‘Public Editor’ Gives People the Solution Government and Big Tech Haven’t
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact
Nick Adams, Goodly Labs, 510-470-5692, nick@goodlylabs.org
You Can Solve Misinformation Right Now
CALIFORNIA, September 1, 2020 /PRNewswire
Misinformation is a global problem that can divide cultures and families. And now, paired with a pandemic, it is killing people. Government and big tech companies have done little to solve it. But, today a team of scientists from the nonprofit Goodly Labs and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) are launching a collective intelligence project enlisting active citizens in an effort to systematically identify and label over 40 types of misleading content and flawed reasoning within the most shared news articles on the Internet.
The Public Editor system partitions news stories into smaller passages and distributes them to Internet-based volunteers who (after training) independently assess the credibility of each passage in terms of its language, evidence, probabilistic reasoning, and logic. When the volunteers have completed their quick tasks (each requiring 5 to 15 minutes), Public Editor merges their results, and labels each article to show where volunteers found specific errors and how these affect the article’s overall credibility. Each article includes labels, a visualization, and a credibility score, providing frictionless critical-thinking training to newsreaders learning how to identify misleading or poorly reasoned content. Public Editor can evaluate hundreds of the most-popular articles each day, sharing results on their website within a half-hour of publication.
In development since 2015, and with seed support from Schmidt Futures, Public Editor offers a new path forward for societies trying to avoid government censorship without forcing big tech companies’ to become – in the words of Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg – “arbiters of truth.” With the Public Editor system, active citizens will be learning to judge content for themselves through a careful and transparent collective process that doesn’t require censoring content or canceling voices.
Public Editor’s Co-Director, Nobel Laureate Saul Perlmutter, is excited that the team will be evaluating the 1000 most-shared articles by the end of the year: “There are multiple crises right now motivating people to join us. People need a way to recognize reasoning errors while reading them. And they need a way to easily share that corrective information with others.” Dr. Nick Adams, the sociologist and data scientist who's led the development of Public Editor, says the project is ready for this moment. “We’re excited to provide people with a principled and systematic way to identify nuanced misinformation very quickly without depending on ‘black-box’ algorithms. This is what we see as the future of an effective society: people coming together to tackle problems directly without politics.”
With misinformation fueling the spread of Covid-19, Public Editor’s launch is especially timely. The volunteer group is expected to grow quickly to address the crisis, and is currently accepting volunteers and partnerships with individuals and organizations across the political spectrum.
Volunteers and other interested parties can obtain more information and try Public Editor tasks at https://publiceditor.io, or contact Nick Adams at the media contact above.
Goodly Labs is a non-profit innovation facility leading research and technology projects for the public benefit. Its mission is to equip individuals with the tools they need to find common ground and take responsibility for building a better society.
The Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) is a central hub of data-intensive research, open source software, and data science training programs at the University of California, Berkeley, facilitating collaboration across the data science community, from the life, social, and physical sciences to computer science, statistics, and applied mathematics.