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One man's unpopular idea is another man's fake news. I'm not sure I want google making such editorial decisions. Also: > We noticed that you're using an ad bl

One man's unpopular idea is another man's fake news. I'm not sure I want google making such editorial decisions. Also: > We noticed that you're using an ad blocker, which may adversely affect the performance and content on Bloomberg.com That is VERY fake news right there.

taurath 10y ago
Googles algorithms already make decisions about what people see, though not based on the editorial content. I don't consider it a real difference whatever scale they use - it will always be biased to something.
nck4222 10y ago
That's neither fake nor news. 1) You'd have to have a pretty loose definition of news to include that message as news. And 2) Ad-blockers obviously affect page content (by you know, blocking it). I don't have the data to support it but anecdotally I've definitely seen it affect performance via javascript issues that arise.
- gragas 10y ago
  He didn't mean it was literally news.
  - nck4222 10y ago
    In a thread that's mostly discussing how fake news is defined, I thought it relevant to comment on it. To me it came off that he was calling it fake news and not being sarcastic. If that's not the case so be it but it wasn't obvious to me.
faet 10y ago
It does affect performance, it makes it faster.
EGreg 10y ago
We should have a crowdsourced website that backs up claims with facts (and has evidence either way), and then journalists can write stories that would link their claims to it. Or the links be added automatically by visitors.
SerLava 10y ago
Trump has conflated biased news with fake news. Google is running off the 2016 definition of fake news - remember what it meant way back half a year ago? It means headlines like "Shocking - senate hearing erupts into fistfight" or "Trump won the popular vote by 1.5 million" Fake - written by Moldovans for Facebook revenue. Not simply biased.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  What you're calling "fake news" has been called "spam" for a long time. If they're talking about spam, why do they need to color it under some new action instead of just saying "We're detecting more spam"? It's because they know that "spam" is not a credible way to censor the voices that they want to censor. "Fake news" emanated from John Oliver. It was the excuse the establishment offered for the mainstream media's horrendous and transparently detached coverage of the election cycle, assuring the public that a Clinton victory was a near-certainty, engaging in fear mongering by indicating that a Trump victory would be a dystopian nightmare, etc. Oliver said to his followers, on behalf of the whole broadcast establishment (CNN and HBO are both owned by Time Warner), "It's not us, it's them." It is, after all, probably the only logical thing to say. In predictable but hilarious fashion, the "fake news" mantra almost immediately backfired on the establishment, as the same masses that elected Trump instantly (and appropriately) applied the label to reporting from the MSM, which had just been proven vibrantly "fake" by the election outcome that they refused to acknowledge as a possibility. Approximately half of the American public is stubbornly conservative. It greatly irritates the broadcast media that it's no longer simple to control the narrative; their propaganda is now challenged and rejected by online voices. This makes the establishment very unhappy, so they've attempted to label all such challenges as "fake news".
  - xapata 10y ago
    > fear mongering by indicating that a Trump victory would be a dystopian nightmare, etc. I do, on occasion, feel like I'm living in a dystopian nightmare. I'm certainly wondering about the ethics of having children, knowing that they'd live to see dramatic climate change and all the horrors of it. Colbert's "truthiness" was eerily prescient, meant in satire, yet followed by Conway's "alternative facts" without irony.
okreallywtf 10y ago
I would like to see a similar tactic used in court to try to get out of a conviction. Who is really to say what happened on the night in question? Who is to say the witnesses and police saw what they saw? What is the nature of reality and how can one really know anything? In light of this the defendant must be acquitted of all charges because all information is equal and perception is everything therefore my drunken rampage at the liquor store only happened in the minds of all of the supposed witnesses while I was at home reading a good book my own perception.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  This is exactly what already happens in court. Both sides are given room to make their arguments, even if the argument is "We can't really like, know anything, on a metaphysical level, can we?" If a jury finds this convincing, you win. The judge and lawyers will actively work to discourage such a waste of time, but if you're accused of a criminal offense and you insist on presenting this argument in court, it is your right to do so. In the U.S., we govern by the will of the people. The jury box is important check on runaway government power (which is, unfortunately, frequently diluted).
- Swizec 10y ago
  There's active research into fake memories. Currently the assumption is that witness testimonials are somewhere between completely useless and actively harmful to justice. https://agora.stanford.edu/sjls/Issue%20One/fisher&tversky.htm https://agora.stanford.edu/sjls/Issue%20One/fisher&tversky.h... > Several studies have been conducted on human memory and on subjects’ propensity to remember erroneously events and details that did not occur. Elizabeth Loftus performed experiments in the mid-seventies demonstrating the effect of a third party’s introducing false facts into memory.4 Subjects were shown a slide of a car at an intersection with either a yield sign or a stop sign. Experimenters asked participants questions, falsely introducing the term "stop sign" into the question instead of referring to the yield sign participants had actually seen. Similarly, experimenters falsely substituted the term "yield sign" in questions directed to participants who had actually seen the stop sign slide. The results indicated that subjects remembered seeing the false image. So ... yeah. Our memory is pretty useless as far as determining facts goes.
swinglock 10y ago
News are not ideas, news are events. Fake news are fake events, by definition misinformation.
- Swizec 10y ago
  There's a big difference between "A bomb fell on Afghanistan" and "Trump authorized a bombing in Afghanistan" and "Trump dropped a bomb" and "Trump dropped the biggest baddest bomb he's got" All are the same factual event reported without interpretation. Just different highlights. Or for a more classic example: I didnt kill them I didnt kill them I didnt kill them I didnt kill them Language is funny like that. You can say a lot without deviating from reporting factual things.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    Yes, people who haven't thought about bias before have a hard time gathering the imagination to grasp the extent of the problem. It's not only how you report something, but what you choose to report, where you put your emphasis, how you headline or divide it, and so forth. News reports will frequently spend 5 paragraphs blathering about their preferred position, include a diminutive and skeptical 1 paragraph section that includes a partial quote from someone who represents the other perspective, and then follow up with a 7th paragraph that goes back to the first "expert", whose credibility they spent the first 5 paragraphs establishing, to rebut or minimize the opposite side's argument. And that's what passes for "balanced" reporting. This propaganda is no longer relevant and that's what's really pissing the old media off. Through the internet, we can crowdsource our news, and their influence is dropping off the cliff at record pace.
ehsankia 10y ago
The very first line: > Google isn’t planning to rid fake news from its search results -- but it’s trying to purge it from the top. They aren't removing anything, just being more picky when it comes to top news, which happens to be what things like the Assistant/Google Home use to reply to questions. To me, that's probably why they care about this so much, because if your kids asks "are dinosaurs real" to Google Home, replying "no" is a big big failure. It's honestly better if it doesn't say anything than a straight out lie.
- gragas 10y ago
  >To me, that's probably why they care about this so much, because if your kids asks "are dinosaurs real" to Google Home, replying "no" is a big big failure. It's honestly better if it doesn't say anything than a straight out lie. I'd rather not have Google make decisions like that for me.
  - aswanson 10y ago
    So dont use google. Just make up any reality/answers you want.
    - gragas 10y ago
      >Just make up any reality/answers you want. What if I want my kids to understand that dinosaurs aren't real? Why should Google deflect from the truth? You're the one who suggested that.
      - aswanson 10y ago
        My bad, didn't detect the sarcasm through the text. These days, you never know...
- tyingq 10y ago
  >They aren't removing anything, just being more picky when it comes to top news, which happens to be what things like the Assistant/Google Home use to reply to questions. It's also what they use for rich snippets, and that's really prone to bad choices. I'm unclear on what, if any, breakthrough they've had to fix this. A US quarter is worth 50 cents: http://i.imgur.com/1nNreR2.png http://i.imgur.com/1nNreR2.png Using thin affiliate sites (that just want referral click payments) as sources for good information on reverse mortgages: http://imgur.com/a/mpayp http://imgur.com/a/mpayp http://imgur.com/a/IZmmJ http://imgur.com/a/IZmmJ Some others: http://imgur.com/a/6EDEP http://imgur.com/a/6EDEP I found these for another thread here, in the span of 10 minutes or so. They aren't rare outliers.
bbctol 10y ago
Well, if you don't want Google making decisions about what content is placed at the top... I'm not sure what you think Google does.
mikhailt 10y ago
> I'm not sure I want google making such editorial decisions. Google has been making the decisions for you since the beginning. This isn't a fact-based search engine, it is based on a list of algorithms that Google has chosen and also it is impacted by the ad revenue it is trying to generate. Google will do what it takes to generate more money for themselves.

taurath 10y ago

Googles algorithms already make decisions about what people see, though not based on the editorial content. I don't consider it a real difference whatever scale they use - it will always be biased to something.

nck4222 10y ago

That's neither fake nor news. 1) You'd have to have a pretty loose definition of news to include that message as news. And 2) Ad-blockers obviously affect page content (by you know, blocking it). I don't have the data to support it but anecdotally I've definitely seen it affect performance via javascript issues that arise.

gragas 10y ago
He didn't mean it was literally news.
- nck4222 10y ago
  In a thread that's mostly discussing how fake news is defined, I thought it relevant to comment on it. To me it came off that he was calling it fake news and not being sarcastic. If that's not the case so be it but it wasn't obvious to me.

faet 10y ago

It does affect performance, it makes it faster.

EGreg 10y ago

We should have a crowdsourced website that backs up claims with facts (and has evidence either way), and then journalists can write stories that would link their claims to it. Or the links be added automatically by visitors.

SerLava 10y ago

Trump has conflated biased news with fake news. Google is running off the 2016 definition of fake news - remember what it meant way back half a year ago? It means headlines like "Shocking - senate hearing erupts into fistfight" or "Trump won the popular vote by 1.5 million" Fake - written by Moldovans for Facebook revenue. Not simply biased.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cookiecaper 10y ago
What you're calling "fake news" has been called "spam" for a long time. If they're talking about spam, why do they need to color it under some new action instead of just saying "We're detecting more spam"? It's because they know that "spam" is not a credible way to censor the voices that they want to censor. "Fake news" emanated from John Oliver. It was the excuse the establishment offered for the mainstream media's horrendous and transparently detached coverage of the election cycle, assuring the public that a Clinton victory was a near-certainty, engaging in fear mongering by indicating that a Trump victory would be a dystopian nightmare, etc. Oliver said to his followers, on behalf of the whole broadcast establishment (CNN and HBO are both owned by Time Warner), "It's not us, it's them." It is, after all, probably the only logical thing to say. In predictable but hilarious fashion, the "fake news" mantra almost immediately backfired on the establishment, as the same masses that elected Trump instantly (and appropriately) applied the label to reporting from the MSM, which had just been proven vibrantly "fake" by the election outcome that they refused to acknowledge as a possibility. Approximately half of the American public is stubbornly conservative. It greatly irritates the broadcast media that it's no longer simple to control the narrative; their propaganda is now challenged and rejected by online voices. This makes the establishment very unhappy, so they've attempted to label all such challenges as "fake news".
- xapata 10y ago
  > fear mongering by indicating that a Trump victory would be a dystopian nightmare, etc. I do, on occasion, feel like I'm living in a dystopian nightmare. I'm certainly wondering about the ethics of having children, knowing that they'd live to see dramatic climate change and all the horrors of it. Colbert's "truthiness" was eerily prescient, meant in satire, yet followed by Conway's "alternative facts" without irony.

okreallywtf 10y ago

I would like to see a similar tactic used in court to try to get out of a conviction. Who is really to say what happened on the night in question? Who is to say the witnesses and police saw what they saw? What is the nature of reality and how can one really know anything? In light of this the defendant must be acquitted of all charges because all information is equal and perception is everything therefore my drunken rampage at the liquor store only happened in the minds of all of the supposed witnesses while I was at home reading a good book my own perception.

cookiecaper 10y ago
This is exactly what already happens in court. Both sides are given room to make their arguments, even if the argument is "We can't really like, know anything, on a metaphysical level, can we?" If a jury finds this convincing, you win. The judge and lawyers will actively work to discourage such a waste of time, but if you're accused of a criminal offense and you insist on presenting this argument in court, it is your right to do so. In the U.S., we govern by the will of the people. The jury box is important check on runaway government power (which is, unfortunately, frequently diluted).
Swizec 10y ago
There's active research into fake memories. Currently the assumption is that witness testimonials are somewhere between completely useless and actively harmful to justice. https://agora.stanford.edu/sjls/Issue%20One/fisher&tversky.htm https://agora.stanford.edu/sjls/Issue%20One/fisher&tversky.h... > Several studies have been conducted on human memory and on subjects’ propensity to remember erroneously events and details that did not occur. Elizabeth Loftus performed experiments in the mid-seventies demonstrating the effect of a third party’s introducing false facts into memory.4 Subjects were shown a slide of a car at an intersection with either a yield sign or a stop sign. Experimenters asked participants questions, falsely introducing the term "stop sign" into the question instead of referring to the yield sign participants had actually seen. Similarly, experimenters falsely substituted the term "yield sign" in questions directed to participants who had actually seen the stop sign slide. The results indicated that subjects remembered seeing the false image. So ... yeah. Our memory is pretty useless as far as determining facts goes.

swinglock 10y ago

News are not ideas, news are events. Fake news are fake events, by definition misinformation.

Swizec 10y ago
There's a big difference between "A bomb fell on Afghanistan" and "Trump authorized a bombing in Afghanistan" and "Trump dropped a bomb" and "Trump dropped the biggest baddest bomb he's got" All are the same factual event reported without interpretation. Just different highlights. Or for a more classic example: I didnt kill them I didnt kill them I didnt kill them I didnt kill them Language is funny like that. You can say a lot without deviating from reporting factual things.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Yes, people who haven't thought about bias before have a hard time gathering the imagination to grasp the extent of the problem. It's not only how you report something, but what you choose to report, where you put your emphasis, how you headline or divide it, and so forth. News reports will frequently spend 5 paragraphs blathering about their preferred position, include a diminutive and skeptical 1 paragraph section that includes a partial quote from someone who represents the other perspective, and then follow up with a 7th paragraph that goes back to the first "expert", whose credibility they spent the first 5 paragraphs establishing, to rebut or minimize the opposite side's argument. And that's what passes for "balanced" reporting. This propaganda is no longer relevant and that's what's really pissing the old media off. Through the internet, we can crowdsource our news, and their influence is dropping off the cliff at record pace.

ehsankia 10y ago

The very first line: > Google isn’t planning to rid fake news from its search results -- but it’s trying to purge it from the top. They aren't removing anything, just being more picky when it comes to top news, which happens to be what things like the Assistant/Google Home use to reply to questions. To me, that's probably why they care about this so much, because if your kids asks "are dinosaurs real" to Google Home, replying "no" is a big big failure. It's honestly better if it doesn't say anything than a straight out lie.

gragas 10y ago
>To me, that's probably why they care about this so much, because if your kids asks "are dinosaurs real" to Google Home, replying "no" is a big big failure. It's honestly better if it doesn't say anything than a straight out lie. I'd rather not have Google make decisions like that for me.
- aswanson 10y ago
  So dont use google. Just make up any reality/answers you want.
  - gragas 10y ago
    >Just make up any reality/answers you want. What if I want my kids to understand that dinosaurs aren't real? Why should Google deflect from the truth? You're the one who suggested that.
    - aswanson 10y ago
      My bad, didn't detect the sarcasm through the text. These days, you never know...
tyingq 10y ago
>They aren't removing anything, just being more picky when it comes to top news, which happens to be what things like the Assistant/Google Home use to reply to questions. It's also what they use for rich snippets, and that's really prone to bad choices. I'm unclear on what, if any, breakthrough they've had to fix this. A US quarter is worth 50 cents: http://i.imgur.com/1nNreR2.png http://i.imgur.com/1nNreR2.png Using thin affiliate sites (that just want referral click payments) as sources for good information on reverse mortgages: http://imgur.com/a/mpayp http://imgur.com/a/mpayp http://imgur.com/a/IZmmJ http://imgur.com/a/IZmmJ Some others: http://imgur.com/a/6EDEP http://imgur.com/a/6EDEP I found these for another thread here, in the span of 10 minutes or so. They aren't rare outliers.

bbctol 10y ago

Well, if you don't want Google making decisions about what content is placed at the top... I'm not sure what you think Google does.

mikhailt 10y ago

> I'm not sure I want google making such editorial decisions. Google has been making the decisions for you since the beginning. This isn't a fact-based search engine, it is based on a list of algorithms that Google has chosen and also it is impacted by the ad revenue it is trying to generate. Google will do what it takes to generate more money for themselves.