Here is my idea submission to the Ford Foundation:

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR IDEA TO SOMEONE IN 30 SECONDS OR LESS?

We solve the problem of misinformation by making the web Socratic in nature.

We’re building a database which connects rebuttal webpages to the webpages they rebut, then ranking the best rebuttals for any given webpage. This data is integrated into all major platforms so that no content escapes being criticised.

DESCRIBE YOUR IDEA

All efforts to autonomously fight misinformation online are making the same fundamental error of trying to identify and suppress the spread of ‘fake news’, while also amplifying ‘true’ news.  This approach is guaranteed to fail for multiple reasons.

We alone are the only organisation working on the one philosophically sound solution to this problem: Universal critical reflection.

The Socratic method and the scientific method both align on this issue: We can’t be sure of the truth, but we can definitely challenge all claims rigorously.

So how do we codify this philosophical principle into the web? Luckily, it is relatively simple, technically speaking.

First of all, we notice that rebuttals, fact-checks, critiques, debunkings, and corrections are written every single day. This content already exists and will continue to be created as a natural part of the web. The problem is that these critical responses are never discoverable from the content being corrected, and so their ability to correct is severely impeded.

We solve this problem by connecting the critical response (URL1) to the webpage being critiqued (URL2) in an open-access database which other organisations, like Facebook and Google, are free to access and integrate into their user interfaces.

Whenever URL2 appears in the newsfeed, URL1 will be accessible right alongside it. Whenever someone visits URL2, they will be able to access URL1 directly from their browser. Fake News will never escape fact checkers, scams will always be revealed, and complex issues will lead people into nuanced discussions from multiple perspectives, necessarily destroying echo chambers.

This approach solves Facebook’s “Fake News” PR problem entirely and doesn’t have any of the complications of accusations of censorship. It also promotes critical thinking in all internet users while they browse, rather than promoting passive acceptance of “True” information.

The post Idea Submission to the Ford Foundation appeared first on rbutr.

I love the unique approach they take, their focus, and their open-mindedness around that focus. It is very refreshing to encounter that when I so often find myself never quite fitting into any of the requirements, conditions and/or expectations of virtually every other grant out there. No I am not with a university. No this isn’t from the USA. No we didn’t start in the last 12-24 months.

Everyone wants to support innovation, but no one ever seems willing to actually step outside of the system that already exists to find that innovation. You fit into the crowd, or you you don’t exist.

“Oh, you have a new idea? Fantastic. Please tell us about this new idea, and be sure to explain it in terms of how it is like Google or Uber, and don’t let the business model scare anyone.”

Anyway, side rant over. Shuttleworth didn’t give me that vibe at all. They have a mission to promote open access to knowledge, and they want to hear ideas on how that can be done. I love it.

I also found their serious of questions, which you are about to read below, to flow really naturally. I didn’t have to fight with the questions to communicate my vision. The questions made it easy.

Anyway, this is my application. All answers needed to be less than 1500 characters. Missing questions are multiple choice or factual ones “Where are you based?” “What is your email address” or stuff like that.

1) Tell us about the world as you see it.:

(A description of the status quo and context in which you will be working)

A lot of money and time is being invested in fighting misinformation right now, but by and large it is all missing the mark.

Efforts to improve media literacy are beneficial, but limited in reach. Other efforts to fund more journalists and fact checkers will provide value, but these alone have little impact on the creation and spread of misinformation.

Most solutions aim to flag and suppress the spread of misinformation. For example, Facebook recently launched a system which labels content as “Disputed” if it is evaluated as false by at least 2 fact checkers. The system also warns you repeatedly if you try to share it. Facebook isn’t filtering out misinformation directly, but they are definitely making it go away.

Victory! Right?

Wrong. The misinformation itself is not the real problem. The problem is that people are unable to accurately identify and critique misinformation.

Making misinformation go away actually makes things worse by lulling everyone into a false sense of security. People will become complacent and begin to uncritically accept anything they read. Why worry about it when the system has already checked it?

Not only is this solution frighteningly susceptible to abuse from people in charge of it, but its promotion of intellectual laziness will make the entire population vulnerable to any piece of particularly persuasive misinformation which sneaks in through some backdoor.

Suppression of misinformation is not the solution.

2) What change do you want to make in the world?:

(A description of what you want to change about the status quo, in the world, your personal vision for this area)

I want to make the world more capable of dealing with false information.

The solution to fake news is not another protective silo filtering out the bad information which may challenge us. The solution to fake news is regular engagement with misinformation within a critical framework. The solution to fake news is a population who knows how to spot it a mile away.

My vision of the web is one where any new story (URL1) will be entered into a centralised, open-access database as soon as the first critique of that story is published (URL2).

URL2 critiques URL1. Simple.

As more critiques are written, they are all added to the database against URL1. When you visit URL1, your browser provides access the those critiques. Good critiques can be upvoted, and the strongest will naturally rise to the top of the list for that page.

Duplications of the original story will be automatically added to the database as duplications of URL1. Every critique of URL1 will also follow those duplicate pages around too.

Want to share the article to Facebook? They won’t stop you. Nor will they hide the link from your friends. They won’t even flag the information as false! They will simply provide easy access to the list of critiques alongside the post, showing the strongest critique first, just like they do with every single other link in their news feed.

All managed from a simple, collaboratively designed and managed database with a very simple rule at its core: URL2 must critique URL1

3) What do you believe has prevented this change to date?:

(Describe the innovations or questions you would like to explore during the fellowship year)

I think the main reason that this change hasn’t happened yet is that it is deceptively simplistic yet philosophically challenging.

On one hand, many people understand that critical analysis of misinformation is a good way to debunk myths, teach people facts, and teach critical thinking in the process. But on the other hand, this system will also present critiques of “true” information on a completely equal footing, and that makes people very uncomfortable.

People are terrified of the idea of a widespread system which will indiscriminately challenge every single belief. Sometimes this is because people are insecure about their beliefs and don’t want them challenged. Sometimes it is because people are already upset with massive public denial of thoroughly established scientific consensus, and they cannot stand the idea of putting that public criticism on an even footing to peer reviewed papers.

Those fears are understandable, but how much longer do we have to keep using the same approach before we realise that we are still getting the same disappointing results? Over 40% of the US population denies the fact of evolution. How many more peer reviewed papers do we need to publish, and how many more creationist arguments do we need to block before they change their minds?

There are other technical reasons which may have impeded implementation of this idea in the past, but these are a distant second to the real reason just provided.

4) What are you going to do to get there?:

(A description of what you actually plan to do during the year)

I am currently working towards four key goals:

• Build a consortium of at least 3 key organisations (publishers, social media or platforms) who will actively participate in the design process of a new rebuttal database.
• Secure a commitment from at least one platform to implement a pilot system interface on their platform.
• Secure enough funding to develop the database and support the new organisational structure.
• Test key hypotheses with controlled scientific studies.

Building the consortium and securing commitments to implement the system from popular platforms is going to require strong, trust-based relationships. I will begin building many of these relationships next week at ICWSM-17 in Montreal. During the conference I will be attending the all day Workshop on Digital Misinformation. This workshop has participants from virtually every major organisation concerned with the Fake News phenomenon, and I will be working hard to connect with and start working with as many of them as possible.

To fund this project I am applying for multiple grants and awards, and will be launching a crowdfunding campaign in the near future. The aim is to get enough money to get us to pilot implementation in a major social media platform.

To test my hypotheses, I have already begun working with two HCI academics in Europe. We have already won a grant of €50,000 for a one year research project, and we are submitting our first paper for review on Monday. More experiments are being developed currently.

5) What challenges or uncertainties do you expect to face?:

I expect that the biggest challenge is going to be getting strong commitments from popular platforms and publishers to support the project. Fortunately we only need one or two to participate in the consortium, and one to implement a pilot system, for the value of the system to be demonstrated. However, getting the first ones are always the hardest.

The second biggest problem will be raising enough money to operate the organisation and develop the new database. Fortunately, there are a lot of funds available for projects working on misinformation at the moment.

It does occur to me that a Shuttleworth Fellowship would likely be the single most powerful asset I could have to address both of these problems. Warm introductions from past fellows to interested parties, backed with the confidence and financial support of the foundation will help break down most barriers immediately, helping us make this happen with much less resistance. I can’t overstate how valuable this fellowship would be to me in helping bring this vision to life.

As for uncertainties, we have many. I think any genuinely innovative solution which needs to be applied at scale to see if it works or not, is going to necessarily come with its own universe of uncertainty. It is for this reason that I have started pursuing scientific research in parallel with our development path. I want to reduce the uncertainty as much as possible.

6) What part does openness play in your idea?

Virtually everything about this idea is based on openness.

First, the philosophy which this system is encoding into the web is a philosophy dedicated to being open to contrary views, open to criticism, and open to doubt and uncertainty.

Second, the system will be built open source.

Third, the consortium built to guide the project will be an open, collaborative endeavour.

Fourth, the data held in the system will be open-access. Free for everyone to use, and integrate or develop on top of.

The current wave of fear of misinformation is causing people to agree to close off parts of the internet. To censor out ideas that they find disruptive. To further reinforce the echo chambers which are already too strong. What can be more closed than isolated communities of people unable to communicate with one another?

My idea is the antidote to that problem.

This idea blows echo chambers wide open.

9) How have you funded your initiative in the past?

The StartupChile accelerator program provided some equity free funding in 2012.

10) Who are your current or potential key partners?

Our current academic partners are Assistant Professor Nava Tintarev at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and Dr Adrian Holzer at EPFL in Switzerland.

We have a strong network of partners in the skeptic communities around the globe, and have started working with several misinformation fighting projects, freely sharing our rebuttal database with them.

The key partners that we are aiming to bring onboard with the project are representatives of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Mozilla, W3C, Reddit, WordPress, Wikipedia, Hypothes.is, Poynter, Politifact, Snopes, Buzzfeed, and others.

14) Do you have an online presence?

Please Provide Links to your Web Presence/s
http://shanegreenup.com/
https://medium.com/@Aegist
https://www.youtube.com/user/aegist
https://twitter.com/Aegist
https://www.reddit.com/user/aegist
http://sportsarbitrageguide.com/
http://www.immortaloutdoors.com/default.aspx
https://github.com/Aegist

15) Does the idea/project have an online presence?

Please Provide Links to your Project/Idea’s Web Presence/s
http://rbutr.com
http://reddit.com/u/rbutrbot

The post Shuttleworth Foundation Application appeared first on rbutr.

Following up from the workshop though, I have several books worth of stuff to say. I will be working on those articles over the coming weeks (I’m a slow writer), but for now this post is just a quick brain dump of some thoughts and outcomes that I want to share with you to keep you up to date on what has happened and what I am now working on.

Meeting the Right People

First of all, my main objective was a complete success. I met people from Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Mozilla, and have opened a dialogue with them about our solution to misinformation online. It is just a first step, but it is a very important one.

The next phase of my efforts on the global rebuttal concept is almost entirely dependant on those organisations and others like them (the gatekeepers of all online information) buying into my vision enough to participate in the process. I’m building a solution for the entire web here, and that won’t work if people don’t encounter it everywhere they go on the web. So I need participation from the web giants. I don’t need any sort of commitments any time soon, but I do need someone to keep picking up the phone when I call.

No One Is Working On This

My single largest take away from the last few weeks is that: No one is working on this. 

In preparation for the workshop I read through a number of the ‘Reconnaissance Readings‘ documents, and watched some panels from other related events, and could already very clearly see the single-minded focus that people working on fake news and misinformation all seem to share. That is, to summarise it quite bluntly: “More good. Less bad.”

Aside from the general acknowledgement that “We should educate people/the youth better”, the only solution anyone in journalism, academia, or the tech sphere is working on with respect to misinformation and fake news, is trying to improve how we determine what is or isn’t fake so that we can suppress the spread of the bad stuff (less bad!), and amplify the true stuff (more good!).

This solution is so obviously and intuitively “the right solution”, that, as far as I can tell, no one is even considering other options. There seems to be a complete blind spot that this one solution (which honestly comes down to simply trying to control information) might in fact not be the solution at all. That there might be other options and that maybe we should be researching those too…

I wrote about this before the workshop and have written critically about these  trending-towards-censorship approaches in the past. What is different now though, is that it is clear that my lone voice here, really is quite alone.

So, more than ever, I feel a duty to get my apparently unique perspective out there.

If I am wrong, then the world of experts should convince me pretty easily. Obviously they’ll have to get through my confirmation bias, but I’m pretty motivated to find out the truth here, since I am investing all of my time and resources into this project.

If I am right however, then hopefully we can get some more money and research time directed at the right targets, and not spending that time and money bashing our heads against what are actually several thousand year old philosophical questions obfuscated by the modern world’s complexity (ie: What is true?).

The Scientific Method vs Communicating the Truth

With so many people working on various methods to programmatically discern true and false information, we better be sure that the ultimate solution to the problem actually requires that sort of capability.

A system which relies entirely on critical analysis, like the one I advocate for, does not require any such knowledge. So perhaps we should be doing more research into whether critiquing everything helps or not? Does critiquing scientifically factual claims harm the readers of those critiques? Does the benefit of a system which repeatedly demonstrates methods of critical analysis outweigh the costs? There are so many unanswered questions in this space, it is a real shame that no one is even looking there.

It seems to me like the scientific method, scientific skepticism, the principle of falsification and the socratic method are all variations on the one reliable concept: We don’t know what is true. We never really can. But we can use a systematic process of constantly challenging every belief in a structured public way until we slowly get rid of the clearly false beliefs, leaving only good ones behind. They may still be false, but at least we’d be less wrong than we were before.

It works for science. So why does everyone think that it can’t work for public communication of knowledge?

Why must the defenders of science and truth resort to religious-like dogmatic declarations of truth, as if the public can’t possibly reach the correct conclusions on their own?! Why does it feel like science defenders are the new catholic papacy, firmly standing their ground that only they can be trusted to communicate the truth?

Perhaps it is time for a reformation of all information communication?

Perhaps it is time that the socratic method be let free once again, and authoritarian issuances of truth be challenged all the time, everywhere. And instead of us winning by controlling what people believe, we win by teaching people how to think critically.

The Socratic Method – Systematised

To that end, I have tentatively decided to name the next version of the rbutr database Socrates.

I have not written much about this publicly yet, but this next phase has been my focus for many months now.

The plan is to start the system from scratch, coding the database and its rules with collaboration from Facebook, Google, Twitter, Mozilla, and Microsoft in particular, ensuring that ‘Socrates’ can give them exactly what they need to find it valuable and reliable to their needs, while still achieving its simple goal of organising existing (and newly created) online content so that critiques are always available from the pages they critique.

Created as a non-profit organisation along the lines of the W3C, Mozilla, or MediaWiki, the goal is to have all information-delivering-platforms (from browsers to social media to small websites) choose to use Socrates to give them the best rebuttals to each URL they deliver to internet users, and integrate that content into their display – whatever that may look like.

This is not a small goal I have set for myself, but it is achievable. And that’s all I need to make it happen. After all, if it is the only option that will work as the long-term solution against the spread of misinformation, then someone has to do it.

What Next?

Next major goal is fundraising. I think we can build the new version of the platform for around $150,000. That, plus organisation registration, management, and other admin costs of around $100,000 give me a goal of $250,000 to take this vision to a fully functional alpha ready to test with partner platforms. Likely all deliverable within 1 year of funding.

Virtually everything I am doing now is to secure that funding.

My immediate steps consist of formalising my roadmap, drawing up a White Paper description of what Socrates is and how it will work, and writing a number of articles arguing my positions on this issue which I will publish to the misinformation fighting crowds.

I will continue to work with our academic partners to design and conduct better experiments to challenge my assumptions and validate target outcomes, and I will push for more academics to do the same.

Follow Our Progress

Please subscribe to this blog, follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get in touch with me if you’d like to be kept up to date on our progress.

Also, email me if you’d like to join us in our Slack channels where we all work on making this stuff happen.

Thanks for reading!
Shane Greenup

The post My lone voice at the Misinformation Workshop appeared first on rbutr.

The most ambitious efforts are trying to automate this with AI, but most are simply relying on crowdsourced fact checking, or, as in the case of Facebook, agreement between highly regarded fact checking services.

While I fully support these efforts, I do have a problem with their approach. Several actually, but this article is about one.

Firstly, I support them because I also want misinformation gone. I don’t like people being tricked into believing things which aren’t true. I don’t like people around me voting and acting on misinformation which is likely to hurt me and other people.

However, I have one particular concern which I haven’t seen expressed anywhere else yet: What happens if they actually, fully, succeed?

The True-or-False Bot

Imagine a not too distant future where we have an AI that can correctly identify misinformation 100% of the time. We already have Watson beating Jeopardy champions and doctors at their job, maybe the next iteration of the Watson code could surprise us, and suddenly we find ourselves able to fact check reliably at high speed. Maybe it will take 20+ years. Either way, what happens to the world?

Do we stop encountering false information? That certainly seems to be the implication to me.

What does that do to our minds? Do we start to take for granted that we can simply trust everything we read?

More importantly, what happens to the next generation who knows only this world? How do they learn to critique what they read? How do they learn to question ideas, when all ideas they encounter in their news feeds are reliably true?

OK, there will always be some level of spin, bias or interpretation that won’t be subject to the true-or-false bot,  but if children grow up in a world where all ‘facts’ are guaranteed to be true, how will they ever learn to investigate new facts and ideas for themselves?

How vulnerable will this next generation be to propaganda by malevolent outsiders? Or by misguided fundamentalists who want to convert them to their belief system?

The fear that I have here is that complete success in removing all misinformation from our newsfeeds will lead to the end of critical thinking. And with critical thinking gone, what basis do we have for holding any beliefs? What do we have to protect us from a particularly persuasive false belief?

We will have cultivated a memetic monoculture with no immune system.

A single virulent idea could potentially wipe out all competing beliefs with little resistance, destroying decades, if not centuries of philosophical, socio-political, and scientific progress. And I haven’t even mentioned the potential for abuse of the AI system itself, the problem with ostracising people who believe differently and several other problems I have with this approach.

This is why I continue to believe that the only solution to misinformation is a system which automatically drags the best argument for that belief out into the spotlight and says “Give us your best argument! ….And then let us reply.” If you want to beat fake news, you need to organise the web so that the best critique of any webpage is immediately available from anywhere that that webpage is found. It is simple. Reliable. Robust. Effective.

No other approach comes close to solving the problem nearly as well as this one does.

The post What happens if automated fact checking succeeds? appeared first on rbutr.

Dr Tintarev was awarded the grant by the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Education and Learning for her project: SuSPECT: Scaffolding Student PErspectives for Critical Thinking which aims to help university students not only assess the veracity of online resources, but also develop more nuanced and balanced thinking.

The grant is being used in part to help develop a new feature for rbutr which will automatically find potential rebuttals to any given URL. The new tool will use social media to construct a list of URLs which could be rebuttals. That list is then presented to the user to evaluate as genuine or not.

The research itself will be looking at a number of different ways that rbutr can be used in classroom settings to help reduce the natural biases in the content, and improve the critical thinking of the students as they engage with the material.

For more on this collaboration, please see the SuSPECT project page, and Dr Nava Tintarev’s blog post.

More collaboration and more research!

This grant, and Dr Tintarev’s work to make it happen have been quite invaluable for rbutr. We’ve all been working together for the last few months now (applying for the grant and organising everything in the background), and the whole process has helped to bring an extra dimension to rbutr’s roadmap and growth path.

Regular readers will remember that I recently wrote about the prospect of conducting research around the central hypothesis behind the entire rbutr concept: the idea that regular exposure to critical analysis will improve critical thinking skills. That post connected us with Dr Adrian Holzer at EPFL who has been working in this space for many years. The three of us (Nava, Adrian and I) are now all working together to help design and conduct high quality studies of how rbutr may impact critical thinking and skepticality.

More about those studies and our collaborations as they happen.

Why? What is this research for?

At the end of the day, I have been working on rbutr for five years now because I believe that this central hypothesis is true. I believe it in part because I have lived it. I have read hundreds of rebuttals over the last few years and it has absolutely changed the way that I interact with information. But none of that matters at all if my belief in the central hypothesis is untrue. That is, it doesn’t matter that I think using rbutr has made me a better critical thinker and more skeptical of claims which I encounter, because I could be wrong in my self-assessment, or I could be unique. We need to know that widespread implementation of a system like rbutr will actually have a measurable impact on critical thinking and skepticality towards information in the population at large.

This is why we need to conduct these studies. We need to know that this work is worth doing.

I haven’t worked on rbutr all this time because of an irrational obsession with our browser plugin. I’ve worked on it because I believe that the idea behind it will make a profoundly positive change in the world. A change so significant that it will become utterly shocking to everyone that it wasn’t implemented many many years before it finally happened.

That is the belief which drives me, and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make it happen, or else at least find out that my core belief is wrong.

Hopefully these research projects will ultimately help us get to where we need to be.

Join us in Slack! Help us make this happen.

With these new academic collaborations, and the addition of a couple new open source developers working to relaunch our plugin with some much needed updates, we’ve got a vibrant active little community working away on rbutr every day now. Get in touch if you want an invite into the channel.

The post Academic Research and rbutr – Announcing a collaboration with the Delft University of Technology appeared first on rbutr.

Project title:

Critical thinking for everyone! A systematic global approach to fixing fake news and misinformation.

Your project summarised in one sentence:

We promote critical thinking and skepticism globally by building a centralised open system which makes it easy for people and organisations to get the best available critique of any given webpage.

What problem are you solving? (150 words max)

This project is the long term solution to the problem of misinformation and false beliefs.

Specifically, we have the key to solving the problems that no other solutions to misinformation and fake news have yet been able to address:

• that misinformation can go viral and spread into the minds of millions before the first rebuttal can be written
• that corrections and fact checks are rarely present when people are discovering (or sharing) misinformation
• that confirmation bias can cause corrections to backfire and increase their false beliefs
• that conspiratorial thinking can drive people away from authoritative attempts to correct misinformation (eg: criticisms of snopes as biased, and wikipedia as unreliable)

A simple centralised database of claim-rebuttal connections (at the webpage level), widely integrated into web platforms, browsers, etc,  can achieve all of this by normalising skeptical thinking and demonstrating critical thinking skills through the content it provides.

Who is this project for? Who benefits? (100 words max)

This project is for everyone in the most true sense of the word.

Individuals don’t like being corrected. Few people believe they are gullible and need protecting from fake news and scams. Most people have no interest in taking personal steps to reduce the spread of fake news, misinformation or the false beliefs they may hold.

This project aims to improve the very nature of the web, and change the way we all interact with information on it. A small change, applied universally, which will improve global skepticism, and actively demonstrate good critical thinking skills.

Why is your project special? What makes it unique and exciting? (150 words max)

Firstly, we are tackling the problem of misinformation without ever taking any positions on what is or is not true.

Secondly, we are primarily concerned with page level relationships. Most efforts in this space work on sentence level annotation, or idea level argumentation. Our unique approach drastically simplifies the problem.

Thirdly, our simple constraint of “PageX critiques PageY” provides a robust resistance to gaming and abuse of the platform.

Fourthly, our crowdsourced rankings of rebuttals simply asks users to vote up rebuttals which make them doubt the claims on the page the rebuttal is arguing against. The goal is to identify which rebuttal is the strongest rebuttal of that specific page, and nothing more. Users aren’t voting for the ‘side’ they most agree with, they are voting up strong rebuttals and compelling arguments within a specific context.

The impact this project will have is incredibly exciting.

What does success look like for your project? What are the three most important metrics you will be aiming for? (200 words max)

Ultimate success would involve the W3C or similar body working to standardise and regulate this system in a way which ensures all websites, platforms, applications and browsers could easily integrate the data into their interfaces, while all writers, journalists, bloggers, vloggers etc could easily submit their rebuttals, critiques and corrections to the system for immediate display against/alongside/following the pages they are critiquing.

Our most important metrics are the number of rebuttals being added to the platform, the number of people delivered relevant rebuttals from our system, and the number of people volunteering to help build and improve this open source system.

The targets for each of these metrics will be constantly evolving, but as a starting point, we are working to build a group of at least 10 active open source developers working on the project. With improvements to the system rolling out, we will be looking for 1000 rebuttals submitted each week (through a mix of plugin submissions, and semi-automated submissions from rebuttal authors, fact checking networks, and other external systems), followed by 1 million people delivered rebuttals (primarily through third party platforms like Facebook).

Why are you the right team to do this? (150 words max)

Craig O’Shannessy and I originally started working on this problem five years ago. We developed our first prototype in one month, then built an active community of 20,000 users over the following 2 years.

In the 3 years that followed, unable to fully commit our time to the project due to family and financial commitments, I had time to reflect on what we learned from our efforts and to reconsider the problem from different perspectives.

When “fake news” became a mainstream term at the end of 2016, I watched with intense interest as numerous solutions were suggested and created. I found that, despite global attention on this well understood problem, none of these new solutions actually offered anything which hadn’t already been tried (and failed).

So, basically, we’re the right team to do this because, despite all of the opportunity, no one else is going to do it.

What specifically are you seeking funding for? What would it go towards? (200 words max)

The funding would be used to hire a back end developer and to cover conference and travel expenses.

For example, I have been invited to a workshop on misinformation at the 17th International Conference on Web and Social Media, in Montreal Canada. I am about to spend almost $2000 to attend this conference in order to have a chance to meet and get to know key people from Facebook, Google, Snopes, Politifact, and many other organisations. These sorts of relationships can be the thing which makes or breaks a project like this.  

I have also been invited to attend Global Fact in Madrid in July, but with no savings left, I am unable to purchase the flights, accommodation and tickets personally. No doubt, many more conferences will follow, and money to cover travel expenses to attend these conferences will be well used.

The bulk of the money would be used to pay a back end developer to take rbutr’s code open source, and help manage our open source volunteers who will be modifying the code to meet the needs of the new vision.

How will your project benefit journalism in Australia, either directly or downstream? (100 words)

This project will benefit journalism in Australia by exposing bad journalism (misinformation, fake news, overwhelming bias etc) wherever it is found, and also by directing people to journalists who take the time to write high quality critiques of poor journalism.

This will help inform the public’s opinion of where to get their news from. The authors and sources of bad information will be regularly shown to be manipulative, inaccurate and biased, while high quality journalism won’t suffer from the same sort of easy take downs.

In short, we will bring more readers and subscribers to quality journalists.

If you are longlisted for a grant, would you be willing to take part in three training modules (in Sydney and streamed nationally) that are designed to enhance your project and develop you/your team’s skills?

Yes.

Are there particular areas/topics you would like to see covered in such a course?

I am most interested in the material that I don’t know I need. The Internet makes it so easy to look up information that I generally educate myself about anything that I know I want to learn. It is the unknown unknowns that is difficult.

Is your project designed to be for a for-profit/commercial venture or a non-profit venture? (We are seeking both for the program.)

Non-profit

The post The Walkley Media Incubator and Innovation Fund appeared first on rbutr.

To fix that problem I am currently working to secure every form of funding that I can bring in for rbutr. I am applying for grants wherever I can find them, and will shortly be launching a crowdfunding campaign to help get rbutr to a couple of key web misinformation/fact checking conferences over the coming few months.

There has never been a better time to aggressively push rbutr out to the world. With Facebook recently launching their own “Disputed by…” tags, the world has just started to catch up to where rbutr was 5 years ago. Now we need to help take this first step the rest of the way to its natural conclusion – a universal system which provides the best available critique for all pages in order to promote skepticism and improve critical thinking.

With that in mind, outwards I go, looking for grants, partnerships and assistance in all forms I can find it.

The Knight Foundation Prototype Fund

Ever since I discovered the Knight Foundation through their News Challenge competition, I have had a lot of respect for them and the work they do. This prototype fund initiative is a perfect example of what I love about them. They fund ideas which aim to make a difference.

We’re looking for technologists, journalists, designers, teachers, researchers, and others who are eager to develop ideas to help ensure all people have access to accurate information. We understand issues of trust and misinformation are nuanced and complicated, and we are looking for ideas and collaborations that can help bring new voices and vision to these debates.

This fund is perfect for rbutr and what rbutr does. So I have written an application.

If only they weren’t so US centric, we might have a chance of getting a grant.

As it currently stands though, their FAQ says that the only people who can apply are: “U.S. based individuals or organizations (both nonprofit and for-profit) may apply.” Since when is misinformation an America only problem?

I’m putting in the application anyway. Maybe we can register a new organisation in the USA to get around this unnecessarily geographically restrictive rule. Besides, I want people to understand the solution more than anything else, and so I am hoping that someone will notice my application, even if we don’t meet the geographic requirements.

Our Application

Title

Critical thinking for everyone! A systematic web based approach.

Describe your project

Our vision of the future of the web is one where every user has permanent, easy access to the best available critique, correction or rebuttal of whatever webpage they are viewing.

In this future you might be on Facebook, Twitter or any other source of content. Every link in that newsfeed has a small non-invasive link/button which would, when clicked, show a list of webpages that critically analyse that content. Being interested in the subject, you open the original link and the top rated rebuttal in new tabs. Reading both articles gives you a wider perspective on the issue and an insight into some of the problems in the original position. You are not totally convinced by the rebuttal though, so you click on a small button in your browser and a list of critical analyses of this rebuttal drops down. You click on the top one, and a rebuttal to this rebuttal opens in a new tab. You read it and continue to gain new perspectives, nuance and understanding of this complex issue.

Our role in this vision is to build a database to record the page level relationship between rebuttals, and the pages they rebut. Our goal is to have all publishing platforms integrate our data into their system so that corrections, critiques and contradictions can always be easily found alongside the information it is critiquing.

We aim to organise the content of the web so that all content is given the skeptical treatment and exposed to relentless critical analysis.

What problem are you trying to solve?

This project is the long term solution to the problem of misinformation and false beliefs.

Many people have tried to solve the problem of misinformation and media bias in the past, but they have all made the same mistake. They have tried to correct misinformation with “true” information. This is a mistake because corrections are not a good way of changing minds (see backfire effect, and the long list of cognitive biases) and when people are told by a web application that they are wrong, they will tend to start ignoring that application, or otherwise avoid it.

Users will tend to conclude: “I’m not wrong. Your app is broken.”

While this project will put corrections up against misinformation, and debunkings against hoaxes, and fact-checks against political lies, that is not how we will beat misinformation.

We will beat misinformation by creating a pervasive culture of critical thinking and skepticism by bringing the best available critique to all information. Good, bad, complex, fake, nuanced – all information is open to critique, and everything needs to be critiqued. When all information online is presented alongside strong critical analysis, then critical analysis (critical thinking) will become mainstream. Scientific skepticism will be normalised.

This approach won’t remove all misinformation from the web, but it will severely impede its ability to spread. It will inoculate people against falling for lies, manipulations and scams.

This project is a vaccine against believing misinformation.

Who will be impacted by your project and how do you understand their needs?

All internet users will be impacted by successful implementation of this project.

Through experimentation with this concept for over 5 years now, we have concluded that the following approach is the only way forwards.

First, it needs to be understood that the average person will not install a rebuttal or fact checking app. They will not go to a fact checking website, nor a debate website every time they read a headline on Facebook. Most people have no real interest in fact-checking, debating or spending time researching things found on Facebook or Google.

Worse than that, misinformation spreads quickly, and corrections take time to write. If the average person needs a correction handed to them in order to spot misinformation, then they will constantly be misinformed by the latest shock story not yet debunked.

The only solution is to actively foster a skeptical culture in all internet users, and to provide them with a constant exposure to high quality rebuttals, which demonstrates to them how to think critically about what they read.

This approach may have mixed results in the older generations, but children will only know a world where all information is critically analysed, and they will embody that socratic attitude.

In order to create this atmosphere of constant critical reflection we need to create a central, open platform which collects and organises these relationships (W3C regulated perhaps) so that all web platforms, internet giants and media outlets can access the data and present it themselves – requiring no opt in from users.

Please list team members and their qualifications

Founders
Shane Greenup
B. Science (hons), B. Arts in Philosophy and the History and Philosophy of Science. Certificate IV in Small Business Management. IndieBio alumni, StartupChile alumni.

Craig O’Shannessy
Over 25 years of experience in all areas of software development and business.
Advisors
Dr. Aubrey de Grey
B. Arts in computer Science, PhD in Biology. Author and Chief Science Officer of SENS Research Foundation.

Dr Michael Shermer
B.A. in psychology, M.A. in experimental psychology and Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University. World famous science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims.

Tim Farley
B. Science in Physics. Tim is a computer software engineer, writer and instructor with an expertise in computer security and reverse engineering. He is a Research Fellow of the James Randi Educational Foundation, the creator of the website What’s The Harm?, and the owner of the SkepTools blog.
Contributors
Dr. Joseph Thomas-Kerr
PhD Computer Engineering, B. Eng – Electrical Engineering. Over ten years of experience, working primarily with Java, C#, and C/C++

Harry Durgin
Over 10 years of experience programming

Nava Tintarev
B. Science, Masters and PhD in Computer Science. An expert in Human Computer Interaction, Nava is currently an assistant professor of the Web Information Systems group at the University of Delft in the Netherlands.

What progress, if any, have you made on this project? *

We’ve built a fully functional prototype system at http://rbutr.com.

We have built the database (which needs a lot more work done to it, or a complete rebuild) and crowdsourced almost 30,000 claim-rebuttal connections into it.

We have developed prototype interfaces which use our data, such as a Chrome browser extension, a reddit reply bot, a twitter reply widget, and an iFrame interface which will work on any device.

We are currently working with a couple of universities to research our core hypotheses and to test rbutr (as it currently stands) in an educational environment.

We have established relationships with many skeptical organisations, and academic research teams around the world.

The post Applying for the Knight Foundation Prototype Fund appeared first on rbutr.

In working my way through the new About Us page I found myself attempting to briefly explain the philosophy behind rbutr, and in doing that, succinctly summarising the core hypothesis behind our approach. It came out like this:

Our key hypothesis is that continual exposure to high quality critical analyses of all online content will foster a skeptical attitude towards all information and improve critical thinking skills as a result of that exposure.

As soon as I wrote that I realised that I finally had a research project we could actually run to at least get an idea as to whether the long term vision for rbutr is reasonable or not.

The Backfire Effect and Changing People’s Minds

Thanks to recent podcasts on The Backfire Effect by You Are Not So Smart (part 1, part 2 and part 3), and an episode by Freakonomics on The Men Who Started  Thinking Revolution I have been primed to think more about how to research on changing minds can be conducted. This priming has paid off and finally given me the (always obvious in retrospect) idea that rbutr’s goals could be tested in a similar way. That we might be able to test whether it is possible to make people more skeptical towards information they encounter online, and better at thinking about that information critically.

Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler did amazing research which established the concept of the backfire effect, while Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s research won Kahneman a Nobel Prize for helping the world understand how and why people reach the conclusions they do. I don’t yet know of any research on our ability to influence people towards increased skepticality of the information they encounter online, nor any research which attempts to improve critical thinking skills through repeated exposure to critical analyses. So I think it would be novel research which could yield some valuable results.

Finding Someone to Conduct this Research

I’m keen to find someone who would like to make this research happen. I’ve already started working on potential experiment designs with the support of an academic advisor who has been working with rbutr in another area, and am happy to help get the ball rolling as much as possible.

I believe that if this research yields any positive results, it could really help direct the way forwards in this massive struggle we are currently all witness to online (one which Tim Berners-Lee rates in the top 3 biggest risks to the web), and may attract a lot of public attention because of it.

If you know someone who is interested in research in this are, and would like to help design and conduct this resarch, please share this article with them. If you would like to work with us to carry out this research, then I would love to hear from you.

Thanks,
Shane

Contact email:

The post Improving Critical Thinking Through Exposure to Critical Analysis – A research project appeared first on rbutr.

It looks like Google has just applied some sort of penalty to NaturalNews.com, effectively removing them from the Google Search results. With the increased pressure on companies like Google and Facebook to fight Fake News and misinformation, there is some reason to suspect that this penalty is directly related to Natural News’ habit of sharing debunked, dangerous misinformation. Google have previously dabbled in using accuracy of information to influence their algorithm after all. At this stage though, I can’t confirm that that is what has happened to Natural News.

Regardless of exactly what has happened though, this is incredibly exciting news. Now we get to see first hand exactly what happens when a web giant suppresses access to a large and popular website!

First of all, I am no fan of Natural News. If you have ever seen any of my rbutr presentations, you will probably already know that rbutr exists because of a Natural News article that friend shared. Natural News spreads misinformation with reckless abandon and the world will be better off without it. That is how I feel.

But, I have also always argued that any effort to censor opinions, beliefs, or communities, by any of the web giants is only going to backfire on them and push people away from their services. The users will decry the move as authoritarian and lose trust in the organisation. From their position it looks like the powerful company is suppressing “true” information from the public.

Imagine how you would react if Google decided to suppress all articles which reported on the current bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. You would be outraged, and rightly so. Any company which refuses to report factual information immediately appears suspect, and likely driven by some ulterior motive. You would rationally suspect that there is a conspiracy afoot. So when the already heavily conspiratorial Natural News community finds out that Google is suppressing them, what else do you think they will conclude? Obviously the illuminati (or globalists, or whoever it is now that is running the show) are trying to suppress the truths that Natural News is publishing.

The backlash has already begun

I didn’t even have to go looking for evidence that people are retaliating against Google for this. The first link I found when I started looking into this was on the /r/Conspiracy subreddit, and the top comment was already saying that they wanted to stop using Google because of this, even though they personally don’t like Natural News.

Of course, Natural News’ own report of the move didn’t hold back, calling Google “Fake Search” and warning their readers to prepare for “total war on humanity.” Apparently this whole thing is a globalist driven attack on Mike Adams and his reputation for supporting Trump and fighting the globalists. Of course.

At least one blogger supporting Natural News has joined the mix, calling this an attack on Natural News. The more level-headed and reasonable perspective of Orac, over on Science Blogs has focussed on the fact that we really have no idea why Natural News was delisted, and could very well be relisted in a day or two after a small mistake is corrected. If that happens, I’m sure Mike Adams will take back everything he has written and apologise for jumping to massive globalist conspiratorial conclusions.

Haha. Not.

The post Google penalises NaturalNews.com, effectively removing it from search results appeared first on rbutr.

The support rbutr page has just been updated to reflect the changes we have undergone recently. It now has a much stronger focus on volunteer efforts, and mentions the intention to run a crowdfunding campaign in the near future.

If you’d like to help organise the crowdfunding campaign with us, please get in touch.

Crowdfunding a lot of money is going to be an important first step towards putting a fire under the growth of rbutr, and making some rapid and impressive improvements to the way rbutr works while taking the entire project open source.

See the new page here: Support rbutr

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