Re:Darpa Wants to Build a BS Detector for Science
by Animats on Sunday July 30, 2017 @05:05PM
(#14887815)
The intelligence community works fairly hard on this, with only moderate success. But they have active opponents trying to fool them.
One of the CIA's checks is to ask of information that confirms other information, "is this from a different source, or is this from the same source via another path"? That's a problem that could be addressed on the web, and is helpful at detecting "fake news" and hoaxes. A graph of which stories are derived from what other stories, and when, gives a good sense of where something came from.
Google is terrible at finding provenance. They're likely to list the popular clickbait site, even if it's a scraper site, rather than the actual source. Sites which are listed as "news" get special treatment, but Google doesn't find the original news story, rather than its indications. Google crawls the web so frequently that it could get a handle on provenance from timestamps alone.
One of the CIA's checks is to ask of information that confirms other information, "is this from a different source, or is this from the same source via another path"? That's a problem that could be addressed on the web, and is helpful at detecting "fake news" and hoaxes. A graph of which stories are derived from what other stories, and when, gives a good sense of where something came from.
Google is terrible at finding provenance. They're likely to list the popular clickbait site, even if it's a scraper site, rather than the actual source. Sites which are listed as "news" get special treatment, but Google doesn't find the original news story, rather than its indications. Google crawls the web so frequently that it could get a handle on provenance from timestamps alone.