'Truth Goggles' a Lie Detector For the Internet | LinkNotes. MIT boffin's 'truth goggles' probe print and pols. High performance access to file storage A student at MIT’s Media Lab is developing a browser plug-in that can check the accuracy of information posted online, and may use it to monitor political speeches for untruths. For his master’s thesis, Dan Schultz – who was recently named a 2011 Knight-Mozilla Fellow – came up with the idea for “truth goggles” while talking to a fact checker at Truthsquad, who was explaining that the principle problem with fact checking was getting people access to the skinny.
Schultz then came up with the idea as a way to correct incorrect information, but more importantly to get people to think critically about what they are reading. “Even fact checkers aren’t perfect - who watches the fact checker, after all – and the problem will continue if people stop looking for the truth,” Schultz explained to The Register. “This software puts the onus on users and makes it as easy as possible to find corroborating facts. Introducing Truth Goggles. I’m working on a magical button. This button, when pressed, will tell you (an average person who just wants to know what is happening in this crazy world) what is true and what is false on the web site you are viewing. I have a fair amount of the platform finished already and you can check it out here. Be warned: Right now it only knows one fact.
I’m workin’ on it! Anyway, I wanted to explain a bit about how this all works, which will in turn help me organize my thoughts on what the next steps are going to be. A Claim is a general statement that is intended to be factual but, in reality, could use a bit of fact-checking by a third party (i.e. it is not trivially true).
A Snippet is an instance of a claim — it is the place where a claim is referenced, for example, a newspaper article or a tweet. A Verdict is the truth of a claim — this is determined by fact checking organizations who have spent a lot of time looking at the big picture and coming to a logical conclusion. Creating snippets. Crit Day Presentation (Truth Goggles) True Or False? Automatic Fact-Checking Coming To The Web – Complications Follow. The social layer has settled on the web like a dusting of multicolored snowflakes, gracing every story with a little menagerie of sharing counts and buttons.
Once basic standards of content publishing were established, basic standards of sharing had to be as well, the internet being as it is a medium of information transmission. First you get the content, then you move it around. We’re still working on the moving around part. Another layering we’ve seen is the layering of the internet onto the real world. Yet another combination is emerging: the layering of reference and context onto the information you read. Some things like this already exist. Yet who will deny that a plug-in or service that takes that statement and tells you the degree to which it can be considered true would be immensely useful and hugely popular?
Schultz’s script, which he calls “Truth Goggles,” (not Googles, as I originally wrote) is still in a very early state. Or do you?