Monat: Oktober 2016

Facebook's Trending Algorithm Can't Stop Fake News, Computer Scientists Say

ThinkStock / Facebook

Facebook has placed a high-stakes — and, experts say, unwise — bet that an algorithm can play the lead role in stanching the flood of misinformation the powerful social network promotes to its users.

The social network where 44% of Americans go to get news has in recent weeks promoted in its Trending box everything from the satirical claim that Siri would jump out of iPhones to the lunatic theory that Presidents Bush and Obama conspired to rig the 2008 election. As Facebook prepares to roll out the Trending feature to even more of its 1.7 billion users, computer scientists are warning that its current algorithm-driven approach with less editorial oversight may be no match for viral lies.

“Automatic (computational) fact-checking, detection of misinformation, and discrimination of true and fake news stories based on content [alone] are all extremely hard problems,” said Fil Menczer, a computer scientist at Indiana University who is leading a project to automatically identify social media memes and viral misinformation. “We are very far from solving them.”

Fil Menczer

Via cnets.indiana.edu

Three top researchers who have spent years building systems to identify rumors and misinformation on social networks, and to flag and debunk them, told BuzzFeed News that Facebook made an already big challenge even more difficult when it fired its team of editors for Trending.

Kalina Bontcheva leads the EU-funded PHEME project working to compute the veracity of social media content. She said reducing the amount of human oversight for Trending heightens the likelihood of failures, and of the algorithm being fooled by people trying to game it.

“I think people are always going to try and outsmart these algorithms — we’ve seen this with search engine optimization,” she said. “I’m sure that once in a while there is going to be a very high-profile failure.”

Less human oversight means more reliance on the algorithm, which creates a new set of concerns, according to Kate Starbird, an assistant professor at the University of Washington who has been using machine learning and other technology to evaluate the accuracy of rumors and information during events such as the Boston bombings.

“[Facebook is] making an assumption that we’re more comfortable with a machine being biased than with a human being biased, because people don’t understand machines as well,” she said.

Taking Trending global

Facebook’s abrupt doubling down on an algorithm to identify trending discussions and related news stories has its roots in the company’s reaction to a political controversy. In May, Gizmodo reported that the dedicated human editors who helped select topics and news stories for the Trending box said some of their colleagues “routinely suppressed” news of interest to a conservative audience. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg convened an apologetic meeting with conservative media leaders. Three months later, the company fired the editors and let an algorithm take a bigger role with reduced human oversight.

Two days after dismissing the editors, a fake news story about Megyn Kelly being fired by Fox News made the Trending list. Next, a 9/11 conspiracy theory trended. At least five fake stories were promoted by Facebook’s Trending algorithm during a recent three-week period analyzed by the Washington Post. After that, the 2008 conspiracy post trended.

Facebook

Facebook now has a “review team” working on Trending, but their new guidelines require them to exercise less editorial oversight than the previous team. A Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed news theirs is more of a quality assurance role than an editorial one. Reviewers are, however, required to check whether the headline of an article being promoted within a trend is clickbait or a hoax or contains “demonstrably false information.” Yet hoaxes and fake news continue to fool the algorithm and the reviewers.

Facebook executives have acknowledged that its current Trending algorithm and product is not as good as it needs to be. But the company has also made it clear that it intends to launch Trending internationally in other languages. By scaling internationally, Facebook is creating a situation whereby future Trending failures will potentially occur at a scale unheard of in the history of human communication. Fake stories and other dubious content could reach far more people faster than ever before.

For Trending to become a reliable, global product, it will need to account for the biases, bad actors, and other challenges that are endemic to Facebook and the news media. Put another way, in order to succeed, the Trending algorithm needs to be better than the very platform that spawned it. That’s because fake news is already polluting the platform’s News Feed organically. A recent BuzzFeed News analysis of giant hyperpartisan Facebook pages found that 38% of posts on conservative pages and 19% of posts on liberal pages featured false or misleading content.

Facebook’s challenge with fake news has its roots, of course, in the platform’s users — us. Humans embrace narratives that fit their biases and preconceptions, making them more likely to click on and share those stories. Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged this in a Facebook post marking the 10th anniversary of News Feed.

“Research shows that we all have psychological bias that makes us tune out information that doesn’t fit with our model of the world,” he wrote.

Facebook relies primarily on what humans are doing on Facebook — likes, shares, clicks, et cetera — in order to train the Trending algorithm. The company may have ditched its editors, but we humans are still giving biased signals to the algorithm, which then mediates these biases back to an even larger group of humans. Fake news stories keep trending because people on Facebook keep reading and sharing and liking them — and the review team keeps siding with the algorithm's choices.

As far as the algorithm is concerned, a conspiracy theory about 9/11 being a controlled demolition is worth promoting because people are reading, sharing, and reacting to it with strong signals at high velocity. The platform promoted a fake Megyn Kelly story from a right-wing site because people were being told what they wanted to hear, which caused them to eagerly engage with that story.

The BuzzFeed News analysis of more than 1,000 posts from hyperpartisan Facebook pages found that false or misleading content that reinforces existing beliefs received stronger engagement than accurate, factual content. The internet and Facebook are increasingly awash in fake or deeply misleading news because it generates significant traffic and social engagement.

Facebook

“We’re just beginning to understand the impact of socially and algorithmically curated news on human discourse, and we’re just beginning to untie all of that with filter bubbles and conspiracy theories,” Starbird said. “We’ve got these society-level problems and Facebook is in the center of it.”

This reality is at odds with Facebook’s vision of a network where people connect and share important information about themselves and the world around them. Facebook has an optimistic view that in aggregate people will find and share truth, but the data increasingly says the exact opposite is happening on a massive scale.

“You have a problem with people of my parents’ generation who … are overwhelmed with information that may or may not be true and they can’t tell the difference,” Starbird said. “And more and more that’s all of us.”

The fact that Facebook’s own Trending algorithm keeps promoting fake news is the strongest piece of evidence that this kind of content overperforms on Facebook. A reliable Trending algorithm would have to find a way to account for that in order to keep dubious content out of the review team&039;s queue.

How to train your algorithm

In order for an algorithm to spot a valid trending topic, and to discard false or otherwise invalid ones, it must be trained. That means feeding it a constant stream of data and telling it how to interpret it. This is called machine learning. Its application to the world of news and social media discussion — and in particular to the accuracy of news or circulating rumors and content — is relatively new.

Algorithms are trained using past data. This past data helps train the machine on what to look for in the future. One inevitable weakness is that an algorithm cannot predict what every new rumor, hoax, news story, or topic will look like.

“If the current hoax is very similar to a previous hoax, I’m sure [an algorithm] can pick it up,” Bontcheva said. “But if it’s something quite different from what they’ve seen before, then that becomes a difficult thing to do.”

@kerrymflynn / Twitter

As a way to account for unforeseen data, and the bias of users, the Trending product previously relied heavily on dedicated human editors and on the news media. In considering a potential topic, Facebook’s editors were required to check “whether the topic is national or global breaking news that is being covered by most or all of ten major media outlets.” They were also previously tasked with writing descriptions for each topic. Those descriptions had to contain facts that were “corroborated by reporting from at least three of a list of more than a thousand media outlets,” according to a statement from Facebook. The review team guidelines do not include either process.

The algorithm also used to crawl a large list of RSS feeds of reputable media outlets in order to identify breaking news events for possible inclusion as a topic. A Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the algorithm no longer crawls RSS feeds to look for possible topics.

Facebook says it continues to work to improve the algorithm, and part of that work involves applying some of the approaches it implemented in News Feed to reduce clickbait and hoaxes.

“We’ve actually spent a lot of time on News Feed to reduce [fake stories and hoaxes’] prevalence in the ecosystem,” said Adam Mosseri, the head of News Feed, at a recent TechCrunch event.

Kate Starbird

Via hcde.washington.edu

Bontcheva and others said Facebook must find ways to ensure that it only promotes topics and related articles that have a diverse set of people talking about them. The algorithm needs be able to identify “that this information is interesting and seems valid to a large group of diverse people,” said Starbird. It must avoid topics and stories that are only circulating among “a small group of people that are isolated.”

It’s not enough for a topic or story to be popular — the algorithm must understand who it’s trending among, and whether people from different friend networks are engaging with the topic and content.

“Surely Facebook knows which users are like each other,” Bontcheva said. “You could even imagine Facebook weighting some of these [topics and stories] based on a given user and how many of the comments come from people like like him or her.”

This means having a trending algorithm that can recognize and account for the very same ideological filter bubbles that currently drive so much engagement on Facebook.

The Trending algorithm does factor in whether a potential topic is being discussed among large numbers of people, and whether these people are sharing more than one link about the topic, according to a Facebook spokesperson.

A suboptimal solution?

Over time, this algorithm might learn whether certain users are prone to talking about and sharing information that’s only of interest to a small group of people who are just like them. The algorithm will also see which websites and news sources are producing content that doesn’t move between diverse networks of users. To keep improving, it will need to collect and store this data about people and websites, and it will assign “reliability” scores based on what it learns, according to Bontcheva.

“Implicitly, algorithms will have some kind of reliability score based on past data,” she said.

Yes, that means Facebook could in time rate the reliability and overall appeal of the information you engage with, as well as the reliability and appeal of stories from websites and other sources.

This would lead to all manner of questions: If Facebook deems you to be an unreliable source of trending topics and information, should it have to disclose that to you, just as it does your ad preferences? Should news websites be able to see how the algorithm views them at any given time?

The Facebook Ad Preferences page.

Facebook / Via Facebook: ads

Then there’s the fundamental question of whether suppression of information and sources by algorithm is preferable to suppression by humans.

“Previously the editors were accused of bias, but if [Facebook] starts building algorithms that are actually capable of removing those hoaxes altogether, isn’t the algorithm going to be accused of bias and propaganda and hidden agendas?” said Bontcheva.

A spokesperson for the company said the current Trending algorithm factors in how much people have been engaging with a news source when it chooses which topics and articles to highlight. But they emphasized that this form of rating is not permanent and only pays attention to recent weeks of engagement. They will not maintain a permanent black or white list of sources for Trending. The company also said that the top news story selected for a given topic is often the same story that&039;s at the top of the Facebook search results for that topic or term, meaning it&039;s selected by an algorithm.

Now consider what might happen if, for example, there&039;s a discussion about vaccines happening on a large scale. Maybe the algorithm sees that it&039;s generating enough engagement to be trending, and maybe the top story is from an anti-vaccine website or blog. The algorithm may put that topic and story in the queue for review. Would a reviewer promote the topic with that story? Would they recognize that the anti-vaccine argument stems from “demonstrably false information,” as their guidelines prescribe, and suppress the topic and story? Or would they promote the topic but select a different story?

Those decisions are the kinds that editors make, but Trending doesn&039;t have those anymore. Given recent failures, it&039;s impossible to predict what might happen in this scenario.

“Is a suboptimal solution good enough, and what are the consequences of that?” Starbird asks. “And are we as a society OK with that?”

Quelle: <a href="Facebook&039;s Trending Algorithm Can&039;t Stop Fake News, Computer Scientists Say“>BuzzFeed

Advocates Sense New Moment in Antitrust As Opposition Grows Against AT&T Merger

Before AT&T had even announced plans to buy Time Warner for $85 billion, Donald Trump had denounced the deal, becoming an unlikely bedfellow for Democrats who would soon join the attack.

The earliest reactions to AT&T’s proposal ranged from professional skepticism to unflinching death stares. And while some observers view Washington’s response as nothing more than a bluster of soundbites, others see a new moment for antitrust enforcement, bolstered by the economic populism that has defined the 2016 election.

“There&#039;s definitely something new in the air when it comes to antitrust,” Lina Khan, a fellow at New America who researches industry concentration, told BuzzFeed News. “There’s a general awakening that our current antitrust approach has failed at keeping markets open and competitive, and has instead overseen extreme concentrations of economic power.”

Trump’s senior economic advisor Peter Navarro evoked the trust-busting personae of Theodore Roosevelt in his condemnation of the merger. A President Trump, he said, would “break up the new media conglomerate oligopolies.” Congressional Republicans, including the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley assured the public that lawmakers would scrutinize the deal. Meanwhile, Sen. Mike Lee, the chair of the Senate’s Antitrust Subcommittee said the mega-merger “would potentially raise significant antitrust issues.” Joined by the panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, he promised a thorough review and at least one Senate hearing.

“The industry-friendly merger approvals that benefit private interests but undercut consumers — this is the price we pay for a system that doesn&039;t work,” Todd O’Boyle, director of the Media and Democracy Project at Common Cause, a progressive advocacy organization, told BuzzFeed News. “Consumers understand that they deserve better, that allowing well connected firms to write their own rules doesn’t advance the public interest,” he said. “I think that message is finally coming up from the grassroots to policy makers in Washington.”

In a sign that concerns over market concentration have gained prominence in the public sphere, the AT&T merger played a role in this week’s Sunday morning political chatter and prompted responses from both presidential candidates. Whereas Trump would like to see the deal scrapped, Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine both said the merger deserves a close look.

“The fact that Donald Trump might agree on something doesn&039;t make it bipartisan”

In a major policy speech this summer, Sen. Elizabeth Warren pushed for a reinvigorated approach to antitrust enforcement. She called out some of the biggest names in tech — Apple, Amazon, and Google — for what she claimed were anticompetitive practices. And she pressed for greater scrutiny over so-called “vertical mergers,” the kind of deal that AT&T and Time Warner hope to pull off — one that combines a supplier with a distributor. In a Facebook post Tuesday, Warren urged regulators to take a “very, very close look” at the proposed merger.

“When it comes to antitrust, there has been a changing approach,” John Bergmayer, senior counsel at Public Knowledge, a digital rights advocacy group, told BuzzFeed News. “The ‘Elizabeth Warren attitude’ has become more prevalent among Democrats around DC. There’s a lot more willingness to challenge deals forthrightly,” he said.

AT&T, for its part, insists that its purchase of Time Warner is more likely to receive the government&039;s blessing because the two companies do not compete with one another. For instance, Comcast’s failed deal to acquire Time Warner Cable last year was an example of “horizontal consolidation,” in which two firms in the same industry tried to combine. “All of the deals that have gotten in trouble … over the last few years have been horizontal mergers, where a competitor is being taken out of the marketplace,” AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said in a call with investors Monday.

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, AT&T’s general counsel David McAtee said, “We look forward to discussing the many benefits of this transaction with our regulators.” According to AT&T, the benefits to its 100 million customers would include new types of subscriptions designed for mobile screens and social media, as well as targeted advertising that would support the creation of new content and niche programming.

But regulators may conclude that AT&T’s takeover of Time Warner would harm competition. Critics of the deal argue that AT&T might privilege its own content over their competitors’; downgrade content offered by rival programmers; or extract higher fees from TV-providers who want to carry Time Warner content. (Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has suggested he would not oppose the merger so long as “HBO’s bits and Netflix’s bits are treated the same.”)

Part of the apprehension expressed by consumer advocates and policymakers over an AT&T-Time Warner union can be tied to a another colossal media merger, from 2011: Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal, a deal that many believe should have never been approved. Federal regulators imposed conditions on that transaction to minimize the potential harm to consumers, including commitments by Comcast to provide affordable broadband to low-income families; increase local news programming; and to not discriminate against TV programs that compete with its own content. But experts contend that the spirit of those conditions has been violated and that they are generally difficult to enforce.

AT&T expects to make concessions during the merger review process. In a call with investors, the company’s leadership indicated that if regulators have lingering concerns, they can be addressed through conditions placed on the merger. But some say these conditional remedies aren’t good enough.

“There’s a dawning understanding that it’s very easy for well connected firms to make big promises, but it&039;s much more difficult for them to follow up and actually deliver on the proposed benefits,” said O’Boyle.

During her antitrust speech in July, Sen. Warren criticised the use of these conditional terms and recommended that regulators simply approve mergers or challenge them — with no strings attached.

“Many policymakers in Washington are still smarting from their approval of the Comcast-NBCUniversal merger,” said O’Boyle. “[They’re] realizing that it did not deliver a fraction of the benefits that were promised to consumers.”

But even with the Comcast baggage and the populist mood that has seized the electorate, the Justice Department’s antitrust division will vet the AT&T deal on its own terms.

“Not liking something isn’t a DOJ rationale for blocking the deal”

“Elizabeth Warren or Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders can yell, kick, and scream as much as they want,” BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield told BuzzFeed News. “They need to come up with a legal basis for the government suing AT&T. Not liking something isn’t a DOJ rationale for blocking the deal.”

Greenfield said that for all the rhetoric, he has yet to hear a sound legal argument that would justify blocking the proposed merger. “Even if the government regrets Comcast-NBCUniversal, even if the government thinks ‘big is bad,’ that in and of itself doesn’t mean you can block this.”

Berin Szoka, president of the free market think tank TechFreedom, told BuzzFeed News that rejecting the deal outright, as some politicians have done, is premature and thoughtless.

“The fact that Donald Trump might agree on something doesn&039;t make it bipartisan or demonstrate that there is real concern there,” he said. “It demonstrates that this is an easy rallying cry for demagogical populism on both sides of the political spectrum.”

Szoka added, “The whole point … of having a Department of Justice look at these things is to take them out of the hands of politicians.”

Perhaps the biggest question surrounding the deal is whether the Federal Communications Commission will join the review process. It’s not clear if the agency will, and the companies have not indicated if they will tailor the deal to avoid the FCC’s scrutiny. Unlike the Justice Department’s review, in which the companies have to demonstrate that a merger will not harm competition, the FCC has a broader mandate: for a merger to move forward, the firms must show that their marriage serves the public interest.

While it may appear that the FCC places a higher burden on companies in its approval process — since they have to affirmatively prove a benefit to consumers — Bergmayer said that the DOJ, as a law enforcement agency, has tremendous practical power in its ability to gather information, and it can do so largely beyond public view. Each agency presents their own challenges to potential mergers, he said.

In either case, advocates hope that regulators will take a hard look at the deal, encouraged by the growing sense among policymakers and the current administration, that industry concentration has increased as entrepreneurship has declined.

A source who has worked on previous media deals noted that while the Justice Department’s antitrust division is non-partisan, the head of the division, like the attorney general, is appointed by the president. What’s more, the DOJ’s career lawyers and economists have heard what the presidential candidates have said during the campaign, which might inform how they approach their daily work and broader mission, the source told BuzzFeed news.

The AT&T-Time Warner review is expected to last through the end of next year. Ultimately, a Clinton or Trump administration will decide whether it succeeds. For either of them, the deal will test their to commitments to thwart excessive consolidation and abuse of economic power. And in the more likely scenario that the merger lands on Clinton’s desk, the review may reveal how much influence Sens. Warren and Sanders have on her administration, and if the populist faction they represent holds sway.

Thumbnail credit: George C. Beresford/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Quelle: <a href="Advocates Sense New Moment in Antitrust As Opposition Grows Against AT&T Merger“>BuzzFeed

Apple Is Delaying Its New Wireless Airpod Headphones

Stephen Lam / Getty Images

Apple has delayed shipping its new Airpods headphones, announced in conjunction with the headphone-jack-less iPhone 7 in early September. The cordless Bluetooth headphones, which cost $159, were scheduled to ship in October of this year.

Even at launch, the Airpods and the iPhone 7 did not have the same shipping date. The iPhone 7 has been released, and customers have been given a special adapter for plugging in their standard headphone cords.

An Apple spokesperson told BuzzFeed News, “The early response to AirPods has been incredible. We don&#039;t believe in shipping a product before it&039;s ready, and we need a little more time before AirPods are ready for our customers.”

The spokesperson declined to give a rough shipping date and declined to comment on any issues that may have delayed the shipment.

This is unusual for Apple, which typically hits its promised product release dates.

Quelle: <a href="Apple Is Delaying Its New Wireless Airpod Headphones“>BuzzFeed