Journalism has become less black and white today. From healthcare reform to progress in Afghanistan, commentators on cable news and blogs have refracted “the truth” into many shades of gray.
So when someone throws out a statistic, how do you know it’s true?
"We’re seeing the end of the newspapers, and with them go many of the fact-checkers*," says Rob Ennals, a research scientist at Intel Labs in Berkeley, Calif. "We now have a far more anarchistic view of the news. You can’t know people’s biases.”
To help readers, Mr. Ennals developed an online veracity alert system. The software, called Dispute Finder, sniffs through what you are reading online. If anything smells fishy – perhaps questionable poll results or references to “death panels” – Ennals’s code blows a whistle and says, "This is disputed. Here’s the evidence."
Once installed, Dispute Finder starts to compare what you read online to its database of recognized contentions. When you stumble upon a dubious claim, the program automatically highlights that section in pink.
For example, Dispute Finder will highlight “Eskimos have many words for snow.” Curious users can click on the pink text to find out why. A little explainer appears as a pop-up bubble. It says: “ ‘Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than do speakers of English,’ according to linguist Steven Pinker in his book ‘The Language Instinct.’ ‘Counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen.’ ”
This evidence also comes with a citation that links to the original website, so you can scrutinize the authority of the allegation. And, whether you agree with the statement or not, each explainer also comes with an “ignore” button, which tells the program not to highlight this dispute in the future.
Dispute Finder also has a "Hot Claims" page that shows some of the disputed claims users have added recently.
Source: Christian Science Monitor
* Human fact checkers and news librarians are not all gone. Many are still doing great work. It was just last week when we posted an article by Paula Hane who discussed several "human powered" services that do there best to separate fact from fiction. If you missed that post, here's the link.
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