Here's the letter, as originally posted on Facebook:

Nate,

I overheard your phone conversation with Mike last night about your plans to come out to me. The only thing I need you to plan is to bring home OJ and bread after class. We are out, like you now. I've known you were gay since you were six, I've loved you since you were born. -

Dad

P.S. Your mom and I think you and Mike make a cute couple.

It's a great story -- assuming it's true.

Is it?

Who the hell knows.

Popularity vs. Truth

Originally published to Facebook by FCKH8.com last last week, the letter quickly went viral. It first came to my attention when it popped up in my Facebook feed and it's been just about everywhere else since: Mashable, Gawker, the New York Daily News and many more.

Everyone has it, but no one seems to be doing any real digging to find out who "Dad" is and whether "Nate" is a real person.

To be fair, Gawker made a half-hearted effort and came up with this:

The photo was sent in to FCKH8 by Nate himself. FCKH8 describes Nate as "a teen... who is a fan of our on Facebook," but declined to provide additional info.  This means we're left with a letter, sent via email to an activist site by an unknown source, and we have no way of knowing whether or not any of it is true - but we pass it along anyway because it makes us smile.

That's fine on an individual level, I guess. I see at least five bullshit stories a week pass through my Facebook feed, but they seem to make my Grandma happy so I try to look the other way.

The Media's Responsibility?

But I expect media outlets to fill a role not required of my Facebook friends: Due diligence in reporting.

Apparently, though, all bets are off once something goes viral. No matter how often - or how recently - a site has been fooled by similar stories. For example, here's the New York Daily News writing about a pig and a goat:

A real-life Babe saved the day for one distressed goat who couldn’t hoof it in the water.

Except it was all faked:

But prankster Nathan Fielder, decided to divulge that he staged the rescue just in time for the Thursday premiere of his new Comedy Central show "Nathan For You."

Bringing Out Our Best - And Our Worst

Getting back to Super Dad, we don't know whether or not Nate is a fictional construct, dreamed-up to drive support for LGBT causes. But this letter has all the hallmarks of feel-good fiction:

• Why would Nate have trouble coming out to a Dad who appears to be the greatest Dad in the history of Dads?
• Why is Nate talking so loudly on the phone about it?
• Why does Dad write a letter rather than talk to his son?
• Why hasn't anyone spoken to Nate on the record?
• How long did this family go without OJ and bread in service of the punch line?

There may be valid answers to these questions, but that doesn't mean the questions shouldn't be asked.

The fact that we desperately want stories like this to be true might speak to the best of us, but the parallel fact that the story was published over and over again with no apparent fact-checking speaks to the worst media excesses. If Dad's letter turns out to have been faked, the media's failure to vet FCKH8's sources could deal a serious blow to the LGBT causes the letter seems meant to bolster. And the sites that published the story will bear some responsibility for that.

Top image courtesy of Shutterstock.

This week, The Washington Post debuted a news app that can fact check speeches, virtually in real time. It's called Truth Teller, and for countless journalists and citizens looking to determine the accuracy and legitimacy of political statements, it's a step towards toward a brighter, more truthful future. 

Cory Haik, The Post's executive producer for digital news describes the app as a "speech-to-text technology to search a database of facts and fact checks. We are effectively taking in video, converting the audio to text (the rough transcript below the video), matching that text to our database, and then displaying, in real time, what’s true and what’s false."  

Released in partnership with the Knight Foundation Prototype Fund, and still in prototype stage, the app is currently focusing on the looming debate over tax reform. But Haik thinks it can one day be applied to streaming video, or even someone "holding up a phone to record a politician in the middle of a field in Iowa."

Yuri Victor, The Post's UX (user experience) Director, and the project lead in design, says the goal is to "hold politicians accountable and squash mistruths from spreading... to push the discussion forward on what's possible with real-time fact checking."

Here's a video of how the app works: 

Washington Post Truth Teller from The Washington Post on Vimeo.

The app works by transcribing videos with Microsoft Audio Video Indexing Service (MAVIS), which uses speech recognition technology that converts audio signals into words. Extracts of audio and video are then saved as a transcript, and the facts in that document are scrutinized for errors. To make it easy to search, the program focuses on patterns instead of specific phrases. This program is called a fuzzy string search algorithm. 

Not Replacing Humans

In today's cash strapped journalism environment, fact checkers have largely gone the way of the dinosaur. While there's still a few dedicated fact checkers here and there, the role has largely merged into the job of the reporter and the editor. Some publications, like The Tampa Bay Times' Pulitzer winning PolitiFact, still do it the old-fashioned way, with human being dedciated to the task.

Does this prototype of an automated fact checker threaten their livelihoods? 

Probably not, says Mark Glaser, the executive editor of PBS Media Shift. 

"I don't think that machines will be able to do all the work on fact-checking yet, but they can be a help and aid to human fact-checkers who might not be able to fact-check everything they hear instantly," Glaser said. "My guess is that this tool will take some time before it can threaten PolitiFact. More likely it will just be another weapon in the arsenal of fact-checkers."

The Post’s national political editor Steven Ginsberg agrees. "I dont think it's going to cost anyone a job. I don't think it replaces anything. I think it expands and broadens what you can do and who you can fact check - and correct a conversation before it gets too far on the wrong path."

Speed Matters

Ginsberg characterizes fact checking as a surprisingly difficult task that only a limited number of people are able to accomplish efficiently. And even for them, the process can take anywhere from an hour to an entire day or more.

And when an error is found, it's difficult to quantify how many people see the corrected fact compared to the number who saw the original mis-statement. When the two are so separated, it can complicate the perception of of what's true and what's not.

The beauty of this innovation, he says, is that it dramatically shortens the time between the falsehood and the truth: "People would get the truth a lot quicker," Ginsberg says. But the real value of the app won't be seen until it's in peoples' hands in town and city halls across the country, where they can use it for themselves to vet the thing that they are told.

"If you're a regular citizen and you want to hear a politician talk and see if he's telling the truth or not, you need something in your hand to go on," Ginsberg said. That's the ultimate goal for the Truth Teller app.

Photo courtesy of TruthTeller.com.

Google's Three-Front Battle: Germany, Brazil, France

Germany: The latest effort to re-assert copyright control of news content is happening in Germany, where a new ancillary copyright bill, Leistungsschutzrecht für Presseverleger, is up for debate in the Bundestag legislative body. The bill, which is supported by Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union party, will grant publishers a year-long exclusive license for all publishers' content - including excerpts, the kind usually displayed in Google News and Yahoo! News within search results. With that license, publishers can choose to withhold content from these results or charge Google and other search engines a fee for including the results.

The Leistungsschutzrecht hit Google's radar in August when it was first proposed, and is the subject of an online petition launched Tuesday from Google Deutschland. The site's welcoming message warns of the Bundestag's debate of the new copyright bill.

"This would give publishers the right to prohibit search engines and other services from displaying articles within search results or else be subject to payment. For you, it would become much more difficult to find the information you are looking for on the Internet," the site warns. A short video showing how Google Deutschland has served the German community with news and information in the past decade is also prominently featured (and even English speakers can chuckle over the how-to-spell-that-damn-Iceland-volcano's-name gag).

The official argument for the bill is safeguarding Fair Use of published content, which publishers argue Google and other aggregators are abusing. But it is also likely an attempt by German news companies to build a revenue stream in the wake of the no-paywall decisions many global news publishers made when they first put their news content online. Only a few media companies have been able to create and maintain profitable paywalls - in the U.S., the Wall Street Journal is the best example -and even fewer have been able to successfully add a paywall after initially going with free content  - the New York Times being the prime exception. (For more on the paywall issue, see Newspaper Paywalls Are A Good Thing - Here's Why.)

Brazil: The revenue issue appears to be the key. Google News, which seems to be the primary target of this bill, already has an opt-out policy for publishers who don't want their content displayed within search results. In October, 154 Brazilian members of the Association of Newspapers opted eout en-masse when they decided that Google should have to pay them for excerpted content.

The move appears to be working out for Brazil's newspapers. The 154 papers involved comprise about 90% of Brazil's circulation, according to PaidContent, and that could be one reason that the papers' sites have not lost significant traffic since making the decision. This seems to rebut Google's big argument why posting headlines and excerpts is good for content providers: that it drives traffic to the news sites.

The German publishers may not trust other parties to abide by a blanket opt-out approach - leaving them to rely on legislation. Google's response is to drum up enough public support among German voters to get the CDU and publishing lobby to back off. If that fails, of course, Google can always turn to the nuclear option: simply stop posting news site results altogether.

France: That's what Google is already doing in France. Gallic lawmakers are urging the search giant to voluntarily pay content providers for search results by the end of the year, or else the French government will consider legislation similar to Germany's. Instead of playing the petition game, though, Google is threatening to stop posting French news results if the government gets involved. One reason for the combative approach is that France has already been playing hardball with Google by leading the European Commission's investigation of Google's search algorithm for possible anti-competitive practices.

Playing Chicken On The Information Superhighway

It would seem like a no-brainer that content creators should get paid. And indeed, no one is really arguing that. All of these issues surround Fair Use arrangements that say others can use portions of content to illustrate a point or explain the broader arguments made in the original content. It's the same thing that lets a writer like me quote another media outlet's content. A little bit, and as long as I explicitly name the source material.

But publishers object when someone builds a business model on nothing but Fair Use-derived content, which is what Google and Yahoo! appear to be doing. The publishers argue that in the aggregrate, this transcends Fair Use.

But Google has scrupulously avoided directly making money with its News service. There are no ads on Google News pages, though there are ads on main Google search results pages, which can include relevant news articles. Yahoo News does include ads within its service, which bolsters the publishers' argument.

Then there's the very model of Internet searching itself. Former Google staffer Matthew Carpenter-Arevalo outlines the point quite succinctly: The Senior Community Manager, Global Shapers Americas at the World Economic Forum, Carpenter-Arevalo calls the disagreement between the French media and Google a "high stakes game of chicken" on the information superhighway.

Carpenter-Arevalo argues that the publishers' real beef with Google and other search engines is that these services level the readership playing field in a new way. The major newspaper Le Monde, for instance, enjoys a very rich cultural and economic place in French society, right down to prim-o real estate in the newsstands on the street.

"Contrast to the online world and in Google's eyes Le Monde is but one of an innumerable and uncountable chattering voices providing information about what's going on in France. Of course Google's algorithm does recognize Le Monde's stature and rewards it accordingly and handsomely by sending millions, if not billions of clicks its way every year," Carpenter-Arevalo writes. "Nevertheless, unlike the newsstand where the probability you buy Le Monde may be 1 in 4, on the Internet the chance you may read Le Monde may be 1 in 1000, such are the exponential ratios in the world of abundance."

In that kind of environment, he continues, Le Monde and other big players in the media world can't help but feel threatened. This is why they believe they should be paid for the privilege of posting their content anywhere, including search results. 

The Loss Of Neutrality

If Google and the publishers can't reach some kind of payment agreement, Google may indeed yank news sites' results in the countries in question. If Brazil is any indication, that may not hurt either side in the short term. But this legistlation - and even the kerfuffle itself - could be the start of a trend where media sites content is increasingly unavailable on Google's search results. That could make searching on Google a less rich experience and open opportunities for competitors like Yahoo and Bing grab market share by making their own licensing deals. Google's sweet "we farm the Internet for free" days may soon come to an end.

The war between news publishers and search engines could have collateral damage as well. For users, search results might no longer be truly neutral, but rather based on which media outlet was licensed to appear in which search engine's results. It's hard to see how that helps anyone.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.