Would you trust judgment of credibility to an algorithm? Maybe I’m showing my age but new-fangled crap like this just makes my jaw drop.
Ars Technica‘s Jacqui Cheng reports that researchers at the Know-Center in Austria are working on just that. Online publications will be ranked as “highly credible, having average credibility, or ‘little credible.’” The algorithm examines “the distribution of words over time, and compares blog topics against articles from mainstream news, which are apparently weighted as being more credible.”
What’s this? The Austrians believe that corporate media are more credible solely because they exist? That’s just silly. Little credible—that’s us.
Little credible like US Representative Jane Harman (D-California). She thought the Bush administration’s illegal warrantless wiretaps were a-okay. Harman is currently upset because the US government wiretapped her legally, with a warrant. The ever-credible Glenn Greenwald sums it up best:
“So if I understand this correctly—and I’m pretty sure I do—when the U.S. Government eavesdropped for years on American citizens with no warrants and in violation of the law, that was ‘both legal and necessary’ as well as ‘essential to U.S. national security,’ and it was the ‘despicable’ whistle-blowers (such as Thomas Tamm) who disclosed that crime and the newspapers which reported it who should have been criminally investigated, but not the lawbreaking government officials. But when the U.S. Government legally and with warrants eavesdrops on Jane Harman, that is an outrageous invasion of privacy and a violent assault on her rights as an American citizen, and full-scale investigations must be commenced immediately to get to the bottom of this abuse of power. Behold Jane Harman’s overnight transformation from Very Serious Champion of the Lawless Surveillance State to shrill civil liberties extremist.”
Cheng also reports on a Japanese system that shows more serious promise. The Nara Institute of Science and Technology demonstrated a system that gathers differing viewpoints on a specific subject and presents them in a “statement map” that represents how they are related. Now that sounds useful.
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