4 ms·

I think this is one of the good ideas that pave the way to hell. What is fake and what is truth? How is Google going to decide? Couple examples: 1/ Is global wa

by dandare 10y ago

I think this is one of the good ideas that pave the way to hell. What is fake and what is truth? How is Google going to decide? Couple examples: 1/ Is global warming a huge conspiracy? The president of USA certainly says so. 2/ News: CIA plotted with terrorist to traffic drugs to US - that must be a hoax, right? 3/ News: The US govt secretly spread syphilis among black population - this infowars shit must be surely hoax. 4/ How about US pretending being attacked to start a war? I am talking about Gulf of Tonkin, not 9/11. 5/ The government is reading all your emails and listening to all your phonecalls - bat shit crazy, right? What I am trying to say is that once such mechanism is in place it can go on a slippery slope from there on. Next thing they will decide to filter fake news search results and that very minute they will be subpoenaed to hide something in the name of state security.

matt4077 10y ago
I know there are people who will dismiss it as bias, but you can actually assign a quality score to publications quite easily. NYT/Wall Street Journal/The Atlantic/Guardian/Washington Post/The New Yorker vs. breitbart/HuffPost/.... Note that all those stories you're referencing were all broken by the papers I listed. The breitbarts of the world usually just repackage what actual news organizations publish with ideological slant.
- pdeuchler 10y ago
  That's not bias, it's just over fitting the model
- tomsaffell 10y ago
  >repackage what actual news organizations publish with ideological slant. Which is what The Economist does - it's been doing so since 1843. Current circulation is over one million, and it's widely respected, though not by all...
  - matt4077 10y ago
    There's a bit of a difference in that the actual facts in the Economist are probably trustworthy, but I agree that they argue from a certain (free-market worshipping) point-of-view. It's obviously a scale, and opinions will vary widely. It's not even a problem for journalism to have an opinion (I'd actually argue it's impossible). What readers should demand is a good-faith effort to argue the best version of the opposition's case. At this point, the problem with the US right isn't actually ideology. You can believe that coal is the future, and I'll vote against you, but I'm not looking at CDC statistics to find out when I can expect you to die. It's the complete disregard for the system that's alarming. All over the country, there are polling places, often staffed by the older generation, people from both parties and independents, and the ones I've met always gave me the feeling that they'd defend the integrity of the vote no matter what. I wish I could say the same about the people being elected.
- thrden 10y ago
  It's worth noting that the "respectable" news organizations that you listed repackage associated press or reuters stories.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    Yes, I thought about adding those, then forgot. They're obviously quality news sources. I know there's a lot of criticism of newspapers using agencies, but not for a lack of quality. (And criticizing their use is also a bit questionable – it's kinda like criticizing programmers for using libraries, and nobody has an idea for a business model that works without them)
- notahacker 10y ago
  tbh, I don't think it's Breitbart/HuffPo's that this is trying to disassociate it from It's the likes of sites so disreputable they have to pretend to be Breitbart, like the Breitbartt.co site which was one of the sources for Denzel Washington's huge, if true (not true) endorsement of Donald Trump that was among Facebook's top trending stories recently. The cynic in me suspects this is at least as much about pointing an accusing finger at social media platforms for not getting their house in order as getting Adsense off sites which tend to opt for far more in-your-face and dubious ad networks anyway.
- myowncrapulence 10y ago
  Note that all those stories you're referencing were all broken by the papers I listed. Actually, Snowden was turned down by every single newspaper you just listed with the exception of The Guardian.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    Wasn't it NYT/Guardian/SPIEGEL that released simultaneously? Also note that he chose to work with these organizations, even though he could have easily posted it online/given it to wikileaks.
    - myowncrapulence 10y ago
      No, they published later after The Guardian and The Washington Post had already covered a majority of the leaks.
- bcoates 10y ago
  The Atlantic doesn't deserve to be nearly that high; they're a Vox-tier (sub-HuffPo) advertorial garbage house monentizing out the last gasp of their dead brand's reputation. To complicate your linear model of news quality, the National Enquirer routinely publishes batshit nonsense ("Rafael Cruz murdered JFK" and "Scalia was assassinated by a hooker", recently) and has also broken several major real stories nobody else would touch. The Graunaid is even harder to fit on your line; decent-quality and mostly worth reading agitprop from an unapologetically specific slant that rejects objective truth as some sort of bourgeoisie conspiracy. The only thing worse than ignoring them is believing them uncritically. Bias itself is a bad model; everyone's slanted, not everyone is worth reading.
toomuchtodo 10y ago
> What I am trying to say is that once such mechanism is in place it can go on a slippery slope from there on. Next thing they will decide to filter fake news search results and that very minute they will be subpoenaed to hide something in the name of state security. This thread makes me deeply nervous thinking about tech giants turning into the Ministry Of Truth. EDIT: As tech professions, do we not appreciate the scale, reach, and leverage technology provides? If we do recognize that, we must realize that with great power comes great responsibility.
- TAForObvReasons 10y ago
  > Tech giants turning into the Ministry Of Truth That already happened. According to a 2014 survey [1], about 64% of American adults "use" facebook and about 30% of the American adult population get their news from Facebook. Think about that for a moment. Facebook really has an incredible reach. [1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-social-media-is-reshaping-news/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-social-m...
  - baybal2 10y ago
    >primary purpose of the web property," Clickfarm like other 9 out of 10 news websites Well, I wish Googlers luck. Clickfarmers, botters, and runners of industrialised clickbait networks will always be a step ahead of them. Whitehat anti-botting people are a mirror image of people who develop and sell "anti-virus" software. Not only they have a profit motive to do their shıtty job poorly, they are simply not in the same class intellectually
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
treebog 10y ago
They're not taking a stand on which news stories are true and which are false. They're targeting sites that exist only to spread false information and make no attempt to be truthful in any story. These aren't news sites that occasionally write sketchy stories. These sites generate exclusively fake "news" content and fraudulently try to pass it off as the real thing. Maybe someday we'll reach the slippery slope, and it will be harder to tell the real news sites from the fake ones. But at the moment, there are certain sites around the net that are obvious frauds, and it is good that Google is taking steps to reduce their influence.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jwtadvice 10y ago
  So... every media outlet? Are we talking about infowars here? Zero Hedge? The Occupy Wall Street blog? RT and SANA? The National Enquirer? Or are we talking about The Onion? Do you think that Google will withdraw ads from sites that have partisan takes on news? Do you think that Google with withdraw ads from sites that pull their information from foreign narrative? Google is an information monopoly that partners with the US military. It already skews its information to the benefit of the United States, where it can. It has every right to do this, as it is a private organization. But this does illustrate the danger of abuse of monopoly power. Without real insight into the operation Google has yet again passed extremely dangerous authoritarian policies without any transparency. To that question: can you please give examples of what you think they are going to decide count as fake news websites? Please share a few links. Presumably there are so many this is a such a huge problem it needs Google to attempt to defund it.
  - treebog 10y ago
    Some sites which are contain nothing but blatantly false fake news: christ wire dot org daily currant dot com (claims to be a "parody" site, but does not attempt to be funny) If you use facebook, you have probably seen these and similar sites pop up, shared by people who think they reflect real news. They exist to confuse people and score clicks in the confusion.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
DominikR 10y ago
Sorry, but I never got the news that it is now considered a good idea in our Western societies to censor information you do not like for political reasons. I'm probably a racist homophobe bigot for writing these words and should be put in a correction camp, sorry.
- myowncrapulence 10y ago
  Surely Trump will make our media and government more transparent. That'll show those on the other side of the dichotomy! Now let's start making generalizations about them too!
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
jakewins 10y ago
I hear this often from engineering friends - if you cannot be unbiased, the problem is unsolvable. This gets applied to things like moral dilemmas in law or, like you do here, to news reporting. Meanwhile, the actual professions of journalism and law have hundreds of years of thought put into how to approach this problem. The courts navigate and make judgement calls every day on provably subjective topics. There's a reason the first thing they teach you in J-school is that there's no such thing as "unbiased". Hence, I entirely disagree with you, and instead think it's awful that we've allowed the nations largest media institution to pretend to be an "unbiased platform" for this long.
- ebola1717 10y ago
  Plus, tech makes gray decisions like this all the time. Youtube's Content ID system, for example. Or any porn/spam classifier.
tptacek 10y ago
These are spam sites. They're automatically generated, sometimes even using spun text from stories from other spam sites. They are populated with nonsense: one which a friend unwittingly shared with me on Facebook had in its archives: * A story that the Pope had endorsed Trump * A story that the Pope had praised Russia's handling of the Ukraine * A story that the Pope was involved in demonic blood sacrifice rituals. (always look at the archives! They're great!) The only thing that makes them interesting is that their goal isn't necessarily to generate money. Presumably, Google will just apply the same approaches it uses to detecting remunerative webspace to political webspam. I don't like The Daily Caller or Breitbart, but there is no confusing fakenews sites with real ones. I don't think the suggestion here is that Google is going to audit stories on Breitbart.

by dandare 10y ago

matt4077 10y ago

I know there are people who will dismiss it as bias, but you can actually assign a quality score to publications quite easily. NYT/Wall Street Journal/The Atlantic/Guardian/Washington Post/The New Yorker vs. breitbart/HuffPost/.... Note that all those stories you're referencing were all broken by the papers I listed. The breitbarts of the world usually just repackage what actual news organizations publish with ideological slant.

pdeuchler 10y ago
That's not bias, it's just over fitting the model
tomsaffell 10y ago
>repackage what actual news organizations publish with ideological slant. Which is what The Economist does - it's been doing so since 1843. Current circulation is over one million, and it's widely respected, though not by all...
- matt4077 10y ago
  There's a bit of a difference in that the actual facts in the Economist are probably trustworthy, but I agree that they argue from a certain (free-market worshipping) point-of-view. It's obviously a scale, and opinions will vary widely. It's not even a problem for journalism to have an opinion (I'd actually argue it's impossible). What readers should demand is a good-faith effort to argue the best version of the opposition's case. At this point, the problem with the US right isn't actually ideology. You can believe that coal is the future, and I'll vote against you, but I'm not looking at CDC statistics to find out when I can expect you to die. It's the complete disregard for the system that's alarming. All over the country, there are polling places, often staffed by the older generation, people from both parties and independents, and the ones I've met always gave me the feeling that they'd defend the integrity of the vote no matter what. I wish I could say the same about the people being elected.
thrden 10y ago
It's worth noting that the "respectable" news organizations that you listed repackage associated press or reuters stories.
- matt4077 10y ago
  Yes, I thought about adding those, then forgot. They're obviously quality news sources. I know there's a lot of criticism of newspapers using agencies, but not for a lack of quality. (And criticizing their use is also a bit questionable – it's kinda like criticizing programmers for using libraries, and nobody has an idea for a business model that works without them)
notahacker 10y ago
tbh, I don't think it's Breitbart/HuffPo's that this is trying to disassociate it from It's the likes of sites so disreputable they have to pretend to be Breitbart, like the Breitbartt.co site which was one of the sources for Denzel Washington's huge, if true (not true) endorsement of Donald Trump that was among Facebook's top trending stories recently. The cynic in me suspects this is at least as much about pointing an accusing finger at social media platforms for not getting their house in order as getting Adsense off sites which tend to opt for far more in-your-face and dubious ad networks anyway.
myowncrapulence 10y ago
Note that all those stories you're referencing were all broken by the papers I listed. Actually, Snowden was turned down by every single newspaper you just listed with the exception of The Guardian.
- matt4077 10y ago
  Wasn't it NYT/Guardian/SPIEGEL that released simultaneously? Also note that he chose to work with these organizations, even though he could have easily posted it online/given it to wikileaks.
  - myowncrapulence 10y ago
    No, they published later after The Guardian and The Washington Post had already covered a majority of the leaks.
bcoates 10y ago
The Atlantic doesn't deserve to be nearly that high; they're a Vox-tier (sub-HuffPo) advertorial garbage house monentizing out the last gasp of their dead brand's reputation. To complicate your linear model of news quality, the National Enquirer routinely publishes batshit nonsense ("Rafael Cruz murdered JFK" and "Scalia was assassinated by a hooker", recently) and has also broken several major real stories nobody else would touch. The Graunaid is even harder to fit on your line; decent-quality and mostly worth reading agitprop from an unapologetically specific slant that rejects objective truth as some sort of bourgeoisie conspiracy. The only thing worse than ignoring them is believing them uncritically. Bias itself is a bad model; everyone's slanted, not everyone is worth reading.

toomuchtodo 10y ago

> What I am trying to say is that once such mechanism is in place it can go on a slippery slope from there on. Next thing they will decide to filter fake news search results and that very minute they will be subpoenaed to hide something in the name of state security. This thread makes me deeply nervous thinking about tech giants turning into the Ministry Of Truth. EDIT: As tech professions, do we not appreciate the scale, reach, and leverage technology provides? If we do recognize that, we must realize that with great power comes great responsibility.

TAForObvReasons 10y ago
> Tech giants turning into the Ministry Of Truth That already happened. According to a 2014 survey [1], about 64% of American adults "use" facebook and about 30% of the American adult population get their news from Facebook. Think about that for a moment. Facebook really has an incredible reach. [1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-social-media-is-reshaping-news/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-social-m...
- baybal2 10y ago
  >primary purpose of the web property," Clickfarm like other 9 out of 10 news websites Well, I wish Googlers luck. Clickfarmers, botters, and runners of industrialised clickbait networks will always be a step ahead of them. Whitehat anti-botting people are a mirror image of people who develop and sell "anti-virus" software. Not only they have a profit motive to do their shıtty job poorly, they are simply not in the same class intellectually
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

treebog 10y ago

They're not taking a stand on which news stories are true and which are false. They're targeting sites that exist only to spread false information and make no attempt to be truthful in any story. These aren't news sites that occasionally write sketchy stories. These sites generate exclusively fake "news" content and fraudulently try to pass it off as the real thing. Maybe someday we'll reach the slippery slope, and it will be harder to tell the real news sites from the fake ones. But at the moment, there are certain sites around the net that are obvious frauds, and it is good that Google is taking steps to reduce their influence.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jwtadvice 10y ago
So... every media outlet? Are we talking about infowars here? Zero Hedge? The Occupy Wall Street blog? RT and SANA? The National Enquirer? Or are we talking about The Onion? Do you think that Google will withdraw ads from sites that have partisan takes on news? Do you think that Google with withdraw ads from sites that pull their information from foreign narrative? Google is an information monopoly that partners with the US military. It already skews its information to the benefit of the United States, where it can. It has every right to do this, as it is a private organization. But this does illustrate the danger of abuse of monopoly power. Without real insight into the operation Google has yet again passed extremely dangerous authoritarian policies without any transparency. To that question: can you please give examples of what you think they are going to decide count as fake news websites? Please share a few links. Presumably there are so many this is a such a huge problem it needs Google to attempt to defund it.
- treebog 10y ago
  Some sites which are contain nothing but blatantly false fake news: christ wire dot org daily currant dot com (claims to be a "parody" site, but does not attempt to be funny) If you use facebook, you have probably seen these and similar sites pop up, shared by people who think they reflect real news. They exist to confuse people and score clicks in the confusion.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

DominikR 10y ago

Sorry, but I never got the news that it is now considered a good idea in our Western societies to censor information you do not like for political reasons. I'm probably a racist homophobe bigot for writing these words and should be put in a correction camp, sorry.

myowncrapulence 10y ago
Surely Trump will make our media and government more transparent. That'll show those on the other side of the dichotomy! Now let's start making generalizations about them too!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

jakewins 10y ago

I hear this often from engineering friends - if you cannot be unbiased, the problem is unsolvable. This gets applied to things like moral dilemmas in law or, like you do here, to news reporting. Meanwhile, the actual professions of journalism and law have hundreds of years of thought put into how to approach this problem. The courts navigate and make judgement calls every day on provably subjective topics. There's a reason the first thing they teach you in J-school is that there's no such thing as "unbiased". Hence, I entirely disagree with you, and instead think it's awful that we've allowed the nations largest media institution to pretend to be an "unbiased platform" for this long.

ebola1717 10y ago
Plus, tech makes gray decisions like this all the time. Youtube's Content ID system, for example. Or any porn/spam classifier.

tptacek 10y ago

These are spam sites. They're automatically generated, sometimes even using spun text from stories from other spam sites. They are populated with nonsense: one which a friend unwittingly shared with me on Facebook had in its archives: * A story that the Pope had endorsed Trump * A story that the Pope had praised Russia's handling of the Ukraine * A story that the Pope was involved in demonic blood sacrifice rituals. (always look at the archives! They're great!) The only thing that makes them interesting is that their goal isn't necessarily to generate money. Presumably, Google will just apply the same approaches it uses to detecting remunerative webspace to political webspam. I don't like The Daily Caller or Breitbart, but there is no confusing fakenews sites with real ones. I don't think the suggestion here is that Google is going to audit stories on Breitbart.