MadMode

A critical, independent and investigative press is the lifeblood of any democracy. -- Nelson Mandela

Newspaper revenue has traditionally come from advertising. Craigslist wiped out classified advertising and Google and Facebook get the lion's share of digital advertising revenue¹, which dwarfs newspaper advertising revenue by 3x².

Our kids can't tell the difference between real and fake news³.

The deep-learning robots at Google can caption photos as well as humans⁴. How hard could it be to teach them to tell true stories from fake? That is:

• determine the main claims of an article
• determine the level of support for these claims
• determine whether promotion of the article is more likely to lead to spead of true or false information

The issue of bias via incomplete truth is perhaps a harder problem.

References

1. Google and Facebook Lead Digital Ad Industry to Revenue Record
   by Aleksandra Gjorgievska
   April 21, 2016
2. U.S. Advertising Industry - Statistics & Facts
3. Students Have 'Dismaying' Inability To Tell Fake News From Real, Study Finds
   npr.org November 23, 2016
4. Microsoft, Google Beat Humans at Image Recognition Deep learning algorithms compete at ImageNet challenge
   R. Colin Johnson
   EE|Times 2/18/2015