Ironic, considering the topic of the article.
I don't like the title either, but the internet is built to incentivize behavior and content like this, unfortunately.
IP definitely has its failings, but the incentive behind clickbait is a late stage economy answerable only to its own metrics.
On a technical level, "The Web" (HTTP/JS) is much more at fault than "The Internet", as its naive designs have fostered a surveillance industry that transmutes a negative-value pageview into positive money.
> as the top Republican in Congress blocks efforts to protect the integrity of elections.
(translation: democrats want to protect our elections, republicans are russians)
I wonder if it will be able to detect massive journalistic malfeasance by people who perpetuated multi-year-long rumors about pee tapes, or whatever other politically motivated "news" posing as journalism
DARPA funded the internet. Did the US unleash military to network computers? I think we could all agree that’s hyperbolic.
It's like publishing a headline saying "Elvis Presley sighted in Moscow", forgetting to specify that it's not the Elvis everybody thinks about, but some other guy that happens to have the same name, and has lived in Moscow, Arkansas, for his whole life and nothing of note happened to him ever. Classic clickbait.
> The Semantic Forensics (SemaFor) program will develop technologies to automatically detect, attribute, and characterize falsified multi-modal media assets (text, audio, image, video) to defend against large-scale, automated disinformation attacks.
The primary use case for this is election security, but more generally being able to detect and defend against an adversary trying to seed political discord with fake accounts, or fake news, so-called "deep fakes", etc.
[1] - https://www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-opportunity.html?oppI...
Straight to the top of HN!
I just want two things.
1/ Show your work. Data, code, citations, attributed quotes, whatever.
2/ Sign your work.
Then everyone so inclined can determine truthiness at their leisure. Just like with academic publishing.
Omitting 1 means it's just opinion, 2 means gossip, both means propaganda.
I know the founder of https://www.fakeskiller.com which is a browser extension for highlighting fake news (they also released a mobile app not so long ago).
They use fact checking organizations to classify news as fake news and highlight posts in social media, which contain links to fake news. They also provide link to rebuttal.
But since there is always a lag between producing clickbait fake news and working on proving it's a fake, I assume those who fight disinformation and propaganda will be on the losing side.
That's why the founder of Fakeskiller always invites everyone on educating those "useful idiots", who are sharing those fakes and sharing truth with them.
But can the propaganda be effectively fought technically? I assume, no.
The core problem is unsourced, unattributed information. The difference between gossip and journalism.
What is the provenance of every statement?
The Correct Answer is adding signatures to every thing, so we can independently verify that someone said something.
Once we have traceability, people can figure out what is more true (less wrong), over time. Just like with academic publishing.
> I just made a weapon?!
-Dustin @21:35
I realize cable news has become entertainment without even trying to correct themselves the next day, but if it was really viable to automatically generate a quasi-ARG experience, wouldn’t Hollywood have developed it first?
I for one welcome the coming onslaught of fake news, at least I won’t have to question the motive of the news source.
