Re: Snopes & Webby

Sandro wrote:

> IMHO it's generally best (and is W3C practice) to wait until you have
> multiple business who all need the standard,

Is it the intent of the W3C to serve only the interests of incumbent
providers who have decided there is a business interest in achieving
interoperability? Is there no room for the voice of the user in specifying
what should exist?

Does the W3C oppose innovation, or the broadened use of its own standards,
unless that innovation comes from incumbent providers or is seen by those
incumbents as serving their business interests?  If the clarification of
standards might encourage new or innovative market entrants, is the W3C
opposed to such clarification? (Note: My personal belief is that a more
full definition of common methods in this space will enable the creation of
many new and innovative services and enterprises.)

It seems to me that the business interests of many of those incumbents who
now have significant control over public discourse would be diminished by
progress on standardizing the nexus between credibility signals, verifiable
credentials, and annotation. This is because that particular combination of
methods will tend to empower the providers of services other than those
currently controlled by the incumbents. For instance, if it were possible
to use an in-browser annotation client to make or view annotations and
credibility signals that were not hosted by an incumbent, the incumbent's
control of the user experience and of the information space would be
reduced. Some incumbents would see such a weakening of control as a threat
to their business interests. Thus, it seems that some incumbents may be
motivated to resist or block efforts to define interoperability efforts in
this area, whether or not the interests of users would be served by such
interoperability. Will the W3C be a party to or facilitate such blocking of
users' interests?

The utility of the existing Credibility Signals document appears to be
severely limited since the absence of a means to search for, discover, or
challenge such signals means that they are primarily useful for making
self-assertions embedded within the resources whose credibility they
signal. Clearly, resource providers will only be interested in
self-publishing signals which serve their own interests. If I have no
standard method for asking a third-party aggregator: "What signals exist
for this resource?," of what utility are credibility signals? As defined,
the signals seem to be little more than a means for resource providers to
puff-up their own credibility. (Is this why none of the existing signals
allow one to challenge, rather than support, credibility?)  I suggest that
the adoption of Credibility Signals would be immensely accelerated if there
was a standard mechanism to discover relevant signals. I also suggest that
defining the mechanism, even in advance of actual implementations, would
tend to motivate implementations.

The issue of the credibility of statements, primarily made using technical
means defined by the W3C (HTML, etc.), has risen to be among the most
prominent issues of our time. It is clear from this that the W3C has
failed, in an important way, to serve the interests of society, if not the
business interests of incumbent providers. It is time, I think, for the W3C
and others to take the initiative in advocating for mechanisms that might
reduce the apparent harm that has and is being caused by use of existing
standards.

I am aware that it is often unwise to advance specs to a final or
"standard" status until there are, in fact, a useful number of
implementations. However, in the many decades I've been in this business,
I've also seen that beginning the work of open specification often
motivates and inspires implementations. (Sometimes, if you build it, they
*will* come...) Thus, an effort will often begin as one which is primarily
aspirational, but evolve into one which is focused on back-and-forth
between actual implementers. Given our very strong need to advance the
state of affairs in this area, I think it reasonable to start an
aspirational effort now, in the hope that implementations will follow
later. If implementations don't follow, then I can see that abandoning the
effort might eventually be the right thing to do. Nonetheless, as an
industry, or community of folk, I think we owe it to our societies to give
this a try, whether or not the incumbents participate in the effort.

I believe that we should address at least these issues:

   - Define signals that challenge or deny credibility (i.e. negative
   signals)
   - Provide a means to make third-party statements about existing
   credibility signals or issuers of such signals (i.e. "Meta-signals (?)"
   that support, challenge, offer proof, provide context, etc. for existing
   signals.)
   - Provide a means to discover the existence of credibility signals which
   exist outside the context of the resources they describe or signals that
   have been aggregated into a collection (i.e. search)
   - Define how credibility signals should be provided as
   Verifiable Credentials.
   - Define how credibility signals should be annotated.
   - Define how alternative providers of credibility discovery services
   (i.e. search and annotation) may federate among themselves.

For what little it may be worth, if these things are defined, I commit to
implementing them.

bob wyman


On Sun, Aug 15, 2021 at 3:15 PM Sandro Hawke <sandro@hawke.org> wrote:

> A few points.
>
> *1. *Snopes COO Vinny Green is a member of this group who has contributed
> at several meetings over the years. The NY Times quotes Vinny as saying "As
> you can imagine, our staff are gutted and appalled by this".
>
> *2. *As an observer of new media (and news media), I've always disliked
> this practice of publishing news stories that are simply rewrites of other
> news stories. Ironically, Owen, you linked to the Fox News rewrite of the
> original BuzzFeed report. At least Fox linked to BuzzFeed. I found the
> BuzzFeed report vastly more informative and didn't notice anything added by
> Fox except that claim that Snopes is "liberal".
>
> As the BuzzFeed article explains:
>
> "That was his big SEO/speed secret," said Binkowski, whom Snopes fired without
> explanation
> <https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2018/snopes-fired-its-managing-editor-%C2%97-and-she-doesnt-know-why/>
> in 2018 (she currently manages the fact-checking site Truth or Fiction
> <https://www.truthorfiction.com/about/>). “He would instruct us to copy
> text from other sites, post them verbatim so that it looked like we were
> fast and could scoop up traffic, and then change the story in real time. I
> hated it and wouldn't tell any of the staff to do it, but he did it all the
> time.”
>
>
> I know we've discussed a signal about whether a news report is original
> reporting or not, and the dangers of it looking like hundreds of outlets
> are investigating a matter, when they're really all just copying one
> article.
>
> *3.* Every signal is imperfect. Of course winning a Webby is no guarantee
> of perfect accuracy*.* But it's better than nothing, right? And winning a
> Webby (or two Webbys) 15 years ago (as in this case) is probably a weaker
> signal than winning it last year.
>
> So using the template in Reviewed Signals: Any Award
> <https://credweb.org/reviewed-signals-20200224/#any-award> we have:
>
> The website with main page URL [ https://www.snopes.com/ ] was honored as
> part of an awards process for the year [ 2006 ] for the prize with main
> page URL [ https://www.webbyawards.com/ ]
>
> and perhaps we could add:
>
> The website with main page URL [ https://www.snopes.com/ ] committed one
> or more major lapses in journalistic integrity in the year [ 2015 ].
> (repeat for each year)
>
> That could be further refined.  BuzzFeed argues Mikkelson's use of a
> pseudonym was perhaps a greater breach than the plagiarism.  Those might be
> split out into separate signals. One could also link to the specific
> failure or the reporting about the failure.
>
> Owen, you or your software could weight this signal higher than the awards
> one.  Of course, you could also give the awards signal zero weight, but I
> expect that would often leave you to rely on even lower quality signals.
>
> For the next version of Reviewed Signals, we could perhaps add some
> discussion that explains this more, although I think the text currently
> there is pretty good. The reason this is a good signal is that it's quite
> hard to game. You can't just make 100 news outlet websites that have won
> reputable awards. If you throw out this signal, what are you going to use
> in its place?
>
> *4*. Bob, yes, the W3C Annotation protocol is a serious contender for a
> way to share signal data, but as I understand standards work, it's
> essential to have the people who will be adopting the standard at the table
> when the standard is being set, or at least in active dialog with the folks
> setting the standard.  It's rare for a standard to ever success without
> that.
>
> In the previous thread about trust.txt there was disagreement about
> whether to apply existing off-the-shelf standards or create something
> tailored to the community of potential adapters. This is a hard trade-off
> to make, but in the end it needs to be made in a way that gets the standard
> adopted if the work is to be useful.
>
> The same issue arises with general signal work. We could say, "use the W3C
> annotation protocol" and fill in the details about exactly how.  But would
> anyone do it?  Would it actually be fit for purpose?
>
> IMHO it's generally best (and is W3C practice) to wait until you have
> multiple business who all need the standard, *then *convene the meetings
> to make sure it's good enough for nearly all of them to agree to use it.
> That's what I thought we had when we started this group, but they didn't
> stick around.
>
> Part of the reason I don't think CredWeb is ready to move forward is
> because we don't have any vendors clamoring to move forward with a
> Credibility Signals system. For a full standards Working Group at W3C we'd
> need about 20 vendors (or other W3C members supporting the work).  In a
> community group, we can do the work without first reaching that bar, but
> operating with zero strikes me as a plan unlikely to succeed.
>
>      -- Sandro
>
> On 8/14/21 11:34 AM, Bob Wyman wrote:
>
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2021 at 9:48 PM Owen Ambur <Owen.Ambur@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> While I do recognize the relevance of awards to tribal vanity and
>> solidarity, this evidence reinforces my bias against considering them to
>> be a credible indicator of credibility:
>>
>
> While plagiarism is a serious failing, I'm not sure that it is correct to
> suggest that plagiarized content is any more or less credible than original
> content. I assume that Snopes received its Webby award because of a general
> perception that its content, however sourced, was useful in determining the
> truthfulness of statements. If Snopes were to post a plagiarised
> confirmation of its own plagiarism, that might provide further evidence of
> their unacceptable behavior, but it would also strengthen their position as
> a site that publishes truthful evaluations of statements, memes, etc. Even
> if all of Snopes' content was plagiarized, their credibility would depend
> on their skill in choosing what to plagiarize.
>
> The important thing about credibility signals is to be aware not only of
> what they indicate but what they do not indicate. Publishing credible
> content does not imply that content is published either honestly or
> legally. Credibility should be understood to be context specific; limited
> to specific purposes and for particular periods of time, etc.
>
> Nonetheless, users of Snopes might wish to know of Snopes' history of poor
> content sourcing practices. (Those issuing awards for ethical conduct might
> be particularly interested...) This confirms for me the belief that we need
> a mechanism that allows one to associate third-person, discoverable
> comments or annotations to a credibility signal. It should be possible, on
> finding a signal of Snopes' credibility, to create a new signal which says,
> in essence: "While they may have once won an award for one thing, they are,
> or have been, plagiarists." If credibility signals were provided as
> identifiable elements, for instance via Verificable Credentials that record
> awards, it should be possible to use the W3C Annotation protocol to
> associate comments or qualifying statements with the identifiers of the
> Verificable Credential.
>
> Snopes won the Webby. That fact can't be changed, however, it would be
> useful if one could later make the statement "The winner of this award has
> been found to have plagiarized content." Doing this would allow others to
> better understand the meaning of, and the limitations of, Snopes' Webby
> award.
>
> Is there any reason why the W3C Annotation protocol would not be a
> reasonable mechanism for publishing signals about signals (meta-signals)?
> Is there a better mechanism for publishing discoverable, third-party
> statements about credibility signals?
>
> bob wyman
>
>
>