Battling fake news
http://www.computerworld.in/feature/can-algorithms-really-tackle-fake-news-fiasco
This article discusses how the two digital behemoths, Facebook and Google, are tackling issue of fake news on their sites. Fake news has become an ever-growing issue since the explosion of Facebook as the dominant social media platform. The reasons for the propagation of fake news is clear–people see an interesting issue/article, and it looks credible enough, and they share that amongst their close acquaintances. This repeats itself, and the original source, which is not factual at all, has become a “truth” to some people. Now, with this issue in mind, Facebook and Google, the two dominant sources of online information, are using algorithms to minimize the propagation of fake news.
The interesting fact is that PageRank algorithm that we learned in class can be applied to battling fake news. Unlike the basic 8~10 node graphs we drew and analyzed in class, Google utilizes PageRank amongst the billions of sites on the World Wide Web. Furthermore, as the news article says, Google applies this PageRank algorithm across multiple platforms, so it becomes easier to sort out fake news from real news. Using our basic understanding of how PageRank works, we can assume that Google has a method of identifying which hubs point to fake new authorities, and use that knowledge accordingly to sort out fake news.
The important takeaway from this article is that while humans can probably do the best job of identifying fake news, this is impossible to do for sites like Facebook and Google, where thousands of terabytes of data is being processed every second. Therefore, algorithms need to do the job of doing this, and one of the ways in which algorithms can identify fake news is using the PageRank algorithm.