaccine insanity, Race-war baiting, Holocaust denial, etc. Those last two probably make up the lion's share of easy to spot gibberish, but I'm not counting. Likely 90% of 'fake news' is that simple to catch, even to those who are medically mentally handicapped. It's the last 10% that all the worrying is about, as well we should. But don't think that the large majority of 'fake news' has any credence whatsoever.
It seems your definition of "fake news" is conspiracy theory. While I agree with you that most if not everything you listed is likely nonsense, it doesn't make them "fake news". There are fake news stories often surrounding these narratives, but the conspiracy theories themselves are not "fake news", as they are not news to begin with.
True, I do think that the endless stream of these conspiracy theories on scummy ad-bait websites, day in and out, is 'fake news'. Just like the chum boxes on the bottom of crummy articles peddling 'doctors' hate him' and the like are also fake news. To me, it is a broad umbrella. Trying to winnow down 'fake news' to: not conspiracy wackos, not ad-bait, not debates on he-said-she-tweeted, etc. is all not productive. To me, they are all 'fake news'. Still, as I said, I think ~90% of 'fake news' is incredibly obvious, and as these things are part of my definition, I think you can see why I believe it is so easy to spot.
Anything not backed by sources? And again, the article doesn't say they are "removing" fake news, Google's just being more pick with their "rich snippets". If something is controversial, then you probably don't want to have Google straight out saying "X is true" or "Y is true", unless you have strong evidence about either.
In the actually search results, I get to see a dozen links with probably varying answers, but for something like Google Home which only reads the top one, I'd rather get no answer at all than a potentially wrong one.
Have you noticed how much US political coverage is based solely on anonymous sources, often ones whose political biases and level of knowledge about their claims are not disclosed to the reader?
Sure, and imo, those more complicated questions which don't have a clear answer shouldn't be top snippets. Snippets are things that you can explain in 1-2 sentence. Most of those political issues are far more complicated and require paragraphs to fully understand all the nuances and sides of the story. A simple quick reply by Google Home isn't gonna cut it, so they shouldn't even offer it.
That's the difference, when I search something on my PC and get 10 different results I can read through, vs when I ask Google and get a single sentence back, or see a snippet at the top with a single sentence.
There is never a general consensus on pretty much everything. Today's news problem is less with verifiable facts, and more with interpretations of facts. If I was a politician and someone snapped a picture of me reading Mein Kamph, and then I was in the general vicinity of some nutjob, most opinion hosts are going to forge ahead with a narrative that aligns with their ideology. Pretty much all of the popular shows on CNN, MSNBC, FOX are filled with these kinds of idiot know-it-all blowhards.
"Fake news" is the last gasp of a dying media establishment who are trying with all their fervor to convince the public of their own necessity. The fact is that in an age where technology has enabled us to communicate instantaneously across the globe and watch events play out ourselves, news media is largely irrelevant.
We don't need an embedded reporter on the other side of the planet anymore, because the people there will be tweeting it out.
The last several major news events for which I had access to cable television immediately devolved into "watch news anchors read Twitter". This was true of the Dallas riots and the Turkey coup last summer. There were several minutes straight of "this is a tweet from someone nearby...", interrupted only by commercial breaks and commentary, not real reporting.
There are several YouTube channels that get more daily viewers than television channels. PewDiePie has over 50 million subscribers. The rising generation grew up accessing any content they wanted on-demand and does not understand a world of scheduled television programming. CNN is quickly becoming grandpa's way to get news.
The traditional news media has been disrupted and outmoded, and "fake news" is their temper tantrum, their attempt to stay relevant. The old broadcast media establishment has lost their influence, and they will not go quietly into the night.
It's sad and ironic that Google's political agenda is causing them to betray their users. We need aggressive market-equalizing reform.
There is quality journalism out there that goes above and beyond "some guy on twitter took a pic of what was happening". If you're married to the concept of outsider journalism, the citizen journalist website bellingcat is pretty good. A lot of well educated and traveled people have contributed. The quality of content is above a tweet.
However, the reason you see news anchors reading tweets is not because there isn't a better source of content than tweets, it's the idea that tweets are what people want to see. Viewer engagement in an interactive age. It's part of Twitter's strategy, as well.
Which is just about everyone outside of the Silicon Valley, San Fran, and establish ment bubble. Stifling free speech in this way will hopefully bring a cornucopia of anti-trust lawsuits against Google.
