4 ms·
That Google doesn't intend to disseminate fake news does not exculpate them if that is nonetheless a foreseeable consequence of their algorithm.
by 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 agoHow 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 agoSo 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"?