We built a Twitter bot that replies to people who share fake news | Hacker News Reader

We built a Twitter bot that replies to people who share fake news

medium.com

5 pointsJanKoenig5 comments

This Fake News hysteria seems to be driving a bunch of false concern about protecting the unsuspecting masses from perceived bad information. The problem is manyfold though because fake news can be very subjective, and who will be chosen as the ultimate authority to determine what is fake and what is not.

I believe that there will always be a certain number people that will still believe falsehoods even after they have been given the correct information. I believe it is a bad idea which will weaken societies collective ability to think on their feet and to be able to discern fact from fiction. Let's move this one into the history books for the sake of everyone.

Totally agree with you! This is why we selected only sources that have created obvious hoaxes in the past. I've been thinking a lot about actually writing this post, because I didn't want to add another post on fake news. However, it was interesting for us how people reacted. And that most didn't care at all about the trustworthiness of the stuff they're spreading

" So we decided to use 21 sites that were flagged as obviously misleading (not satire, not opinionated, just fakes and hoaxes) from this list."

"this list" goes to https://docs.google.com/document/d/10eA5-mCZLSS4MQY5QGb5ewC3... which i've seen before, but I can not find any actual list! Just an article about how to analyze sources. Where's the list?

My bad! Here's the link to an article covering the list. The list was updated a few weeks ago because the creator received death threats http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/fake-news-sites-list-facebook...

From the write up:

"Randomly tweeting at people is considered spam by Twitter. However, this went through so fast that I believe several accounts who spread the news on purpose didn’t like our bot. And thus reported it ..."

Yes, oddly enough if you threaten people's income streams they will tend to react badly, and quickly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com