9 ms·

How political data teams game Google to fool people

90 points by some1else 9y ago

zspitzer 9y ago
from Australia, I'm seeing the credible results on the first page (both logged in and incognito), how does it look from elsewhere? Has Google already tweaked their algorithm?
krona 9y ago
maskirovka has been used for centuries. The fact is, the internet makes it as easy for someone with a youtube channel on the other side of the world to be more effective at disseminating disinformation as a state sponsored newspaper in the 1920s. If the WWW is to remain unregulated, then get used to it.
- rrggrr 9y ago
  It was used to great effect after the American Revolutionary war. Competing presses would print all manner of slander against monarchist and anti-monarchist factions, seeking to impact public opinion.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gadders 9y ago
Why has the title been changed from the original "How the Trump-Russia Data Machine Games Google to Fool Americans"?
- drops 9y ago
  Because it implies that Trump and Russia are somehow parts of the same evil rightwing-shilling machine. That meme is getting ridiculous.
  - chasing 9y ago
    Given that it's under active investigation, "meme" might be wrong word.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      Like WMDs were under active investigation, with agencies checking on them, the NYT, CNN and other "serious" outlets informing the public about them, and even a whole war (and tons of lives lost, not to mention a trillion dollars spent) was justified on their presence? Yeah, "BS excuse of large part of the establishment for their own incompetence and disconnect" would be a better moniker.
    - akerro 9y ago
      Which investigation?
    - cubano 9y ago
      Oh you mean the investigation that hasn't found one shred of real evidence after spending untold millions basically as a Trump witch-hunt?
    - omgduh 9y ago
      there sure are a lot of very vocal people who seem to wish it was a meme.... hmmm....
  - gadders 9y ago
    Yeah, I've flagged the story.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    It was ridiculous to begin with. How about accepting that a good 20% of the population are religious republican nuts, and a good 20%+ were not particularly feeling like voting for the established candidates once more (because of lost jobs, prospects, the feeling of a country changing in ways the don't like, etc), but rather vote Trump and see the world burn? And that they were distributed in a winning way, even if some "full democratic" states had a few million more Clinton supporters? Whether Russians leaked the emails (which is quite unlikely), that is inconsequential as far as the vote is concerned. The momentum was there from a year before, and Trump had marched on and on already (not to mention few even heard or cared about those). Now, if Trump's circle tried to make some bucks with Russian deals (like e.g. Bush Jr. made with Saudi deals and connections before and after the elections), that's something else. The most hopeful thing from a Trump presidency (since obviously in internal affairs he would be a republican wrecking ball) was whether he would stop the warmongering and interventionism that's been a constant for decades. And of course, established Democrats and Republicans only push him towards not doing that, to keep the military machine going, and even applaud him whenever he puts his marching boots on.
- some1else 9y ago
  OP here. I didn't submit this because of politics, but because the validity of Google's search engine results is something that may concern the community. The takeaway here might be that until Google does something about this, you are being overtaken by the competitor with more recent updates, spread through a number of online properties. For instance: Hashicorp could try to improve traffic by moving all their product blogs to their respective domains. I'll add that despite Google's attention to Black hat SEO throughout the years, identifying these types of affiliations is an open problem, perhaps not that critical for a functioning search engine (until gaming starts to skew the results). So maybe that's somehing we'll have to take into consideration for years to come.
  - gadders 9y ago
    Fair enough. Underneath the political slant it sounds like there is a good SEO article trying to get out.
korrachs 9y ago
As someone who has been on the publication side of digital media: Never ascribe to propaganda what you can explain by greed. News is fundamentally broken, all those sites linking to each other are probably doing it to increase the "trending" part of the news which will push all of them up the google rankings. The reason why Russians, and Eastern Europeans in general, are more highly represented as owners of these places is because the cost of living is so low there. That you make $2,000 from add revenue in the US would mean you can afford to eat out a few more times a month. When you can do the same thing in a country where this is double the average wage you can spend all your time doing it and be better off than if you tried doing anything else.
- kmfrk 9y ago
  > As someone who has been on the publication side of digital media: Never ascribe to propaganda what you can explain by greed. It's been pretty crazy to see how many of the frothing right-wing fake-news sites are created by (nominal) leftists. Humankind's a real piece of work.
- some1else 9y ago
  I suppose that's a variation of Hanlon's razor, but this isn't a rule of thumb situation. They are winning at gaming the biggest source of information, which shouldn't be hapenning regardless of their motivations.
  - korrachs 9y ago
    Who is "they"? The people who own the top slots of the news today aren't the ones who did 6 months ago. The sites I was running are making less than $20 a month, at their best they were making $500 a day (lasted all of one week during the primaries) and even then I make more at my day job. I'll never do it again because I have better options, but it was an education to see my bullshit stories picked up by top shelf news organizations. How do you propose to stop people like me from taking over the news? Rely on someone like Murdoch to keep us safe from fake news? Have an official news network from the US government that only publishes verified news? One from Google? Facebook? Comcast? Let the bullshit bubble and froth, it's sound and fury signifying nothing. Any cure I've ever herd put forward is worse than the disease.
doktrin 9y ago
> Why aren’t Democrats paying people to do this kind of thing with the truth? No idea. None. They can do it, just like that other company crushed us, but they haven’t learned. As a casual observer, it certainly does seem like the political right in America has consistently been more willing and eager to bend the rules of the information game - up to and including willfully propagating falsehoods. This has at a minimum been repeatedly evidenced over the last 20 years, first in cable news and now online. Is the solution - as the OP implies - for the left / center left to adopt the same dirty tactics as their counterparts? Is there any alternative? I'm sure every rational individual (a group in which I hope to include myself), would really just prefer if everyone started behaving like adults and returned to discussing issues in what at least looks like good faith. Is that at this point a pipe dream?
- djscram 9y ago
  The problem is that the tactics work best for fake stories, because they can be pre-loaded and coordinated. True news is worked out between competing outlets and breaks messily.
  - smacktoward 9y ago
    Fake stories are also quicker to write. Truth requires careful research, which takes time. Fake news can be written as fast as fingers can strike the keyboard. Fake stories can be tuned for maximal appeal to people's existing opinions, preconceptions and prejudices. Truth has a habit of telling us things other than what we want to hear.
  - whitemale 9y ago
    Like the gender wage gap? (leftist invention)
    - sctb 9y ago
      > Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
simion314 9y ago
I am wondering why for factual statements like X is Y that are provable as false can't the entity damaged by the publication ask for a retraction and/or damages ? As a person if you denigrate other person you are in trouble.
- chasing 9y ago
  "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." -Mark Twain
  - goodmachine 9y ago
    "Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after" - Jonathon Swift http://www.bartleby.com/209/633.html http://www.bartleby.com/209/633.html
  - teddyh 9y ago
    http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
- deleted 9y ago
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- deleted 9y ago
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- blowski 9y ago
  Daily Mail and its ilk often write statements like "Twitter users were outraged after reports that Mr Celebrity X shoved a hamster up his arse". They don't say Mr Celebrity X actually did it, just that Twitter users were outraged over reports that he had done so. I'm sure there's a legal distinction in there that means they're still in the wrong, but I don't know how the consequences differ.
- michaelt 9y ago
  Mechanisms exist - they just don't work. For one thing, you can convert any false story into a not-provably-false story by appending 'a twitterstorm has erupted over' or 'a highly placed anonymous source has claimed' You can also host false info with impunity by allowing user-submitted content, and ensuring users can recreate deleted content faster than you respond to complaints. Another option is to run a story 'giving both sides of the controversy' but giving the false info 95% of the airtime. Yet another is to simply not run stories on up-to-date facts you don't like, in favour of restating old-but-true stories that fit the narrative you prefer. For another thing, even if a story is provably false, forcing someone unwilling to retract or pay damages can be extremely time-consuming. Court cases can go on for weeks and months; the stories about Clapper the article mentions have most of their impact while they're only a few hours old. For another, thanks to the Streisand effect, if Joe sues Newsco over their false claim that X, he can look forward to several months of stories about "Joe sues Newsco over X claims" I'm not sure there are any easy solutions here - ain't many people going to be coming out in support of making it easier for politicians to muzzle the press.
graeme 9y ago
Why does Google prioritize freshness so much? In some domains (i.e. Tech developments), freshness is very important. But in most, old content (the classics) is likely to be better than most new content.
- blowski 9y ago
  To me, this seems like one of those issues that's easy for a human to parse, but hard for a computer. For example: * Terrorist attack in London * Terrorist attacks in London The only difference is the plural. However, the first is probably time-sensitive, looking for the most recent attack that's in the news right now. The second is more general.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    Those categories are fast whittling down, as the terrorist attacks are now apparently a weekly occurrence.
some1else 9y ago
I hope everyone is keeping in mind that constant conversion + more traffic = more users.
- chatmasta 9y ago
  Yep. This is no different than any marketing campaign. Trump builds the product, and people set up websites "selling" it. I've been in marketing a long time, and everything I've seen reinforces my cynical view that people are nothing but a bunch of sheep waiting to be herded. As a convoluted example, consider the fact that simply changing the color or position of a button on a webpage can measurably alter the rate of people who click on it. Looking at it this way, one begins to wonder when free will ends and conformity begins.
rijoja 9y ago
Well if you google for "no evidence collusion", and if you get evidence for collusion there is something wrong with the algorithm don't you think?
ygaf 9y ago
>the way those results are ordered isn’t exactly organic. Alexa ranks the NYT at 120 globally; WaPo at 190. Now, what about the illustrious townhall.com, which had not one but two hits on page one? It’s ranked at 9,109. In other words, those first four pages (four full pages of synchronized bullshit) are evidence of a massive and centrally managed strategic misinformation campaign being waged on your brain. Granted. >These dozens of sites are all peddling the same lie... Uh, the headlines provided range from "No evidence of trump-russia collusion" (page 1) all the way to... "lack of evidence on trump-russia collusion" (page 4). >If you read closely (which they’re betting you won’t) they all include the proper, honest caveats: no evidence YET; no one says they’ve SEEN evidence; etc. The jump from that, to "No evidence" in the headline, is the most humdrum of spin used in every media article written every day, it's the background noise of journalism. You're onto something big, don't mire your articles in blue tribe whining.
nippples 9y ago
"Left wing media" lost me a few years ago to no credit of "Right wing media". They're shamelessly embracing polarization and every time I decide to take another peek at it, it seems it's sunken further. Journalism is broken, completely broken, and as long as people are trying to figure out how to fling mud at other publications rather than rise above the sea of trash they'll keep losing to ever less credible sources.
- geodel 9y ago
  I agree. They have been "post-truth" long before they labeled their rivals with it.
  - nippples 9y ago
    > Trump gets two scoops of Ice Cream > Anderson Cooper reads best covfefe tweets > HowAreWeLosing.png The country has recently elected who's arguably their most controversial president ever, who is making fishy weapons deals with the only country in present day to prohibit women from driving and putting guys like Rothschild's Wilbur Ross in his cabinet, and we're talking about FREAKING ICE CREAM SCOOPS and TYPOES?
- ygaf 9y ago
  > as long as people are trying to figure out how to fling mud at other publications And that's half of what this article boils down to, "as if these websites are above these". Google rankings for one story - the author is very specific in fetching that story - aren't going to strictly follow alexa rankings of entire websites. I can see pro-trump users clicking "No evidence of trump-russia collaboration" much more commonly than people who don't want to believe it is true. The author is onto something very believable, but he doesn't so much have evidence as whining.
  - mistermann 9y ago
    From TFA: > Now let’s see exactly what’s up here. Together, we’re going to Google the phrase “trump no evidence collusion.” (And because Google searches change over time, I’ll drop screenshots of my results here.) What will emerge is a picture of an invisible hand writing a specific argument, over and over and over. That hand belongs to Robert Mercer, Trump’s data man, who gamed Google and fake news during the campaign and whose return to the scene is heralded by Trump’s war room and bot boom. If you want, you can read more about this crazyAF, richAF, crackpot genius with a heart of shit. > Before we begin, though, we need to establish the fact that this statement is a lie: “There’s no evidence of collusion!” The reason I’m using this specific example is because this highly nuanced claim is the perfect loophole to exploit for misinformation, to shade the truth as lie and get away with it clean. > The truth: no one in the intelligence community and no one on any of the Congressional committees looking into this thing, be they Democrat or Republican, none of them have said categorically, flat-out, “There is no evidence of collusion.” Period. People investigating the case will only go so far as to say they haven’t seen any evidence. Or that there hasn’t been any evidence made available to them yet. But they don’t ever say there flat-out isn’t any evidence of collusion. Ever. Read this if you don’t believe me. Maybe I misread/skimmed the article, or misunderstood the premise, but are these statements not more or less guilty of the same thing? Most any left-leaning (or at least anti-Trump) person I know is highly certain that Trump/Russia collusion is a fact, despite (as far as I know) no hard evidence being found. So to my mind, accusing pro-Trump people of being intellectually dishonest by saying "There’s no evidence of collusion!" is at least as great of a crime as whatever it is the pro-Trump side is doing. When we have reporting 24x7 on numerous news networks and casual news shows like the Daily Show repeating the Trump-Rusia story ad nauseum, stating the correct (is it not?) fact that no hard evidence of Trump/Russia collusion has so far at least been found seems like the lesser of two crimes. (Being pedantic, it is actually a true statement as far as the public record is concerned, based on my understanding). But them maybe I'm misunderstanding. If one wants to see something truly illuminating, set aside a few hours some evening, go on YouTube and watch some Noam Chomsky interviews, especially the more recent ones. Indeed I'm sure my mind is biased, but what you will see, albeit skewed by Noam's political leanings, is pretty damning to both sides. The hypocrisy of Americans being so incredibly morally outraged at election tampering is probably one of the biggest recurring gems you will come across, this whole thing borders on hilarious if you take off your partisan hat and actually think about it. About the only thing I feel quite confident about, is that anyone who has very strong leanings to one side or the other is likely wrong (compared to the actual omniscient truth).
vwcx 9y ago
Nigritude ultramarine, but for control of the United States of America.
swalsh 9y ago
The thing that scares me the most, let's say Trump IS impeached. Not outside the realm of possibility. This group of people, they literally live in a different reality, and in their reality this impeachment would be a coup. People don't just silently stand by when that happens. This is a heavily armed group of people, who's been "riled" up for literally years. Go to their discussions about the "free speech rallies" online. Look up based stickman. A lot of people are eager. When the stakes reach the climax, we could see this "information" war turn into a real life war. Conspiracies, whether right or wrong, play HUGE roles in significant parts of history.
- empath75 9y ago
  Given trump's 'enemy of the people' rhetoric against the press, scapegoating of minorities in general and encouragement of violence in his rallies and tacit endorsement of extra judicial violence by local police (he praised Duterte's literal death squads!), I wouldn't be surprised to see actual pogroms in Trump country.
caseysoftware 9y ago
This is not new or unique. According to Wikipedia, "Google bomb" was added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2005.[1] The first instance I remember was "miserable failure" linking to Bush 43's biography.. so probably not Republicans. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
hadrien01 9y ago
The UK has the concept, at least for televised news, of "Due Impartiality and Due Accuracy and Undue Prominence of Views and Opinions" [1]. I know the US loves its first amendment, but such a law could really help to have better televised debates and opinion programs on cable news (I'm obviously thinking of Fox News, but the problem exists for the other news channels). Other European-inspired laws like no political ads or limited amount of money spent during the campaign [2] would also help to have a better political environment. [1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/86307/bc2015-07-section_5_due_impartialitiy.pdf https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/86307/b... [2] Still can't understand Citizens United with my European point of view
brockvond 9y ago
the only thing Russia hacked was how stupid Americans are and how addicted they are to using quick quotes to signal a false intelligence... so that's on us. As far as the DNC... those emails should be public from the moment they are sent. All government emails should reside on a public searchable database... content is king.

90 points by some1else 9y ago

from Australia, I'm seeing the credible results on the first page (both logged in and incognito), how does it look from elsewhere? Has Google already tweaked their algorithm?

krona 9y ago

maskirovka has been used for centuries. The fact is, the internet makes it as easy for someone with a youtube channel on the other side of the world to be more effective at disseminating disinformation as a state sponsored newspaper in the 1920s. If the WWW is to remain unregulated, then get used to it.

rrggrr 9y ago
It was used to great effect after the American Revolutionary war. Competing presses would print all manner of slander against monarchist and anti-monarchist factions, seeking to impact public opinion.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

gadders 9y ago

Why has the title been changed from the original "How the Trump-Russia Data Machine Games Google to Fool Americans"?

drops 9y ago
Because it implies that Trump and Russia are somehow parts of the same evil rightwing-shilling machine. That meme is getting ridiculous.
- chasing 9y ago
  Given that it's under active investigation, "meme" might be wrong word.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    Like WMDs were under active investigation, with agencies checking on them, the NYT, CNN and other "serious" outlets informing the public about them, and even a whole war (and tons of lives lost, not to mention a trillion dollars spent) was justified on their presence? Yeah, "BS excuse of large part of the establishment for their own incompetence and disconnect" would be a better moniker.
  - akerro 9y ago
    Which investigation?
  - cubano 9y ago
    Oh you mean the investigation that hasn't found one shred of real evidence after spending untold millions basically as a Trump witch-hunt?
  - omgduh 9y ago
    there sure are a lot of very vocal people who seem to wish it was a meme.... hmmm....
- gadders 9y ago
  Yeah, I've flagged the story.
- coldtea 9y ago
  It was ridiculous to begin with. How about accepting that a good 20% of the population are religious republican nuts, and a good 20%+ were not particularly feeling like voting for the established candidates once more (because of lost jobs, prospects, the feeling of a country changing in ways the don't like, etc), but rather vote Trump and see the world burn? And that they were distributed in a winning way, even if some "full democratic" states had a few million more Clinton supporters? Whether Russians leaked the emails (which is quite unlikely), that is inconsequential as far as the vote is concerned. The momentum was there from a year before, and Trump had marched on and on already (not to mention few even heard or cared about those). Now, if Trump's circle tried to make some bucks with Russian deals (like e.g. Bush Jr. made with Saudi deals and connections before and after the elections), that's something else. The most hopeful thing from a Trump presidency (since obviously in internal affairs he would be a republican wrecking ball) was whether he would stop the warmongering and interventionism that's been a constant for decades. And of course, established Democrats and Republicans only push him towards not doing that, to keep the military machine going, and even applaud him whenever he puts his marching boots on.
some1else 9y ago
OP here. I didn't submit this because of politics, but because the validity of Google's search engine results is something that may concern the community. The takeaway here might be that until Google does something about this, you are being overtaken by the competitor with more recent updates, spread through a number of online properties. For instance: Hashicorp could try to improve traffic by moving all their product blogs to their respective domains. I'll add that despite Google's attention to Black hat SEO throughout the years, identifying these types of affiliations is an open problem, perhaps not that critical for a functioning search engine (until gaming starts to skew the results). So maybe that's somehing we'll have to take into consideration for years to come.
- gadders 9y ago
  Fair enough. Underneath the political slant it sounds like there is a good SEO article trying to get out.

korrachs 9y ago

As someone who has been on the publication side of digital media: Never ascribe to propaganda what you can explain by greed. News is fundamentally broken, all those sites linking to each other are probably doing it to increase the "trending" part of the news which will push all of them up the google rankings. The reason why Russians, and Eastern Europeans in general, are more highly represented as owners of these places is because the cost of living is so low there. That you make $2,000 from add revenue in the US would mean you can afford to eat out a few more times a month. When you can do the same thing in a country where this is double the average wage you can spend all your time doing it and be better off than if you tried doing anything else.

kmfrk 9y ago
> As someone who has been on the publication side of digital media: Never ascribe to propaganda what you can explain by greed. It's been pretty crazy to see how many of the frothing right-wing fake-news sites are created by (nominal) leftists. Humankind's a real piece of work.
some1else 9y ago
I suppose that's a variation of Hanlon's razor, but this isn't a rule of thumb situation. They are winning at gaming the biggest source of information, which shouldn't be hapenning regardless of their motivations.
- korrachs 9y ago
  Who is "they"? The people who own the top slots of the news today aren't the ones who did 6 months ago. The sites I was running are making less than $20 a month, at their best they were making $500 a day (lasted all of one week during the primaries) and even then I make more at my day job. I'll never do it again because I have better options, but it was an education to see my bullshit stories picked up by top shelf news organizations. How do you propose to stop people like me from taking over the news? Rely on someone like Murdoch to keep us safe from fake news? Have an official news network from the US government that only publishes verified news? One from Google? Facebook? Comcast? Let the bullshit bubble and froth, it's sound and fury signifying nothing. Any cure I've ever herd put forward is worse than the disease.

doktrin 9y ago

> Why aren’t Democrats paying people to do this kind of thing with the truth? No idea. None. They can do it, just like that other company crushed us, but they haven’t learned. As a casual observer, it certainly does seem like the political right in America has consistently been more willing and eager to bend the rules of the information game - up to and including willfully propagating falsehoods. This has at a minimum been repeatedly evidenced over the last 20 years, first in cable news and now online. Is the solution - as the OP implies - for the left / center left to adopt the same dirty tactics as their counterparts? Is there any alternative? I'm sure every rational individual (a group in which I hope to include myself), would really just prefer if everyone started behaving like adults and returned to discussing issues in what at least looks like good faith. Is that at this point a pipe dream?

djscram 9y ago
The problem is that the tactics work best for fake stories, because they can be pre-loaded and coordinated. True news is worked out between competing outlets and breaks messily.
- smacktoward 9y ago
  Fake stories are also quicker to write. Truth requires careful research, which takes time. Fake news can be written as fast as fingers can strike the keyboard. Fake stories can be tuned for maximal appeal to people's existing opinions, preconceptions and prejudices. Truth has a habit of telling us things other than what we want to hear.
- whitemale 9y ago
  Like the gender wage gap? (leftist invention)
  - sctb 9y ago
    > Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

simion314 9y ago

I am wondering why for factual statements like X is Y that are provable as false can't the entity damaged by the publication ask for a retraction and/or damages ? As a person if you denigrate other person you are in trouble.

chasing 9y ago
"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." -Mark Twain
- goodmachine 9y ago
  "Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after" - Jonathon Swift http://www.bartleby.com/209/633.html http://www.bartleby.com/209/633.html
- teddyh 9y ago
  http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
deleted 9y ago
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deleted 9y ago
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blowski 9y ago
Daily Mail and its ilk often write statements like "Twitter users were outraged after reports that Mr Celebrity X shoved a hamster up his arse". They don't say Mr Celebrity X actually did it, just that Twitter users were outraged over reports that he had done so. I'm sure there's a legal distinction in there that means they're still in the wrong, but I don't know how the consequences differ.
michaelt 9y ago
Mechanisms exist - they just don't work. For one thing, you can convert any false story into a not-provably-false story by appending 'a twitterstorm has erupted over' or 'a highly placed anonymous source has claimed' You can also host false info with impunity by allowing user-submitted content, and ensuring users can recreate deleted content faster than you respond to complaints. Another option is to run a story 'giving both sides of the controversy' but giving the false info 95% of the airtime. Yet another is to simply not run stories on up-to-date facts you don't like, in favour of restating old-but-true stories that fit the narrative you prefer. For another thing, even if a story is provably false, forcing someone unwilling to retract or pay damages can be extremely time-consuming. Court cases can go on for weeks and months; the stories about Clapper the article mentions have most of their impact while they're only a few hours old. For another, thanks to the Streisand effect, if Joe sues Newsco over their false claim that X, he can look forward to several months of stories about "Joe sues Newsco over X claims" I'm not sure there are any easy solutions here - ain't many people going to be coming out in support of making it easier for politicians to muzzle the press.

graeme 9y ago

Why does Google prioritize freshness so much? In some domains (i.e. Tech developments), freshness is very important. But in most, old content (the classics) is likely to be better than most new content.

blowski 9y ago
To me, this seems like one of those issues that's easy for a human to parse, but hard for a computer. For example: * Terrorist attack in London * Terrorist attacks in London The only difference is the plural. However, the first is probably time-sensitive, looking for the most recent attack that's in the news right now. The second is more general.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  Those categories are fast whittling down, as the terrorist attacks are now apparently a weekly occurrence.

some1else 9y ago

I hope everyone is keeping in mind that constant conversion + more traffic = more users.

chatmasta 9y ago
Yep. This is no different than any marketing campaign. Trump builds the product, and people set up websites "selling" it. I've been in marketing a long time, and everything I've seen reinforces my cynical view that people are nothing but a bunch of sheep waiting to be herded. As a convoluted example, consider the fact that simply changing the color or position of a button on a webpage can measurably alter the rate of people who click on it. Looking at it this way, one begins to wonder when free will ends and conformity begins.

rijoja 9y ago

Well if you google for "no evidence collusion", and if you get evidence for collusion there is something wrong with the algorithm don't you think?

ygaf 9y ago

>the way those results are ordered isn’t exactly organic. Alexa ranks the NYT at 120 globally; WaPo at 190. Now, what about the illustrious townhall.com, which had not one but two hits on page one? It’s ranked at 9,109. In other words, those first four pages (four full pages of synchronized bullshit) are evidence of a massive and centrally managed strategic misinformation campaign being waged on your brain. Granted. >These dozens of sites are all peddling the same lie... Uh, the headlines provided range from "No evidence of trump-russia collusion" (page 1) all the way to... "lack of evidence on trump-russia collusion" (page 4). >If you read closely (which they’re betting you won’t) they all include the proper, honest caveats: no evidence YET; no one says they’ve SEEN evidence; etc. The jump from that, to "No evidence" in the headline, is the most humdrum of spin used in every media article written every day, it's the background noise of journalism. You're onto something big, don't mire your articles in blue tribe whining.

nippples 9y ago

"Left wing media" lost me a few years ago to no credit of "Right wing media". They're shamelessly embracing polarization and every time I decide to take another peek at it, it seems it's sunken further. Journalism is broken, completely broken, and as long as people are trying to figure out how to fling mud at other publications rather than rise above the sea of trash they'll keep losing to ever less credible sources.

geodel 9y ago
I agree. They have been "post-truth" long before they labeled their rivals with it.
- nippples 9y ago
  > Trump gets two scoops of Ice Cream > Anderson Cooper reads best covfefe tweets > HowAreWeLosing.png The country has recently elected who's arguably their most controversial president ever, who is making fishy weapons deals with the only country in present day to prohibit women from driving and putting guys like Rothschild's Wilbur Ross in his cabinet, and we're talking about FREAKING ICE CREAM SCOOPS and TYPOES?
ygaf 9y ago
> as long as people are trying to figure out how to fling mud at other publications And that's half of what this article boils down to, "as if these websites are above these". Google rankings for one story - the author is very specific in fetching that story - aren't going to strictly follow alexa rankings of entire websites. I can see pro-trump users clicking "No evidence of trump-russia collaboration" much more commonly than people who don't want to believe it is true. The author is onto something very believable, but he doesn't so much have evidence as whining.
- mistermann 9y ago
  From TFA: > Now let’s see exactly what’s up here. Together, we’re going to Google the phrase “trump no evidence collusion.” (And because Google searches change over time, I’ll drop screenshots of my results here.) What will emerge is a picture of an invisible hand writing a specific argument, over and over and over. That hand belongs to Robert Mercer, Trump’s data man, who gamed Google and fake news during the campaign and whose return to the scene is heralded by Trump’s war room and bot boom. If you want, you can read more about this crazyAF, richAF, crackpot genius with a heart of shit. > Before we begin, though, we need to establish the fact that this statement is a lie: “There’s no evidence of collusion!” The reason I’m using this specific example is because this highly nuanced claim is the perfect loophole to exploit for misinformation, to shade the truth as lie and get away with it clean. > The truth: no one in the intelligence community and no one on any of the Congressional committees looking into this thing, be they Democrat or Republican, none of them have said categorically, flat-out, “There is no evidence of collusion.” Period. People investigating the case will only go so far as to say they haven’t seen any evidence. Or that there hasn’t been any evidence made available to them yet. But they don’t ever say there flat-out isn’t any evidence of collusion. Ever. Read this if you don’t believe me. Maybe I misread/skimmed the article, or misunderstood the premise, but are these statements not more or less guilty of the same thing? Most any left-leaning (or at least anti-Trump) person I know is highly certain that Trump/Russia collusion is a fact, despite (as far as I know) no hard evidence being found. So to my mind, accusing pro-Trump people of being intellectually dishonest by saying "There’s no evidence of collusion!" is at least as great of a crime as whatever it is the pro-Trump side is doing. When we have reporting 24x7 on numerous news networks and casual news shows like the Daily Show repeating the Trump-Rusia story ad nauseum, stating the correct (is it not?) fact that no hard evidence of Trump/Russia collusion has so far at least been found seems like the lesser of two crimes. (Being pedantic, it is actually a true statement as far as the public record is concerned, based on my understanding). But them maybe I'm misunderstanding. If one wants to see something truly illuminating, set aside a few hours some evening, go on YouTube and watch some Noam Chomsky interviews, especially the more recent ones. Indeed I'm sure my mind is biased, but what you will see, albeit skewed by Noam's political leanings, is pretty damning to both sides. The hypocrisy of Americans being so incredibly morally outraged at election tampering is probably one of the biggest recurring gems you will come across, this whole thing borders on hilarious if you take off your partisan hat and actually think about it. About the only thing I feel quite confident about, is that anyone who has very strong leanings to one side or the other is likely wrong (compared to the actual omniscient truth).

vwcx 9y ago

Nigritude ultramarine, but for control of the United States of America.

swalsh 9y ago

The thing that scares me the most, let's say Trump IS impeached. Not outside the realm of possibility. This group of people, they literally live in a different reality, and in their reality this impeachment would be a coup. People don't just silently stand by when that happens. This is a heavily armed group of people, who's been "riled" up for literally years. Go to their discussions about the "free speech rallies" online. Look up based stickman. A lot of people are eager. When the stakes reach the climax, we could see this "information" war turn into a real life war. Conspiracies, whether right or wrong, play HUGE roles in significant parts of history.

empath75 9y ago
Given trump's 'enemy of the people' rhetoric against the press, scapegoating of minorities in general and encouragement of violence in his rallies and tacit endorsement of extra judicial violence by local police (he praised Duterte's literal death squads!), I wouldn't be surprised to see actual pogroms in Trump country.

caseysoftware 9y ago

This is not new or unique. According to Wikipedia, "Google bomb" was added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2005.[1] The first instance I remember was "miserable failure" linking to Bush 43's biography.. so probably not Republicans. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb

hadrien01 9y ago

The UK has the concept, at least for televised news, of "Due Impartiality and Due Accuracy and Undue Prominence of Views and Opinions" [1]. I know the US loves its first amendment, but such a law could really help to have better televised debates and opinion programs on cable news (I'm obviously thinking of Fox News, but the problem exists for the other news channels). Other European-inspired laws like no political ads or limited amount of money spent during the campaign [2] would also help to have a better political environment. [1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/86307/bc2015-07-section_5_due_impartialitiy.pdf https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/86307/b... [2] Still can't understand Citizens United with my European point of view

brockvond 9y ago

the only thing Russia hacked was how stupid Americans are and how addicted they are to using quick quotes to signal a false intelligence... so that's on us. As far as the DNC... those emails should be public from the moment they are sent. All government emails should reside on a public searchable database... content is king.