UI + AI + News: Lately reads
I’m currently working on a new AI initiative at Yle (The Finnish Broadcasting Company). It aims to augment the user-citizen, journalist and the newsroom to better understand the power and effects of algorithms in our everyday lives.
Here are some articles and papers (with highlighted snippets/takeaways)that I’ve read recently on journalism, personalization, news, AI/ML and algorithmic power. If any questions, feel free to ping me e.g. on Twitter. Hope you find some interesting reads in here:
How The Wall Street Journal is preparing its journalists to detect deepfakes
“The way to combat deepfakes is to augment humans with artificial intelligence tools.”
GAN Dissection: Visualizing and Understanding Generative Adversarial Networks
“In recent years, innovative Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs, I. Goodfellow, et al, 2014) have demonstrated a remarkable ability to create nearly photorealistic images. However, it has been unknown whether these networks learn composition or if they operate purely through memorization of pixel patterns.”
Progress Toward “the Holy Grail”:The Continued Quest to Automate Fact-Checking
“ClaimBuster has identified one sweet spot where AI can help learn what is check-worthy effectively. On the other hand, our experience with iCheck seems to indicate that checking a non-trivial statement automatically starting from just data still requires considerable work. ”http://ranger.uta.edu/~cli/pubs/2017/factchecking-cj17-adair.pdf
Tutki itse!
Tieteellisen metodin arvostus kannattelee myös demokratiaa, sillä se varustaa yhteiskunnan jäsenet taidoilla, joiden avulla arvioida heille tarjoiltuja väitteitä ja ratkaisuja. Taitava tiedonrakentaja on vaikeammin manipuloitavissa. Subjektiiviset totuudet ajavat ihmisiä vastakkain, erilleen. Voisi siis ajatella, että ymmärrys tieteellisestä menetelmästä on yhä tärkeämpi kansalaistaito.
An algorithmic nose for news
“computers can help a lot with monitoring and spotting claims that might be deserving of journalists’ attention.”
“…computational story discovery tools are helping to speed up and scale up journalists’ ability to surveil the world for interesting news stories. Algorithms offer a sort of data-driven sixth sense that can help orient journalistic attention.”
“Newsworthiness is not intrinsic to an event. It arises out of a judgment process that humans — and now algorithms — contribute to.”
“Every algorithmic lead creates a variable amount of human work that depends on the required reporting depth. All of this underscores the need for newsrooms to be able to set the volume and type of leads they receive.”
We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads
“if the people in power are using these algorithms to quietly watch us, to judge us and to nudge us, to predict and identify the troublemakers and the rebels, to deploy persuasion architectures at scale and to manipulate individuals one by one using their personal, individual weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and if they’re doing it at scale through our private screens so that we don’t even know what our fellow citizens and neighbors are seeing, that authoritarianism will envelop us like a spider’s web and we may not even know we’re in it.”
How Algorithms Can Learn to Discredit the Media
“Fake news and defamation are nothing new. What is new, though, is the role of AI in their propagation. AIs are designed to maximize watch time, which can have the side effect of favoring content that decreases engagement with other channels.”
Looking For Syllabus 2.0
“For self-learning new topics, we need something that’s more like a coach than an encyclopedia. In the classroom, the syllabus plays that role. The syllabus is a learning map.”
Content or Context Moderation? Artisanal, Community-Reliant, and Industrial Approaches
“As platform companies increasingly try to find the “right” answer to policing difficult content types, it is difficult to imagine how they will achieve the results that will satisfy the diverse communities that are now reliant upon on them. ”
https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DS_Content_or_Context_Moderation.pdf
The problem with real news — and what we can do about it
“our news obsession takes away from what journalism as a practice is supposed to be about: helping everyone who is part of the public understand the world well enough to join in public discussion about what is to be done.”
How to Reclaim Your Relationship with Tech: Tools & Tips
“We constantly ignore the warning signs that our bodies are resisting these technological implants — the insomnia caused by the glow of the phones we take with us to bed, the anxiety from social media notifications that follow us everywhere.”
How to track trolls in your feed during the 2018 US midterms
“Bot Sentinel: Tracks tens of thousands of Twitter bots and trolls. Bot Sentinel has a much looser verification system and doesn’t try to verify where the operators are based. However, you can see much more about individual accounts and who’s saying what. It also has a browser extension that lets you check the likelihood of whether any given account is a bot, troll, or “fake news” purveyor — and actively flags notable culprits.”
https://qz.com/1431929/how-to-track-trolls-and-bots-in-the-2018-midterms/
Political Competition and Social Media: Can Facebook Change the Status Quo of Finnish Politics?
“In social media, no candidate is guaranteed to have this resource a priori. How this visibility is allocated to users is one of the most important mechanisms we must understand before we can have a full picture on how social media benefits political actors and who can benefit the most from it.”
“While the specific mechanism through which visibility is gained within social media tends to change over time, the fact that all social media can be thought of as a network of individual users who influence how information spreads within the overall network gives us the necessary solid ground to which we can root overarching theories. The importance of individual users for the dissemination of information is the greatest in social media than it has ever been in any of the prior communication technologies that have come before, and the SEI model aims to capture this main mechanism. ”
https://tampub.uta.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/103373/1526296871.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Fake, misleading social media posts exploding globally, Oxford study finds
“Disinformation during elections is the new normal. In democracies around the world, more and more political parties are using social media to spread junk information and propaganda to voters.
Instagram, Meme Seeding, and the Truth about Facebook Manipulation, Pt. 1
“Instagram is a major distributor and re-distributor of IRA propaganda that’s at the very least on par with Twitter. In my opinion, the platform is far more impactful than Twitter for content-based “meme” engagement — especially for certain minority segments of the American population.”
‘Pro-Beyoncé’ vs. ‘Anti-Beyoncé’: 3,500 Facebook ads show the scale of Russian manipulation
“The only way we can begin to inoculate ourselves against a future attack is to see first-hand the types of messages, themes and imagery the Russians used to divide us.”
USA TODAY asks FBI to probe rise in fake Facebook followers
“The continued presence of phony accounts hasn’t checked the social network’s user growth, but they can cause confusion and havoc for individual users and companies. Fake profiles that masquerade as real people have also caused tragedy, such as the torture and killing of a university student in Pakistan after someone set up a fake Facebook account in his name that allegedly contained blasphemous content.”
The strange tale of USA Today’s Facebook page
“What are the things that stand out here? Firstly the sheer scale of this fake engagement — logistically this would require dedicated resources to set up and maintain. This is not hundreds of fake accounts set up to help boost a page, as Buzzfeed uncovered with Britain First. This is almost 6 million followers and tens of millions of post engagement, having a significant effect on what Facebook users in the US will read.”
Algorithms, bots, and political communication in the US 2016 election: The challenge of automated political communication for election law and administration
“ Intelligent agents are specifically designed to observe and act upon a given computational environment in order to achieve certain goals. These coded agents are able to navigate and influence changing and, thus, unpredictable environments. To put it simply, intelligent agents work on behalf of human users, parsing information and making decisions to a specific end. Many social and political bots on platforms like Twitter can be viewed as intelligent agents.”
News and Political Information Consumption in Sweden: Mapping the 2018 Swedish General Election on Twitter
“Our results indicate that Swedish voters have shared a substantial amount of junk news in the run up to the 2018 Swedish General Election. Our analysis suggests that countries like Sweden still have a high volume of junk news — despite recent efforts to prevent and combat the influence of computational propaganda.”
http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/93/2018/09/Hedman-et-al-2018.pdf
My Friends, Editors, Algorithms, and I: Examining audience attitudes to news selection
“Algorithmic recommendations are not new, and neither are observations about what people think of them, if, indeed, they think of them at all. Back in the mid-twentieth century, Meehl cited some of the scepticism that medical practitioners had towards the use of algorithms in diagnosis. Substantive empirical research did not follow for decades, perhaps because algorithmic recommendations were not widely available or utilized, making the measurement and analysis of opinions about them a low priority for researchers.”
The Hidden Tribes of America
“In our public debates, it seems that we no longer just disagree. We reject each other’s premises and doubt each other’s motives. We question each other’s character. We block our ears to diverse perspectives. At home, polarization is souring personal relationships, ruining Thanksgiving dinners, and driving families apart.”
Free speech in the age of algorithmic megaphones
“Our political conversations are happening on an infrastructure built for viral advertising, and we are only beginning to adapt.”
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-domestic-disinformation-algorithmic-megaphones/
How can we learn about the AI systems that might be used to surveil us?
“We need a free, public and easily accessible source of information about the AI systems that might be used to watch us. And I’ve found it in a surprising place: the federal trademark register.”
The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators
“…journalists, editors, and publishers must determine how the journalistic rule set must be strengthened and fortified against this newest form of journalistic manipulation — in some cases through the rigorous upholding of long-standing journalistic principles, and in others, by recognizing which practices and structural limitations make reporters particularly vulnerable to manipulation”
Äärioikeiston logiikka ja median vastuu
“Usein hyödyntäminen tapahtuu niin, että tehdään huolella ennakkoon suunniteltu provokaatio esimerkiksi sosiaalisessa mediassa. Skandaalin keskeisenä elementtinä on antaa yksinkertaistettuja ja liioiteltuja vastauksia monimutkaisiin yhteiskunnallisiin kysymyksiin ja pelata ihmisten pelolla. Seuraavaksi perinteinen media tarttuu äärioikeiston skandaaliin, joka pian nostetaan mediaan uutisaiheeksi sellaisenaan. Näin äärioikeisto on saanut syötettyä suoraan median lapaan ja kehystettyä mediakeskustelun toiveidensa mukaan. ”
Here’s how much Americans trust 38 major news organizations (hint: not all that much!)
“In Gallup’s data on that question — which asks about “the mass media, such as newspapers, TV, and radio” — 72 percent of Americans trusted the media in 1976, post-Watergate. By 2016, that was down to 32 percent. But the media in 1976 was your local daily, Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, and Harry Reasoner. “The media” is something fundamentally different now, and a decline in trust is a rational reaction to that, even in an environment less polarized than our own.”
A Timeline Showing the Full Scale of Russia’s Unprecedented Interference in the 2016 Election, and Its Aftermath
The Suffocation of Democracy
“The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.””
More research suggests that Twitter’s fake news “strategy” is either ineffective or nonexistent
Seven ways misinformation spread during the 2016 election
““Fake news” and disinformation continue to reach millions: More than 80 percent of accounts that repeatedly spread misinformation during the 2016 election campaign are still active, and they continue to publish more than a million tweets on a typical day.”
