[HN Gopher] Machine-Learning media bias
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Machine-Learning media bias
Author : Hard_Space
Score : 76 points
Date : 2021-09-14 09:42 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.unite.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.unite.ai)
| bluepoint wrote:
| It is not the machine learning that has media bias, it is the
| media bias measured by machine learning. Article's title:
|
| MIT: Measuring Media Bias in Major News Outlets With Machine
| Learning
| chris_f wrote:
| This is really an analysis of the use of biased language in news
| articles, which is interesting but only one dimension of
| potential bias.
|
| It is very possible to use non "charged" language, but still
| report a topic with a strong bias. For example, Slate is left
| leaning by most measures, but the below landscape chart from the
| study has them dead center. Maybe they are better at using
| neutral terms?
|
| https://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/phrasebias.jpg
| li2uR3ce wrote:
| > dead center
|
| That's a bias that gets tugged around by the bias of extremes
| rather than the sensible. Sorry, I hate that term because it is
| often used to imply that you can average a wrong and a right
| and get something more correct. Often enough, one side[1] is
| decently close to right on an issue and the other is pretty
| much wrong. Picking the center of that isn't more right.
|
| Often the quest for "neutrality" is bunk. In flat-world vs
| round-world, the flat-world is not with equal standing but the
| "neutral" seeking would often present as if the flat-world
| idiots have a case. While issues may have some subjectivity, we
| should not constantly pretend that there's an even
| distribution.
|
| A neutral language meter can't ever hope to be right. It's not
| an analysis of what's well supported. Rather it's an analysis
| of assertiveness. I'm very assertive about the world being
| fucking round. I'm a red flag for such a bias meters.
|
| Sorry if I'm going off but--I'll just go a head and say it--
| that term triggers the fuck out of me for getting undeserved
| validity.
|
| [1] On a per issue basis. This is not to imply that one side is
| more consistently correct across issues.
| iNic wrote:
| Can someone explain this chart to me? What does the position on
| the chart indicate? Slate is left leaning, but it is correctly
| marked in blue.
|
| EDIT: from the paper "Our method locates newspapers into this
| two-dimensional media bias landscape based only on how
| frequently they use certain discriminative phrases, with no
| human input regarding what constitutes bias. The colors and
| sizes of the dots were predetermined by external assessments
| and thus in no way influenced by our data. The positions of the
| dots thus suggest that the two dimensions can be interpreted as
| the traditional left-right bias axis and establishment bias,
| respectively"
| IAmEveryone wrote:
| It's a projection of the NLP's vectors into 2D space.
| Remember the illustrations for the king - man = queen example
| for word embedding? They also often used a 2D space. You can
| sometimes, but rarely Intuit a sense for these dimensions,
| but they don't come with any natural definition or unit.
| mypastself wrote:
| I still don't get it. Is the chart supposed to show axes in
| addition to the left/right and pro-establishment/critical,
| currently represented by colors and sizes? How do the "lack
| of human input" and "external assessments" fit into the
| explanation?
| oefrha wrote:
| The paper itself without the summarizer's bias:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.00024
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > _" The work centers on the way topics are addressed with
| particular phrasing, such as undocumented immigrant | illegal
| Immigrant, fetus | unborn baby, demonstrators | anarchists."_
|
| This to me is phrenology 2.0 or something. Not only does this
| have absurd explicit shortfalls, like the fact that words like
| 'anarchist' can be derogatory or sympathetic purely depending on
| context on opposite sides of the spectrum, this completely
| ignores any nuance, sarcasm, or anything else that really reveals
| bias beyond the obvious.
|
| I'd suggest sampling a thousand random people, having them rate
| everything on a spectrum and average it out, or consulting the
| title of the publication. Saves you the compute. We don't need ML
| to determine that the _American Conservative_ , is surprisingly
| enough a right-wing publication
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Phrenology is a fake science finding patterns where none exist.
| But human language and political thinking are deeply
| intertwined. You're right that you don't need ML to know a
| certain conservative outlet is right wing, but automated
| analysis can help show us the full spectrum of coverage for a
| given issue, and help show the more open minded consumers how
| their particular media compares to others. There's a lot we can
| learn by studying how people use language.
| qsort wrote:
| The point is that language is not enough. I'm a fierce critic
| of how contemporary media seems to be moving away from NPOV
| as a default, but objectivity requires, at a minimum, an
| attempt to properly weigh and prioritize information. Which
| is deeply contextual and even time-sensitive.
|
| The usual example is an hypothetical Wikipedia page starting
| with the sentence "Adolph Hitler was a soldier, a painter and
| a statesman". It's not wrong, but I wouldn't say it's a good
| summary either.
| IAmEveryone wrote:
| But.... They picked up some signal, and the examples they
| give are both correlated with each other, and with our
| intuition? So what "is" that signal, and if it correlates
| well with the left-right dimension, what does it matter if
| it's not exactly the same, or not causal in any direction?
|
| All I can think of is that using this data to judge biases
| could be defeated by a simple search-and-replace if anyone
| wanted to. But I doubt publishers cate enough about obscure
| papers calling them conservative to change their language.
| (If they do stop calling all foreigners "illegal aliens",
| that's would actually be quite the feat for a lowly
| department of semantics)
| Barrin92 wrote:
| It can be defeated by engaging in sarcasm. It can be
| defeated by using right-wing language to construct a left
| wing argument (one of the most straight-forward ways to
| persuade someone is to speak their language), one can
| twist an argument entirely by minor adjustments to
| speech.
|
| The issue here is a simple one, that in _communication_ ,
| language cannot be divorced from context. Laughing at a
| birthday party means you're having fun. Laughing at a
| funeral means you're distressed. Laughing itself has no
| meaning, and words themselves have no meaning. You don't
| 'pick up' signals, you _interpret something as a signal_
| within a frame of reference.
|
| This methodology is right in every case where it is
| trivial, and thus unnecessary, it is likely wrong in
| every case where it matters. And that is an actively bad
| combination.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| > this completely ignores any nuance, sarcasm, or anything else
| that really reveals bias beyond the obvious.
|
| This problem is mentioned several times in the article, and
| several ways it manifests itself is discussed.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| but no real solution is offered to rectify it, and if you
| have such glaring problems it basically renders the thing
| useless in any scientific sense.
|
| I'm focusing on it because of the implication spelled out at
| the end:
|
| _" Nonetheless, the MIT study seems to be the largest of its
| type to date, and could form the framework for future
| classification systems, and even secondary technologies such
| as browser plug-ins that might alert casual readers to the
| political color of the publication they are currently
| reading._"
|
| What's happening in that study is not science but alchemy, a
| gigantic problem in the field. Entire sectors are now
| infested with this stuff, see 'affective computing' for
| another offender.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > that might alert casual readers to the political color of
| the publication they are currently reading
|
| So many false positives with ESL writers.
| visarga wrote:
| It's experimental, you just use it or not depending on its
| usefulness.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Yes, and it isn't alchemy, since no gold is created.
|
| It is tautology.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| The word anarchist is a bad example but for undocumented
| immigrant vs illegal immigrant or fetus vs unborn baby, it's
| utterly clear what the connotations are.
| parakalan wrote:
| https://github.com/rpryzant/neutralizing-bias - This is a similar
| or even better solution than phrase matching.
| mellosouls wrote:
| I don't know if the article title is too long or has changed but
| its:
|
| _MIT: Measuring Media Bias in Major News Outlets With Machine
| Learning_
|
| which is rather more useful than the existing one - I thought it
| was about bias in some way displayed via machine learning as in
| previous problematic cases.
| samuelizdat wrote:
| I'd be more interested in calculating bias based on what they DO
| or DON'T report entirely. It's one thing to report on something
| with bias, it is more telling to note what they selectively
| ignore.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| Or report by saying only half the truth, without showing the
| other side's story at all. It makes it so much easier to adapt
| the language to sound neutral and educated. I think this is a
| big part of why the US is so divided right now, you get mostly
| half truths and no coherent view from the other side that it
| makes you think "the others" are completely insane.
| hwers wrote:
| It would be challenging to define "articles that a news
| organization _should_ cover but isn 't" though. Like there's
| trillions of things that happen every day, where's the lower
| bound on "news worthy" and how do you not bias that lower bound
| to ignore things that some other party would consider
| significant?
| dqpb wrote:
| Really? You just take the set of stories across N news
| outlets and then compare to the set of stories in each one
| outlet.
| hwers wrote:
| Sure. It's just that if the goal really is to identify
| which stories aren't covered by news then if you only look
| at what news covers to determine that, you'll miss some of
| the bigger 'coordinated silences'. Weinstein's comment
| about how weird it is that no journalist ever brings up
| some really obvious questions about Epstein comes to mind.
| Or how little press there was about his brothers telomere
| story. From one perspective the reason for the silence is
| because it's not worth covering by the news, but from
| another perspective it's biased silence.
| dahfizz wrote:
| You could do it in relation to other news outlets. That won't
| give you absolute bias, but you could say something like "CNN
| is much less likely to report about X topics than Fox." It
| would be interesting as well to add in other factors - i.e.
| how often do certain outlets report about the wars in the
| middle east when the president is republican vs democrat?
| sodality2 wrote:
| How often certain outlets report about the wars in the
| middle east fluctuates massively on the actual wars,
| though.
| dahfizz wrote:
| But you would still expect them to fluctuate together.
| How the different news agencies ramp up and down coverage
| in response to the same events is what's interesting.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I would go farther and make it relative to clusters of
| people on, say, Twitter. If an outlet is concerned with a
| lot of things that the progressive cluster of Twitter users
| is talking about (more so than many other outlets), that's
| a strong indicator that the media outlet (and other outlets
| in its media cluster) is also progressive.
| hwers wrote:
| I'll just throw out a comment (even though this is mostly
| a thought experiment) that doing any type of twitter
| analysis is either nearly impossible (in the scraping
| case) or prohibitively expensive (e.g. using their API).
| They've really shut off access to third parties in the
| last few years. (Just thought I'd mention it since the
| parent post continues this pre-2015-ish idea that still
| floats around that using twitter for projects could be a
| thing.)
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Fair enough, yes, Twitter was intended to be an example
| of a mine-able medium where people express political
| opinions, but to your point mining Twitter data may be
| more difficult than I imagined.
| [deleted]
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Yes. There are research dollars for studies to "use AI to do a
| meaningless study on topics that are done better in other
| ways." Hence professors obligingly churn them out and
| journalists report them.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| What's even funnier is, once you speak two languages, to
| compare coverage of the same news on the same network in two
| different languages (so aimed at different demographics).
| dolphinhats wrote:
| I hate how unlabeled these graphs are.
|
| EDIT: I am glad to see the summary here acknowledges and points
| out that it may have been intentional to obscure the labeling of
| these graphs as a method to avoid inflaming the media. If that is
| the case I think that's a bit short sighted on the part of the
| authors of the paper but it makes sense.
| BossHogg wrote:
| Interesting that this summary states "[t]he paper comes from
| Prof. Max Tegmark at MIT's Department of Physics" and later
| refers to "the author." There are in fact two authors and the
| lead author (i.e. the one who most likely did the bulk of
| research and writing) is Samantha D'Alonzo. Is this bias from
| unite.ai?
| Hard_Space wrote:
| > Is this bias from unite.ai?
|
| No, it's a goof due to time pressure. It's been corrected.
| uncletaco wrote:
| I was surprised to read his name. Didn't know he did anything
| besides push his weird philosophies.
| hwers wrote:
| I just feel like all this is going to end up as a deeply layered
| proxy for pushing your political narrative (hidden behind a "AI
| is math therefore it's objective" veil), and I just don't feel
| like being part of the deception.
| beckman466 wrote:
| What was the original title of this thread? It just changed when
| I refreshed.
| 50kIters wrote:
| > What was the original title of this thread? It just changed
| when I refreshed.
|
| Same as the article link.
| xibalba wrote:
| It is telling that the euphemism "undocumented immigrant" is
| considered less polar than the factually descriptive "illegal
| immigrant". "Undocumented" suggests ambiguous legality, which is
| plainly false in the vast majority of cases to which the phrase
| refers.
|
| It is also interesting that there is no neutral term for this
| topic. Actually, now I'm using euphemisms. It's not interesting,
| it's disheartening.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| illegal alien is the neutral and legal term. it's been
| politicized like most words that side disagrees with. it all
| turns into a semantics and racial game to distract from the
| actual issues.
| allemagne wrote:
| You seem to imply that "undocumented immigrant" isn't actually
| less factually descriptive or a euphemism at all, but a term
| that refers to a slightly broader category than "illegal
| immigrant."
|
| I don't know if that's a correct categorization, but given that
| framing the relevant differences are not at all about one
| "descriptive" term and one "euphemistic" one.
| drooby wrote:
| My understanding.. it is more grammatically correct to say
| that:
|
| A person can be undocumented.
|
| However, a person cannot be illegal - they can only commit
| illegal acts. I.e illegal immigration.
|
| Language is flexible though and I understand what people mean
| with the term. I believe those on the left take issue with
| calling people illegal, out of fear of promoting xenophobia.
| xibalba wrote:
| In a descendant comment to this, you wrote:
|
| > if we used more compassionate language to refer to these
| people
|
| Which implies a greater interest in the politics of the
| language vs. semantic precision/grammatical precision.
|
| The "illegal" in the phrase "illegal immigrant" refers to
| their illegal immigration, not to the legality of their
| person-hood, as your comment would imply. "Undocumented" is
| an intentional dodge of the legality of the immigration
| action undertaken by the person (aka their immigration
| status). The more factual phrase has been made controversial
| by partisans.
|
| And btw, cards on the table, I support an expanded, rational
| immigration policy that recognizes the critically important
| role immigrants play in the U.S. economy and, more generally,
| society. And one that encourages legality and punishes
| illegality.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| no one is calling anyone "illegal". they are calling them an
| illegal alien, it's a legal term in our immigration laws
| referring to a non resident who is staying here illegally,
| not by legal means.
|
| getting into the semantics is ridiculous in this situation.
| 1/3 girls let over that border are raped according to doctors
| without borders. every person walking over is part of the
| cartels human trafficking ring, but yeah let's worry about
| what we called it in our legal books.
|
| xenophobia is not the moral issue here, it's fucking human
| trafficking.
| akiselev wrote:
| _> every person walking over is part of the cartels human
| trafficking ring_
|
| _> xenophobia is not the moral issue here_
| hunterb123 wrote:
| In other words, the perilous journey and initial
| exploitation by the cartels are the issue, not some
| semantics debate about the legal term "illegal aliens"
| and whether people invoke it because some alleged
| "xenophobia".
|
| Unless you were selectively quoting parts of my sentences
| for another reason. You didn't exactly make a rebuttal.
| drooby wrote:
| I'm sorry I triggered you. People actually do care about
| the meaning behind words. That's why we are talking about
| it. Words shape understanding, understanding shapes
| actions, and actions have consequences. Perhaps if we used
| more compassionate language to refer to these people it
| would support our efforts to prevent this violence you talk
| about.
|
| Also, as of this year the Biden administration has asked
| ICE, CBP to stop using the term "illegal alien".
| hunterb123 wrote:
| there's a time and place to care about words, mind you
| these are legal words baked into our immigration laws.
|
| noone will believe you care if you squabble over what to
| call someone while letting them be trafficked.
|
| illegal alien is not offensive, stop trying to make a
| false debate so you don't have to discuss the real issue,
| the cartels.
|
| Biden can ask ICE and CBP to use whatever words he wants,
| like that does something, they're just following the laws
| he helped write.
|
| maybe he should have updated the immigration laws in his
| half a century as a senator.
| drooby wrote:
| Dude... do you know where we are? We are in a comment
| thread discussing the usage of words in media bias... is
| this not the time and place? This isn't a thread about
| the cartels. Talk about false debate.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Dude... follow the chain. This was about whether or not
| illegal immigration has a neutral term, it does, illegal
| alien, the legal term. I did dive into the issue itself,
| but it doesn't make it a false debate, unlike the
| semantics debate.
|
| I was pointing out how bias in the media in this topic
| always turns to a word debate not a debate on the issue.
|
| Keep in mind YOU brought up xenophobia and not the
| cartels. You continued the semantics debate, but not the
| root issue.
| drooby wrote:
| Well I disagree. I don't think there is any such thing as
| a neutral term in politics. No one has an objective
| understanding of some combination of words. Just because
| the term does not illicit emotions _in you_ , does not
| mean it doesn't in other people. Like I said, Biden has
| already recommended the term "illegal alien" be changed -
| thus highlighting its politicization.
|
| And on your second point I take issue with the premise.
| Like I said earlier, I think our understanding of words
| have consequences, debating their meaning _is_ debating
| the issue. However, is it the most fruitful and
| meaningful debate? Perhaps not.. but again, we are in a
| comment section about word usage in media bias - so
| that's why I'm focusing on it.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| My point is the same. You, like Biden, want to argue
| semantics, which word to swap out that is "less
| offensive" but says the same thing.
|
| Even if the word isn't offensive, and you have no idea
| how many find it as such, if any. That's the priority.
|
| All pointless to solve the actual issue, but makes a
| great show and distracts people.
|
| Unlike Biden, you had no power to change the immigration
| laws, so I don't hold anything against you.
|
| But yes, this is about media bias and word usage. Let's
| just chalk semantic debates up as a tool used in that
| bias.
| drooby wrote:
| It's honestly really strange how triggered you are.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| You've thrown that "insult" again at me while advocating
| changing a legal term because you think it triggers
| people. Strange.
| drooby wrote:
| Your edits have clarified your intent. I thought you were
| reaching for ad hominem or something by making
| unsubstantiated claims about my beliefs. "You like
| Biden", vs, "You, like Biden". Regardless though, you're
| still making unsubstantiated claims about my beliefs... I
| didn't advocate for changing legal terms.. I was only
| explaining why "those on the left" feel uncomfortable
| with the term. My first comment was geared more towards
| an educational tone rather than a prescriptive tone. I
| recommend reading it again. I didn't edit any of my
| posts. See, this is why I think language is important.
| Gonna have to call it here though. Good chat.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| I believe you're looking too deep into my grammatical
| edits. I simply missed a comma.
|
| You're the one arguing about replacing legal terms and
| xenophobia while gloating that I may be "triggered" by
| what you're saying.
|
| Complete nonsense wrapped up in words, while ignoring the
| real world issues. Read up on the border, ease up on the
| thesaurus. Cheers.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| One of these terms can get you votes from naturalized citizens
| of certain communities. The other one won't.
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