You mean government regulation a la China because some memes really are dangerous? If you increase the velocity of transmission, then even in a free system there are some dangerously infectious falsehoods that it might be in the public good to slow. Think War of the World on Facebook.
It basically needs to be serious enough to overwhelm the internal incentives of maximizing key performance indicators.
I would say they don't do so because of micro-optimized KPI targeting: they do so because they feel time on Facebook is valuable and makes them happy. If Facebook can't deliver increases in that, then optimizations only take them so far.
I can't imagine an unprecedented breaking news story that has no basis in any factual information. I'm not talking about an upvoter here, but primarily a downvoter (incongruence with accepted facts being easier to prove than vice versus).
There's no fundamentally creative step in deciding "How well does this new piece of information match pieces I previously had"?
From an untrustworthy collection of input relationships, how do I produce the most reliably correct output?
Nevertheless, I agree that if anyone can do it algorithmically, it would probably be Google.
I'd like it if it was, but I've never witnessed popularity that embodies that statement.
Popular opinion is usually informed by the most often repeated narrative.
The Allen AI group has been working on solving year 4 multiple choice science tests for about 3 years. They now score a bit over 60% correct, and that is a much easier task.
Everything has to be right for an answer option to be correct. Only one thing has to be wrong for it to be incorrect.
Choosing a random story from politifact: http://www.politifact.com/missouri/statements/2016/nov/06/ro...
Like most false stories, there is a hint of truth to this but that doesn't make it true. Politfact spends 3 pages discussing it, and concludes:
Courts did object in three cases to decisions Kander made as secretary of state. But the specifics of those cases are much more nuanced than Blunt lets on. And the claim that Kander tried to manipulate the election is, at best, unproven.
A SOTA computer system could probably parse that last paragraph I posted, but couldn't get anywhere near getting close to doing the research needed to get to that conclusion. We are years off that (I work on research in this area)
A lot of claims that were made this cycle are rooted in measured quantities where the measurements we have disagree with the claims.
If there is at least one rape or at least one illegal immigrant then it becomes subjective or contextual.
Is 3 rapes a flood? What if it is in a week in one town? What if one was by a former illegal immigrant? What if it is over the course of a year, but all 3 occurred in one day?
Is 20 illegal immigrants a flood? What if they all arrive in a town with a population of 100?
Who is "we"? Is a story about millions of illegal immigrants in Greece relevant? What if it about thousands of illegal immigrants working in Athens? What if Athens is in Georgia?
A real example:
"Broken Families: Raids Hit Athens' Immigrant Community Hard" vs "Athens crackdown shows no hospitality for illegal migrants"
One is a real headline from Georgia, the other from Greece. Can you tell which is which?
It would absolutely have to be automatically generated, but it doesn't seem impossible (just much harder NLP that Watson playing Jeopardy).