One thing I enjoy about software’s evolution over three decades is how concepts I studied in college Philosophy class are suddenly front and center business issues. In this case, epistemology:
e·pis·te·mol·o·gy noun 1)the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion. Origin: mid-19th century: from Greek epistēmē ‘knowledge,’ from epistasthai ‘know, know how to do.’
Are we getting real knowledge in today’s world of on-line “instant news” from web-casters operating from their home or Facebook page, Twitter feed, ? New media outlets are challenging the big boys at Fox, CNN, ABC, Huffington Post, etc. What some people think is the truth often turns out to be what Stephen Colbert’s character called “truthiness”. Fact checking sites (Snopes, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org) can help news consumers separate fact from fiction or propaganda, but only if people visit and search those sites.
Enter Google, with a better idea: “Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links”
The trustworthiness of a web page might help it rise up Google’s rankings if the search giant starts to measure quality by facts, not just links
THE internet is stuffed with garbage. Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free “news” stories spread like wildfire. Google has devised a fix – rank websites according to their truthfulness.
Google’s search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.
A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. “A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy,” says the team (arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.
The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.
There are already lots of apps that try to help internet users unearth the truth. LazyTruth is a browser extension that skims inboxes to weed out the fake or hoax emails that do the rounds. Emergent, a project from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, New York, pulls in rumors from trashy sites, then verifies or rebuts them by cross-referencing to other sources.
LazyTruth developer Matt Stempeck, now the director of civic media at Microsoft New York, wants to develop software that exports the knowledge found in fact-checking services such as Snopes, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org so that everyone has easy access to them. He says tools like LazyTruth are useful online, but challenging the erroneous beliefs underpinning that information is harder. “How do you correct people’s misconceptions? People get very defensive,” Stempeck says. “If they’re searching for the answer on Google they might be in a much more receptive state.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “Nothing but the truth”