Fake News Tracker Game

[Tricky to implement. DOES NOT TRY TO AUTOMATE DETECTION OF FAKE NEWS. Relies on crowdsourcing for that.]

You score points in this game if you're quick to 'smell the rat' in stories that are eventually consensus-rejected as fake.

The implementation may be complicated, though, if we try to automate verification of how the story spread, comparing changes in text over time across every possible news site including blogs and facebook and twitter and local news.

Players will submit links that appear to include new variants to any story; the gamesite will archive the coverage and try to verify its own date-claims (watching especially for faked dating).

A group might try to swing a false consensus, but since registration will be required maybe the system could detect and fork such efforts. (If people always vote the same way you're given the choice of accepting or rejecting their votes.)

The alt-right landscape

Breitbart is very weird in staking out a set of perspectives never before or since recognised as a single unified set, and then projecting a phony attitude that only fools could disagree...

Unz is commendable for including a a vast spectrum of unfashionable opinion, and Taki a narrower spectrum of slightly more outrageous views.

Sailer is the site I agree with most, but he doesn't try to cover topics where he's not comfortable.

Israel is really the acid test, where speaking freely gets you blacklisted.

fairplayai.slack.com

It seems to me that
even very simple AI
can start making positive contributions to the world political debate,
by virtue of its transparent fairness.

Calculating the number of column-inches
that different media give to different interest groups
is the most obvious approach.

Creating sentence templates that expose the similarities and differences between

"Trump has small hands and funny hair" vs
"Miss World is getting fat"
or
"Blacks should show solidarity with other blacks" vs
"Whites should show solidarity with other whites"
or
"Muslim extremists belong on drone kill-lists" vs
"Jewish extremists belong on drone kill-lists"
or
"Open borders are good for Europe" vs
"Open borders are bad for Israel"
or
"Protectionism is bad for manufacturing" vs
"Protectionism is good for professionals like doctors"
or
"The alt-right media promote fake news stories" vs
"The NYT and WaPo promote fake news stories"

these sorts of semantically-simple moral challenge should be turned into
educational webpages (or whatever platforms offer some promise)
and if they gradually begin to form a cohesive alternative political platform
that's something we badly need.

So for discussions I've started a "Fairplay AI" slack at fairplayai.slack.com

I need your email address if you want an invite.