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My summary of the article: An algorithm designed by Google engineers to promote upcoming stories does exactly what it was supposed to do, and people who don't u

My summary of the article: An algorithm designed by Google engineers to promote upcoming stories does exactly what it was supposed to do, and people who don't understand why Google employees did not manually review just one out of one hundred thousand things that the search engine indexed that day are suprised. Google Search is a content aggregator that show you what it thinks you are most likely to click on. It does not know about politics, it cannot fact check, it does not think care about effort journalism, the only thing that matters is what stories generate more ad revenue. Of course, Google will try to police its results better after this incident, but they can't effectively do this without mass censorship. If you don't believe me, see the recent YouTube drama over monetization.

ForHackernews 9y ago
Maybe algorithms just aren't up to the task of exercising editorial judgement over news stories? Would the world be that much poorer if Google didn't include a "popular on Twitter" feature? What if Google News were a smaller, human-curated roster of important stories that were basically the same for everyone? (maybe targeted by country) It could be a good thing to have a non-filter bubbled set of news.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
  It's worth pointing out that Facebook tried the human curation thing and were accused of bias.
  - ForHackernews 9y ago
    That's fine: They should own that, then. "We're Facebook and these are our values -- we trust the BBC and do not trust InfoWars.com" These big tech companies are trying to be all things to all people, and they want to pretend that using algorithms means they're free from bias. It's just a different, more opaque bias encoded in the algorithms. But users are inclined to trust it because it comes "from the computer". It's a Garbage In, Gospel Out situation.
  - awj 9y ago
    You mean like every human-curated news source since the beginning of time?
- ams6110 9y ago
  Human curators are biased. Google company culture is left-leaning as a whole, so you'd expect to see that same bias in any curated content they provide.
baybal2 9y ago
>My summary of the article: An algorithm designed by Google engineers to promote upcoming stories does exactly what it was supposed to do, and people who don't understand why Google employees did not manually review just one out of one hundred thousand things that the search engine indexed that day are suprised. That is not entirely correct, big dotcoms do outsource a lot of such mechanical Turk work to outsourcing companies that do such work, and they do prefer to contract ones in places without much contact to English speaking work to prevent mass backlash. >https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/ https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/ A lot of times when such companies claim that something is done by some voodoo magic "smart algorithm," that claim is a lie.
- baybal2 9y ago
  * s/work/world/
ubernostrum 9y ago
I read it more as Google's blind faith in algorithms finally being loudly and publicly discredited. Baked deeply into Google's corporate DNA is the unquestioned assumption that all you have to do to solve a problem -- any problem -- is throw clever algorithms and compute power at it. Which I suppose might still turn out to be true, but Google has picked off all the low-hanging fruit and is now hitting problems that seem to be well beyond their capabilities to solve algorithmically. But since the whole company is built on the assumption that this would never happen, the are incapable of confronting and dealing with it.
- mtgx 9y ago
  Algorithms can have bias, too. Like for instance, in the last election, Google removed the more negative expressions that would be suggested alongside politicians' names. That wasn't just the Algorithm™ -- it was Google deciding that. There are likely hundreds of such "manual" decisions within its search algorithms.
  - zaarn 9y ago
    Algorithms are generally incapable of bias. What an algorithm does is a perfect reproduction of it's instructions plus it's parameters. The actual bias is either by the designer by making an algorithm that does not fit the intended use properly or by using flawed parameters. Also known as; garbage in, garbage out. The pipe in between doesn't care if it's garbage. In your example, this was a decision by a Google engineer or c-level, not the algorithm. The algorithm did as it was told to in exactly the way it was designed without bias or error.
    - ForHackernews 9y ago
      > Algorithms are generally incapable of bias. This is nonsense unless you define-down "bias" in such a way as to mean "performing contrary to the deterministic result of its implementation" (which seems to be what you're doing, and I agree is impossible). A more sensible definition of bias might be something like "preferentially favouring one outcome over another for reasons unrelated (or even contrary) to the core purpose of the software". Imagine a vending machine that when prompted generically by a user saying "I'm thirsty" always provided sugary soda instead of bottled water. Modern machine learning algorithms are extremely complex and opaque, and depending on the dataset they're trained on, and the features they're trained to focus on, they can very easily wind up just encoding human biases. https://www.theregreview.org/2017/10/10/cramer-bias-computer-algorithms/ https://www.theregreview.org/2017/10/10/cramer-bias-computer...
deleted 9y ago
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PhasmaFelis 9y ago
What you're saying is that some things are (presently, at least) impossible to automate reliably. That's true. The issue is that a reasonable person's response is "I guess we can't automate that yet," not "oh well, let's automate it really poorly instead."
mrtksn 9y ago
You forget the part where the aggregated content is displayed in a different context than the one it is created for. It's perceived as an factual answer to a question because it shows up when googled with keywords other than "Popular on Twitter" : https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/927335154707828736/photo/1 https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/927335154707828736/... When you see these tweets on Twitter, you'll quickly identify them as fake due to the context. On Google on the other hand you will see the false statements but these false statements would not be corrected if these tweets were not the exact content you're looking for and you just consumed them and moved on to the content you were searching.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
pavel_lishin 9y ago
So, a product is badly broken, and you're trying to sell this bug as a feature - not just of the product itself, but of the world we live in?
- wickawic 9y ago
  This is something that programmers (including myself) are often guilty of. We see an implementation and understand what features based on that implementation are difficult/infeasible. Then we say things like "it isn't possible with our architecture" and "It is understandable that the website works in $x way." The flipside is true too: developers are very understanding of bugs/shortcomings that are borne out of the specific implementation. With all this knowledge, it is easy to say things like "people shouldn't use this tool for that" or "users should know this is flaky" At some point you have to fight for the user instead of defend the code.
- colemannugent 9y ago
  No, I suppose my point was more that people think that one of the features of Google search results is correctness, which is false. The main feature of Google searches is that it shows you what it thinks you want to see. The "product" here is the fast search engine that indexes a massive portion of all human knowledge and tries to provide you with results that are meaningful to you all within a quarter of a second. I don't think it is broken, I think it is a miracle that it works as well as it does. Unfortunately, there is no algorithm to determine "the truth", mainly because there is no universal truth. This is a feature of the world we live in, though I suppose you could call it a bug if you think that there should be some kind of universal truth.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    If nearly all of your users believe that your product delivers X, when it actually delivers Y, then your product is still broken.
    - colemannugent 9y ago
      No, your product is not broken. You have a marketing problem. You sold your product as something it was not and now you pay the price of lying to all your users.
Buldak 9y ago
That Google doesn't intend to disseminate fake news does not exculpate them if that is nonetheless a foreseeable consequence of their algorithm.
- yeukhon 9y ago
  How can you determine something IS a fake news? I can post an event I witnessed solely on my own, and yet people can call it fake news. Is UFO a fake news? No scientists have disapproved the possibility of the existence of UFO. I am sure many of the UFO accounts aren't UFO, glare or whatnot. But you cannot punish NYT from reporting "A man from NYC reports UFO sighted over Hudson River and it's getting viral". You cannot until you do editorial work. This is what journalism is all about - not an algorithm's fault. Even NYT isn't immune from inaccurate reports. A responsible journalist has to do research, sometimes, days of research and dozen of interviews, to get a story out. Not simple "oh this is a fake news". No algorithm in the world can solve this problem. Never. Perhaps 1+1 = 3 is a fake news? No. Someone can write a joke about 1+1=3. In fact, we know humans invent the "1". We could have written 1 as "2". So 2+2 = 4 is no longer true. If we could use an algorithm to detect something is a fake news, an improved lie detector would have been produced. Remember history and scientific facts can be rewritten. What's is true today isn't necessarily true tomorrow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_controversies
  - ksk 9y ago
    So why are they calling their product Google News? Why not Google Rumors, or Google Gossip? or "Stuff our Algorithms find to be popular or current but may or may not be true"?
maxerickson 9y ago
Could you explain why it is good for society for Google to not give a shit about what it promotes? I mean, the point of limited liability is not to give investors a path to profit regardless of all other things, it is to encourage investments that are beneficial to society. If it isn't working, we should retink it.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  Because the money they make compared to how much content their serve is miniscule, and the only reason it works is scale. So if you want YouTube/Google/Twitter/Facebook to exist, you have to accept best effort algorithmic solutions, otherwise these services are not commercially viable and will cease to exist. Can we ask these companies to do better? Sure. Can we expect them to be perfect? Not really.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    If they are harming society they don't need to exist. Google could trivially spend $200 million a month on moderation and other editorial functions, they just would rather not.
    - Eridrus 9y ago
      Net-net, I think Google's benefits outweigh it's issues. Economic analysis basically backs that up. I admit I haven't run the numbers on Google, but when I looked at YouTube, requiring human minimum wage moderators to review every video would cost billions of dollars a year - more than the entire site's revenue. So, sure, Google could drop another 200m on moderation, but I don't think that would get you to full moderation, so you still need algorithms in there somewhere.
    - mythrwy 9y ago
      If you want a moderated service use one. Or build one. If Google becomes one (which they appear to be doing in some ways) I'll look for something that is more of a raw aggregator. Google doesn't need to be a social engineer. Nor do many of the others who have decided they know what is "harming society and doesn't need to exist". Like a F*n small town preacher on a crusade to remove a book with dirty words from the library that is.
fredgrott 9y ago
yes but would not AI be an interesting thing to apply to something like this? So the question is why Google is not yet investigating such an application of AI...its not going away..China has started using some of the same techniques as Russia
kadenshep 9y ago
>Google will try to police its results better after this incident, but they can't effectively do this without mass censorship. It's not mass censorship. It's editorialization. Something we've lost an appreciation for in our fetishization of a dystopian future that's always just over the horizon. Facebook tried doing this to combat actual fake news (the one that ironically comes from the political segment in the U.S. most likely to cry wolf about it). This process was then characterized as facebook policing political content in a biased manner -- despite the fact that blatantly false content happened to continually come from sources with a conservative bent more often than not, which isn't Facebook's problem to deal with. Point being, it's not censorship. And I wish any attempt to fight false information wasn't disingenuously painted as these organizations having some kind of political agenda or as "censorship". We need content aggregators of every kind (facebook, google, reddit, and even HN) to be more editorial, especially and specifically when content is presented in a manner that might help how credible that content looks. This whole wish-washy "oh just let the people decide what they wanna see, it'll work out in the end" with a nice touch of "all opinions matter" clearly hasn't and isn't working.
- powertower 9y ago
  > Facebook tried doing this to combat actual fake news (the one that ironically comes from the political segment in the U.S. most likely to cry wolf about it). This process was then characterized as facebook policing political content in a biased manner -- despite the fact that blatantly false content happened to continually come from sources with a conservative bent more often than not, which isn't Facebook's problem to deal with. Assuming we followed the same Facebook story (that intentionally set up boards of people - that were biased - to curtail the news in various ways), it seems like what you are trying to say is that alternative and conservative news is "fakes news", and they should receive algorithmic censorship. Personally, for myself, the last 10 stories I've seen on "neutral" outlets like CNN and to the left outlets like Washington Post / New York / MSNBC - have been 100 percent driven by agenda rather than facts. And the only time I'm able to get anything real is when I go to the other side, in which case all I have to do is tone it down 50%, yet on the left I have to literally invert what they are saying to get at the truth. So how would you categorize which one of us is the idiot whose sources of news should be curtailed? Because I'm actually fine with you listening to CNN.
aljones 9y ago
Its not planned, it just works out that way.
awj 9y ago
I find it appalling that you don't even confront the question of "why are we using algorithms to promote news"? Unless Google can somehow find a way to reliably present factual content, what they're doing here is fundamentally irresponsible. That their choice of editorialization strategy is based on algorithms is entirely besides the point. The proof is in the pudding, and Google's pudding sometimes has chunks of shit in it. The onus is not on me to understand why that shit got there to be able to state that I don't want shit in my pudding.
- blacksmith_tb 9y ago
  But isn't the problem that Google isn't a news outlet? It's essentially showing us all the 'shit' that's floating around on the internet. Going to them expecting to get 'just the facts' is a category error.
  - awj 9y ago
    Except that's exactly the expectation people have of news, and Google calls what they do news. It absolutely isn't a category error on the part of consumers when Google puts themselves in the category.
    - blacksmith_tb 9y ago
      That's fair, to a point. Obviously most of what Google does is search, but "Top Stories" is cheerfully vague. It isn't Google News proper, but I agree it's intentionally confusing.
- colemannugent 9y ago
  >I find it appalling that you don't even confront the question of "why are we using algorithms to promote news"? So you think news could be effectively be curated on Google's scale by humans alone? >Unless Google can somehow find a way to reliably present factual content, what they're doing here is fundamentally irresponsible. Where do they claim that the content they present if factual? You are assuming this. They merely aggregate data, what you do with the data is your responsibility, not Google's. A higher ranking in results does not mean a higher level of accuracy in the content of the result, as anyone researching anything could tell you. >The proof is in the pudding, and Google's pudding sometimes has chunks of shit in it. The onus is not on me to understand why that shit got there to be able to state that I don't want shit in my pudding. I think what you are trying to say here is that you search for things expecting "the truth" to be given to you. Google only gives you things to read, you actually need to read them to determine if you think they're true or not. The onus is on you. Don't believe everything that Google "tells" you. For a while, asking Google Now how tall the current president was (after Trump took office) would still give you Obama's height. Had you not actually looked at your phone, you wouldn't have noticed that the height it spoke back to you was for the wrong president. If you went around claiming Trump was the same height as Obama (they are actually pretty close, but that's besides the point) then you would be wrong and the responsibility would be solely yours for simply accepting whatever Google told you without checking other sources.
dmode 9y ago
As a near monopoly, Google needs to do better than just defer to algorithm. When I searched for the Texas gunman name the first two articles on amp had headlines that he was a Muslim and Antifa. This is literally fake news and Google should be able to prevent gaming of it's algorithm from 4chan types
FussyZeus 9y ago
> and people who don't understand why Google employees did not manually review just one out of one hundred thousand things that the search engine indexed that day are suprised. This drumbeat in recent news where one Silicon Valley firm or another gets caught presenting content designed to illicit response either through outrage, sensationalism, confirmation bias, or whatever via algorithms designed by behavior scientists that find offensive, misleading, false or outright maliciously incorrect content for that purpose which is done via an automated process and then posted to the front pages of various places where people are known to seek information after which the firm apologizes profusely, reminds people that this is just computers finding stuff, and tells everyone not to worry... ...is getting really, really fucking old. You know damn well what your algorithm is looking for. You know damn well it's good at finding it. You know damn well what it's going to do when it finds it. The fact that it's done automated-ly is not an excuse to LET IT KEEP FUCKING DOING THAT and just throw up your hands as if it's something not intended and not designed to do exactly that while you continue raking in the ad revenue because of it. Google's the one in this story but it's far from the worst or only offender. How much longer exactly are we thinking on allowing Silicon Valley firms that make their money on promoting sensationalist garbage to continue to throw up their hands like it isn't exactly what they were meaning to do in pursuit of "eating the world" and walk away without so much as questioning if that may not be the best course of action?
ksk 9y ago
>Of course, Google will try to police its results better after this incident, but they can't effectively do this without mass censorship. If you don't believe me, see the recent YouTube drama over monetization. Well, if you call your product "News" and you promote fake news, that's pretty much a huge sign that you're not ready to ship yet.

ForHackernews 9y ago

Maybe algorithms just aren't up to the task of exercising editorial judgement over news stories? Would the world be that much poorer if Google didn't include a "popular on Twitter" feature? What if Google News were a smaller, human-curated roster of important stories that were basically the same for everyone? (maybe targeted by country) It could be a good thing to have a non-filter bubbled set of news.

SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
It's worth pointing out that Facebook tried the human curation thing and were accused of bias.
- ForHackernews 9y ago
  That's fine: They should own that, then. "We're Facebook and these are our values -- we trust the BBC and do not trust InfoWars.com" These big tech companies are trying to be all things to all people, and they want to pretend that using algorithms means they're free from bias. It's just a different, more opaque bias encoded in the algorithms. But users are inclined to trust it because it comes "from the computer". It's a Garbage In, Gospel Out situation.
- awj 9y ago
  You mean like every human-curated news source since the beginning of time?
ams6110 9y ago
Human curators are biased. Google company culture is left-leaning as a whole, so you'd expect to see that same bias in any curated content they provide.

baybal2 9y ago

>My summary of the article: An algorithm designed by Google engineers to promote upcoming stories does exactly what it was supposed to do, and people who don't understand why Google employees did not manually review just one out of one hundred thousand things that the search engine indexed that day are suprised. That is not entirely correct, big dotcoms do outsource a lot of such mechanical Turk work to outsourcing companies that do such work, and they do prefer to contract ones in places without much contact to English speaking work to prevent mass backlash. >https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/ https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/ A lot of times when such companies claim that something is done by some voodoo magic "smart algorithm," that claim is a lie.

baybal2 9y ago
* s/work/world/

ubernostrum 9y ago

I read it more as Google's blind faith in algorithms finally being loudly and publicly discredited. Baked deeply into Google's corporate DNA is the unquestioned assumption that all you have to do to solve a problem -- any problem -- is throw clever algorithms and compute power at it. Which I suppose might still turn out to be true, but Google has picked off all the low-hanging fruit and is now hitting problems that seem to be well beyond their capabilities to solve algorithmically. But since the whole company is built on the assumption that this would never happen, the are incapable of confronting and dealing with it.

mtgx 9y ago
Algorithms can have bias, too. Like for instance, in the last election, Google removed the more negative expressions that would be suggested alongside politicians' names. That wasn't just the Algorithm™ -- it was Google deciding that. There are likely hundreds of such "manual" decisions within its search algorithms.
- zaarn 9y ago
  Algorithms are generally incapable of bias. What an algorithm does is a perfect reproduction of it's instructions plus it's parameters. The actual bias is either by the designer by making an algorithm that does not fit the intended use properly or by using flawed parameters. Also known as; garbage in, garbage out. The pipe in between doesn't care if it's garbage. In your example, this was a decision by a Google engineer or c-level, not the algorithm. The algorithm did as it was told to in exactly the way it was designed without bias or error.
  - ForHackernews 9y ago
    > Algorithms are generally incapable of bias. This is nonsense unless you define-down "bias" in such a way as to mean "performing contrary to the deterministic result of its implementation" (which seems to be what you're doing, and I agree is impossible). A more sensible definition of bias might be something like "preferentially favouring one outcome over another for reasons unrelated (or even contrary) to the core purpose of the software". Imagine a vending machine that when prompted generically by a user saying "I'm thirsty" always provided sugary soda instead of bottled water. Modern machine learning algorithms are extremely complex and opaque, and depending on the dataset they're trained on, and the features they're trained to focus on, they can very easily wind up just encoding human biases. https://www.theregreview.org/2017/10/10/cramer-bias-computer-algorithms/ https://www.theregreview.org/2017/10/10/cramer-bias-computer...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

PhasmaFelis 9y ago

What you're saying is that some things are (presently, at least) impossible to automate reliably. That's true. The issue is that a reasonable person's response is "I guess we can't automate that yet," not "oh well, let's automate it really poorly instead."

mrtksn 9y ago

You forget the part where the aggregated content is displayed in a different context than the one it is created for. It's perceived as an factual answer to a question because it shows up when googled with keywords other than "Popular on Twitter" : https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/927335154707828736/photo/1 https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/927335154707828736/... When you see these tweets on Twitter, you'll quickly identify them as fake due to the context. On Google on the other hand you will see the false statements but these false statements would not be corrected if these tweets were not the exact content you're looking for and you just consumed them and moved on to the content you were searching.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

pavel_lishin 9y ago

So, a product is badly broken, and you're trying to sell this bug as a feature - not just of the product itself, but of the world we live in?

wickawic 9y ago
This is something that programmers (including myself) are often guilty of. We see an implementation and understand what features based on that implementation are difficult/infeasible. Then we say things like "it isn't possible with our architecture" and "It is understandable that the website works in $x way." The flipside is true too: developers are very understanding of bugs/shortcomings that are borne out of the specific implementation. With all this knowledge, it is easy to say things like "people shouldn't use this tool for that" or "users should know this is flaky" At some point you have to fight for the user instead of defend the code.
colemannugent 9y ago
No, I suppose my point was more that people think that one of the features of Google search results is correctness, which is false. The main feature of Google searches is that it shows you what it thinks you want to see. The "product" here is the fast search engine that indexes a massive portion of all human knowledge and tries to provide you with results that are meaningful to you all within a quarter of a second. I don't think it is broken, I think it is a miracle that it works as well as it does. Unfortunately, there is no algorithm to determine "the truth", mainly because there is no universal truth. This is a feature of the world we live in, though I suppose you could call it a bug if you think that there should be some kind of universal truth.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  If nearly all of your users believe that your product delivers X, when it actually delivers Y, then your product is still broken.
  - colemannugent 9y ago
    No, your product is not broken. You have a marketing problem. You sold your product as something it was not and now you pay the price of lying to all your users.

Buldak 9y ago

That Google doesn't intend to disseminate fake news does not exculpate them if that is nonetheless a foreseeable consequence of their algorithm.

yeukhon 9y ago
How can you determine something IS a fake news? I can post an event I witnessed solely on my own, and yet people can call it fake news. Is UFO a fake news? No scientists have disapproved the possibility of the existence of UFO. I am sure many of the UFO accounts aren't UFO, glare or whatnot. But you cannot punish NYT from reporting "A man from NYC reports UFO sighted over Hudson River and it's getting viral". You cannot until you do editorial work. This is what journalism is all about - not an algorithm's fault. Even NYT isn't immune from inaccurate reports. A responsible journalist has to do research, sometimes, days of research and dozen of interviews, to get a story out. Not simple "oh this is a fake news". No algorithm in the world can solve this problem. Never. Perhaps 1+1 = 3 is a fake news? No. Someone can write a joke about 1+1=3. In fact, we know humans invent the "1". We could have written 1 as "2". So 2+2 = 4 is no longer true. If we could use an algorithm to detect something is a fake news, an improved lie detector would have been produced. Remember history and scientific facts can be rewritten. What's is true today isn't necessarily true tomorrow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_controversies
- ksk 9y ago
  So why are they calling their product Google News? Why not Google Rumors, or Google Gossip? or "Stuff our Algorithms find to be popular or current but may or may not be true"?

maxerickson 9y ago

Could you explain why it is good for society for Google to not give a shit about what it promotes? I mean, the point of limited liability is not to give investors a path to profit regardless of all other things, it is to encourage investments that are beneficial to society. If it isn't working, we should retink it.

Eridrus 9y ago
Because the money they make compared to how much content their serve is miniscule, and the only reason it works is scale. So if you want YouTube/Google/Twitter/Facebook to exist, you have to accept best effort algorithmic solutions, otherwise these services are not commercially viable and will cease to exist. Can we ask these companies to do better? Sure. Can we expect them to be perfect? Not really.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  If they are harming society they don't need to exist. Google could trivially spend $200 million a month on moderation and other editorial functions, they just would rather not.
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    Net-net, I think Google's benefits outweigh it's issues. Economic analysis basically backs that up. I admit I haven't run the numbers on Google, but when I looked at YouTube, requiring human minimum wage moderators to review every video would cost billions of dollars a year - more than the entire site's revenue. So, sure, Google could drop another 200m on moderation, but I don't think that would get you to full moderation, so you still need algorithms in there somewhere.
  - mythrwy 9y ago
    If you want a moderated service use one. Or build one. If Google becomes one (which they appear to be doing in some ways) I'll look for something that is more of a raw aggregator. Google doesn't need to be a social engineer. Nor do many of the others who have decided they know what is "harming society and doesn't need to exist". Like a F*n small town preacher on a crusade to remove a book with dirty words from the library that is.

fredgrott 9y ago

yes but would not AI be an interesting thing to apply to something like this? So the question is why Google is not yet investigating such an application of AI...its not going away..China has started using some of the same techniques as Russia

kadenshep 9y ago

>Google will try to police its results better after this incident, but they can't effectively do this without mass censorship. It's not mass censorship. It's editorialization. Something we've lost an appreciation for in our fetishization of a dystopian future that's always just over the horizon. Facebook tried doing this to combat actual fake news (the one that ironically comes from the political segment in the U.S. most likely to cry wolf about it). This process was then characterized as facebook policing political content in a biased manner -- despite the fact that blatantly false content happened to continually come from sources with a conservative bent more often than not, which isn't Facebook's problem to deal with. Point being, it's not censorship. And I wish any attempt to fight false information wasn't disingenuously painted as these organizations having some kind of political agenda or as "censorship". We need content aggregators of every kind (facebook, google, reddit, and even HN) to be more editorial, especially and specifically when content is presented in a manner that might help how credible that content looks. This whole wish-washy "oh just let the people decide what they wanna see, it'll work out in the end" with a nice touch of "all opinions matter" clearly hasn't and isn't working.

powertower 9y ago
> Facebook tried doing this to combat actual fake news (the one that ironically comes from the political segment in the U.S. most likely to cry wolf about it). This process was then characterized as facebook policing political content in a biased manner -- despite the fact that blatantly false content happened to continually come from sources with a conservative bent more often than not, which isn't Facebook's problem to deal with. Assuming we followed the same Facebook story (that intentionally set up boards of people - that were biased - to curtail the news in various ways), it seems like what you are trying to say is that alternative and conservative news is "fakes news", and they should receive algorithmic censorship. Personally, for myself, the last 10 stories I've seen on "neutral" outlets like CNN and to the left outlets like Washington Post / New York / MSNBC - have been 100 percent driven by agenda rather than facts. And the only time I'm able to get anything real is when I go to the other side, in which case all I have to do is tone it down 50%, yet on the left I have to literally invert what they are saying to get at the truth. So how would you categorize which one of us is the idiot whose sources of news should be curtailed? Because I'm actually fine with you listening to CNN.

aljones 9y ago

Its not planned, it just works out that way.

awj 9y ago

I find it appalling that you don't even confront the question of "why are we using algorithms to promote news"? Unless Google can somehow find a way to reliably present factual content, what they're doing here is fundamentally irresponsible. That their choice of editorialization strategy is based on algorithms is entirely besides the point. The proof is in the pudding, and Google's pudding sometimes has chunks of shit in it. The onus is not on me to understand why that shit got there to be able to state that I don't want shit in my pudding.

blacksmith_tb 9y ago
But isn't the problem that Google isn't a news outlet? It's essentially showing us all the 'shit' that's floating around on the internet. Going to them expecting to get 'just the facts' is a category error.
- awj 9y ago
  Except that's exactly the expectation people have of news, and Google calls what they do news. It absolutely isn't a category error on the part of consumers when Google puts themselves in the category.
  - blacksmith_tb 9y ago
    That's fair, to a point. Obviously most of what Google does is search, but "Top Stories" is cheerfully vague. It isn't Google News proper, but I agree it's intentionally confusing.
colemannugent 9y ago
>I find it appalling that you don't even confront the question of "why are we using algorithms to promote news"? So you think news could be effectively be curated on Google's scale by humans alone? >Unless Google can somehow find a way to reliably present factual content, what they're doing here is fundamentally irresponsible. Where do they claim that the content they present if factual? You are assuming this. They merely aggregate data, what you do with the data is your responsibility, not Google's. A higher ranking in results does not mean a higher level of accuracy in the content of the result, as anyone researching anything could tell you. >The proof is in the pudding, and Google's pudding sometimes has chunks of shit in it. The onus is not on me to understand why that shit got there to be able to state that I don't want shit in my pudding. I think what you are trying to say here is that you search for things expecting "the truth" to be given to you. Google only gives you things to read, you actually need to read them to determine if you think they're true or not. The onus is on you. Don't believe everything that Google "tells" you. For a while, asking Google Now how tall the current president was (after Trump took office) would still give you Obama's height. Had you not actually looked at your phone, you wouldn't have noticed that the height it spoke back to you was for the wrong president. If you went around claiming Trump was the same height as Obama (they are actually pretty close, but that's besides the point) then you would be wrong and the responsibility would be solely yours for simply accepting whatever Google told you without checking other sources.

dmode 9y ago

As a near monopoly, Google needs to do better than just defer to algorithm. When I searched for the Texas gunman name the first two articles on amp had headlines that he was a Muslim and Antifa. This is literally fake news and Google should be able to prevent gaming of it's algorithm from 4chan types

FussyZeus 9y ago

> and people who don't understand why Google employees did not manually review just one out of one hundred thousand things that the search engine indexed that day are suprised. This drumbeat in recent news where one Silicon Valley firm or another gets caught presenting content designed to illicit response either through outrage, sensationalism, confirmation bias, or whatever via algorithms designed by behavior scientists that find offensive, misleading, false or outright maliciously incorrect content for that purpose which is done via an automated process and then posted to the front pages of various places where people are known to seek information after which the firm apologizes profusely, reminds people that this is just computers finding stuff, and tells everyone not to worry... ...is getting really, really fucking old. You know damn well what your algorithm is looking for. You know damn well it's good at finding it. You know damn well what it's going to do when it finds it. The fact that it's done automated-ly is not an excuse to LET IT KEEP FUCKING DOING THAT and just throw up your hands as if it's something not intended and not designed to do exactly that while you continue raking in the ad revenue because of it. Google's the one in this story but it's far from the worst or only offender. How much longer exactly are we thinking on allowing Silicon Valley firms that make their money on promoting sensationalist garbage to continue to throw up their hands like it isn't exactly what they were meaning to do in pursuit of "eating the world" and walk away without so much as questioning if that may not be the best course of action?

ksk 9y ago

>Of course, Google will try to police its results better after this incident, but they can't effectively do this without mass censorship. If you don't believe me, see the recent YouTube drama over monetization. Well, if you call your product "News" and you promote fake news, that's pretty much a huge sign that you're not ready to ship yet.