8 ms·

Look, I am all game for attacking fake news. However, this seems to me like a blanket ban which could apply to anyone. For example, Fox News has a slant which o

Look, I am all game for attacking fake news. However, this seems to me like a blanket ban which could apply to anyone. For example, Fox News has a slant which one could consider highly misleading. Would they get de-ranked too? Wouldn't a better solution be to identify the claims in the article and automatically alert the reader that one or more claims have been debunked? Then let the user decide?

dataminded 9y ago
I'm not sure that most 'readers' are able enough to balance points and counterpoints. If readers were capable of separating fact from fiction, you would think that 'fake news' would be less prominent.
- aalleavitch 9y ago
  They're also being subjected to outright manipulative tactics that aim at where they're weakest emotionally and intellectually in order to exploit their resulting behavior.
  - wahern 9y ago
    What RT exploits are pre-existing prejudices and narratives inculcated by a wholly domestic popular nationalist movement begotten by the GOP. The demonizing of Hillary Clinton, for example, originated with Newt Gingrich's 1994 Contract with America, which saw a resurgent GOP control both the House and Senate for the first time in over 40 years. That was a campaign which normalized calling Hillary Clinton a "bitch" after it came out that that's how Gingrich referred to her in private, and refused to walk it back, instead only lashing out at the leaker, Connie Chung. Ironically (given how events precipitated 15 years later where Democrats adopted the previously-conservative alternative) the main reason (but hardly the only reason) Hillary came to the foreground was because she was appointed to lead a task force to investigate healthcare reform in 1993. Basically, the poisonous, vitriolic, conspiracist, and highly personal attacks of today can be directly and unequivocally traced back to our daemons from the 1990s, some of whom literally walk the halls of government today using the same playbook. Laying the blame on RT and other outlets simply obfuscates things. The Democrats are idiots for their ham-fisted use of the so-called fake news narrative. Not because it's completely wrong, per se, but because the emphasis is so misleading and counter-productive. And it's why so many Republicans are joining the Democrats in the assault on fake news, as they know they have absolutely nothing to lose and a lot to gain in terms of their own credibility, which will undoubtedly be used to perpetuate more poisonous narratives (i.e. Birther Movement, Benghazi, etc). These poisonous narratives are domestic, crafted and perpetuated by domestic, elected politicians. We might as well "de-rank" C-SPAN. For all the techies on HN, we should be pushing back against this GOP and DNC attack on Silicon Valley. The Democrats idiotically created a scape-goat in Silicon Valley and the Republicans happily adopted the narrative. The only people stupider than the Democrats in doing this are Facebook, Google, and Twitter, who seem to have drunk their own kool-aid regarding their social impact and then decided to do a mea culpa. The whole thing is absurd from every conceivable angle. RT is an island of sanity by comparison. At least their own journalists don't believe their propaganda. They aren't fooling themselves; not like all the players in the U.S.
  - s_kilk 9y ago
    So Breitbart, Fox and all their chums should be deranked too.
dleslie 9y ago
Google makes no illusion about it any longer, they aim to curate what their users have access to and want to ensure that the curation conforms to an acceptable spectrum of thought. They are in the business of feeding users advertisements and information, and hitherto that has benefited users with easier access to the world's full breadth of information and ideas. That era is drawing to a close.
- jabretti 9y ago
  >Google makes no illusion about it any longer, they aim to curate what their users have access to and want to ensure that the curation conforms to an acceptable spectrum of thought The good news is: I've finally figured out how to beat google, or at least compete with it. There's billions of dollars on the table for whoever manages to come up with the thing that is to google what Fox News is to CNN.
- koonsolo 9y ago
  > That era is drawing to a close. Or it opens up room for a competitor to take (a part of) that market.
turndown 9y ago
Obviously this is a lazier approach than others that could be taken, but I do think that it's completely fair that a state run news agency would be given less inherent credibility on a wide range of topics(read: any that might effect the nation in a positive/negative way.) How can you guarantee the objectivity of a by-design mouthpiece for a government? You can't.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- rohit2412 9y ago
  Does BBC fit the bill? Al Jazeera?
  - harry8 9y ago
    Just as an aside, if you'd asked me a decade ago whether Al-Jazeera would have the highest quality journalism of any institutional news source and superior to the BBC I would have probably suggested this was vanishingly unlikely. Not sure I'd get my news on Qatar from that source though.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    BBC is public service, not a British state propaganda outlet. RT/Sputnik etc are state sponsored channels. A public service outlet is critical of government, not its mouthpiece. I think this should just be solved algorithmically. Google assigns importance to linked articles and if you assign massive negative importance to fake news outlets and articles then those who reference them or report the same things should drop in ranking. Obviously you’ll need an army of people to decide what is fake news - but I think that’s unavoidable. I beyond the point where I think people can “see all the facts and decide for themselves what to believe in”. It’s unfortunate that we have to hope for some global megacorp to solve our news filtering so people don’t do stupid things.
- wahern 9y ago
  The BBC? I'd be the last person to defend RT, but the cost/benefit of blacklisting such a site belies atrocious foresight. Google is opening up a huge can of worms for what will be very little gain in terms of improving the signal-to-noise ratio of mass media consumption. Facebook, Google, and Twitter are all doing a very poor job of countering the backlash on Capitol Hill. That's partly their own doing as they willfully perpetuated the myth of the magic of their technology. But rather than reign in the misperceptions they're doubling down to save face and making very concrete, very stupid promises.
crooked-v 9y ago
Fox News probably should get de-ranked, yes, in comparison to generally reputable and truthful right-leaning news sources like the Wall Street Journal.
- RawData 9y ago
  Aren't Fox News and the Wall Street Journal owned by the same company? :-P
  - linkregister 9y ago
    Aren't both Google and Crocs owned mostly by the same mutual & index funds, endowments, and retirement accounts? Yet Crocs still makes far more durable products than Google! ;)
chadlavi 9y ago
Fox News, being a stridently partisan media outlet, is a somewhat incendiary example (I edited that sentence a lot to take out more pointed insults about Fox News). A more neutral one is: imagine Google invests in Media Org A, and de-ranks competing Media Org B's sites. Bye bye, Media Org B.
- aalleavitch 9y ago
  We're ignoring the fact that there is an active malicious campaign by elements fueled by the Russian government in order to artificially inflate the visibility of news articles that the Russian government wants people to see. Deranking these articles in response is totally justifiable.
  - knowThySelfx 9y ago
    How did they artificially inflate visibility?
  - averagewall 9y ago
    Replace "Russian government" with the name of any news organization and your claim is (still) true. So your conclusion is based on the presupposition that the Russian government has such incredibly bad things to say that all the world's naive people need to be protected from it. Really? Are they spreading a new global communism ideal or something?
    - aalleavitch 9y ago
      It's worse than that. https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
      - hasenj 9y ago
        And who says that Rand is not fake news?
        9y ago
cooper12 9y ago
Welcome to the murky world of SEO. If you don't like it, use another search engine. It's up to Google how they want to rank websites and what criteria they use. I also doubt the technical feasibility of "identifying debunked claims". By annotating results and providing commentary, you take up an editorial stance.
grandalf 9y ago
This is the right thing to be concerned about. It takes an incredible amount of chauvinism and arrogance to believe that the American people are too stupid to realize that perhaps a news source called "Russia Today" might publish articles that would reflect unflattering aspects of American society and unflattering stories about American politicians. If our domestic news outlets reported on these things there would have been no market share left to be grabbed by RT in the first place. Schmidt seems to want to suppress such ideas, helping to suppress these unflattering stories so that the Al Frankens, Donald Trumps, and George HW Bushes of the world can stay in power. As an aside, Schmidt is the ultimate establishment opportunist, so of course he would do this sort of thing. He cares only about making Eric Schmidt powerful. > Wouldn't a better solution be to identify the claims in the article and automatically alert the reader that one or more claims have been debunked? Then let the user decide? Of course that would be better. It would also be what a capable tech firm should do to help create an informed populace. But Schmidt doesn't want that, he simply wants to be viewed as one of the "good guys" by the partisans who are promoting the Russia story and trying to make political headway with it. I have zero respect for Trump, but the Russia story is total bunk and RT has published more important stories about America's disadvantaged citizens and failing infrastructure than all of the major news outlets combined. This also probably reveals that Google rankings can no longer be trusted simply to reveal pagerank results with corrections for spam and pagerank exploits. Note to Google: We do not want you to be an information censor or a moderator of the ideas that we are exposed to. Please stop.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- linkregister 9y ago
  Why did you link Schmidt with Al Franken?
  - grandalf 9y ago
    The men I listed are examples of powerful Americans who are abusers of power. Franken is among them. The US media pretends that senators, presidents, etc., deserve some sort of bizarre deference. They do not, and we'd all be better off if they were assumed to be scoundrels.
api 9y ago
Yes but wow is that an order of magnitude harder.
akras14 9y ago
Amen
krick 9y ago
When you say "better", remember to ask yourself, "better for who?" For you? Honestly, I'm pretty sure Google doesn't care what would be better for you. You're a product, not a customer. Now, who is a customer, then? Usually, answer seems pretty obvious, but you couldn't answer it regarding this particular case, could you? It might be government, it might be some other company, it might be Schmidt himself for whatever reason… And it seems to me, the fact you are being sold without even being able to tell who likely buys you anymore is even more noteworthy than the notion itself.
FussyZeus 9y ago
I'm honestly tired of hearing this (don't take it personally, I just read it a lot) argument that "Well what if we ban Fox News? Where does it stop? It stops where we bloody well want it to. Fox News is not the only news org that puts out crap content on the regular, they're just one of the bigger ones. CNN has a similar problem in the other direction, both doing the same basic tactic; taking and leaving facts and figures that don't suit what they want to say. The vast majority of news networks yes, have a bias, but also report more or less the facts with more or less a complete picture. There are only a few news orgs out there that report just plain, outright, easily disproven bullshit and at the front of them is Fox News, that, in perhaps an honest attempt to counter the bias of most mainstream media, -or- in a cynical cash grab picked up and stoked the fears of white middle America, choose the narrative you prefer. Outside of that, most are relatively fine. And yes, get Fox News the hell off Google. I'm all for it. Let's get rid of CNN too for the same reasons, and make news agencies compete for ranking based on who gets the story RIGHT, not who gets it FIRST.
- blux 9y ago
  Who decides what the right story is? Right and wrong should be decided in public debate. Not be some private or governmental entity deciding for us what is right and wrong.
  - FussyZeus 9y ago
    Facts are not up for debate. For way too long we’ve allowed idiots to argue facts with opinions. Your opinions are less valuable than facts. So are mine. We need to be dealing in reality, everything else is noise.
    - goialoq 9y ago
      How do we now which facts are true and which are fake?
      - bostik 9y ago
        Fact checking. You know - that tedious, slow, boring, and often costly activity which proper journalists are supposed to undertake before publication.
bshur 9y ago
I think the difference is that RT is literally registered as a foreign agent now, so everything they produce is actual propaganda in some form. It doesn't mean that it is all fake news -- actually, the most dangerous articles are somewhat true but intentionally misleading or sensationalizing some component of a true story that helps Russia's cause.
- harry8 9y ago
  This is precisely what people often claim of the New York Times Israel coverage. Should we de-rank it? I think the NYT is the best newspaper in the world but wouldn't dream of reading it uncritically...
- smsm42 9y ago
  > RT is literally registered as a foreign agent now They were forced to register, AFAIK. I'm not sure how that proves anything. I mean, I know that RT is a propaganda outlet, but them complying with some law requiring registration is not proving anything - it's like saying "you paid taxes therefore you are a spy". Total non-sequitur. > the most dangerous articles are somewhat true but intentionally misleading or sensationalizing some component Which of course US press would never dream of doing. Have you watched any news recently?
eclectic 9y ago
A better solution is to allow only approved non-fake information to ever reach the reader. Any internet search should provide one true answer as determined by Google.
blubb-fish 9y ago
Deranking FOX would be an atrocious attack on investigative journalism and drain the brave people of the United States of America of a very valuable news source! just my ¢2.

dataminded 9y ago

I'm not sure that most 'readers' are able enough to balance points and counterpoints. If readers were capable of separating fact from fiction, you would think that 'fake news' would be less prominent.

aalleavitch 9y ago
They're also being subjected to outright manipulative tactics that aim at where they're weakest emotionally and intellectually in order to exploit their resulting behavior.
- wahern 9y ago
  What RT exploits are pre-existing prejudices and narratives inculcated by a wholly domestic popular nationalist movement begotten by the GOP. The demonizing of Hillary Clinton, for example, originated with Newt Gingrich's 1994 Contract with America, which saw a resurgent GOP control both the House and Senate for the first time in over 40 years. That was a campaign which normalized calling Hillary Clinton a "bitch" after it came out that that's how Gingrich referred to her in private, and refused to walk it back, instead only lashing out at the leaker, Connie Chung. Ironically (given how events precipitated 15 years later where Democrats adopted the previously-conservative alternative) the main reason (but hardly the only reason) Hillary came to the foreground was because she was appointed to lead a task force to investigate healthcare reform in 1993. Basically, the poisonous, vitriolic, conspiracist, and highly personal attacks of today can be directly and unequivocally traced back to our daemons from the 1990s, some of whom literally walk the halls of government today using the same playbook. Laying the blame on RT and other outlets simply obfuscates things. The Democrats are idiots for their ham-fisted use of the so-called fake news narrative. Not because it's completely wrong, per se, but because the emphasis is so misleading and counter-productive. And it's why so many Republicans are joining the Democrats in the assault on fake news, as they know they have absolutely nothing to lose and a lot to gain in terms of their own credibility, which will undoubtedly be used to perpetuate more poisonous narratives (i.e. Birther Movement, Benghazi, etc). These poisonous narratives are domestic, crafted and perpetuated by domestic, elected politicians. We might as well "de-rank" C-SPAN. For all the techies on HN, we should be pushing back against this GOP and DNC attack on Silicon Valley. The Democrats idiotically created a scape-goat in Silicon Valley and the Republicans happily adopted the narrative. The only people stupider than the Democrats in doing this are Facebook, Google, and Twitter, who seem to have drunk their own kool-aid regarding their social impact and then decided to do a mea culpa. The whole thing is absurd from every conceivable angle. RT is an island of sanity by comparison. At least their own journalists don't believe their propaganda. They aren't fooling themselves; not like all the players in the U.S.
- s_kilk 9y ago
  So Breitbart, Fox and all their chums should be deranked too.

dleslie 9y ago

Google makes no illusion about it any longer, they aim to curate what their users have access to and want to ensure that the curation conforms to an acceptable spectrum of thought. They are in the business of feeding users advertisements and information, and hitherto that has benefited users with easier access to the world's full breadth of information and ideas. That era is drawing to a close.

jabretti 9y ago
>Google makes no illusion about it any longer, they aim to curate what their users have access to and want to ensure that the curation conforms to an acceptable spectrum of thought The good news is: I've finally figured out how to beat google, or at least compete with it. There's billions of dollars on the table for whoever manages to come up with the thing that is to google what Fox News is to CNN.
koonsolo 9y ago
> That era is drawing to a close. Or it opens up room for a competitor to take (a part of) that market.

turndown 9y ago

Obviously this is a lazier approach than others that could be taken, but I do think that it's completely fair that a state run news agency would be given less inherent credibility on a wide range of topics(read: any that might effect the nation in a positive/negative way.) How can you guarantee the objectivity of a by-design mouthpiece for a government? You can't.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rohit2412 9y ago
Does BBC fit the bill? Al Jazeera?
- harry8 9y ago
  Just as an aside, if you'd asked me a decade ago whether Al-Jazeera would have the highest quality journalism of any institutional news source and superior to the BBC I would have probably suggested this was vanishingly unlikely. Not sure I'd get my news on Qatar from that source though.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  BBC is public service, not a British state propaganda outlet. RT/Sputnik etc are state sponsored channels. A public service outlet is critical of government, not its mouthpiece. I think this should just be solved algorithmically. Google assigns importance to linked articles and if you assign massive negative importance to fake news outlets and articles then those who reference them or report the same things should drop in ranking. Obviously you’ll need an army of people to decide what is fake news - but I think that’s unavoidable. I beyond the point where I think people can “see all the facts and decide for themselves what to believe in”. It’s unfortunate that we have to hope for some global megacorp to solve our news filtering so people don’t do stupid things.
wahern 9y ago
The BBC? I'd be the last person to defend RT, but the cost/benefit of blacklisting such a site belies atrocious foresight. Google is opening up a huge can of worms for what will be very little gain in terms of improving the signal-to-noise ratio of mass media consumption. Facebook, Google, and Twitter are all doing a very poor job of countering the backlash on Capitol Hill. That's partly their own doing as they willfully perpetuated the myth of the magic of their technology. But rather than reign in the misperceptions they're doubling down to save face and making very concrete, very stupid promises.

crooked-v 9y ago

Fox News probably should get de-ranked, yes, in comparison to generally reputable and truthful right-leaning news sources like the Wall Street Journal.

RawData 9y ago
Aren't Fox News and the Wall Street Journal owned by the same company? :-P
- linkregister 9y ago
  Aren't both Google and Crocs owned mostly by the same mutual & index funds, endowments, and retirement accounts? Yet Crocs still makes far more durable products than Google! ;)

chadlavi 9y ago

Fox News, being a stridently partisan media outlet, is a somewhat incendiary example (I edited that sentence a lot to take out more pointed insults about Fox News). A more neutral one is: imagine Google invests in Media Org A, and de-ranks competing Media Org B's sites. Bye bye, Media Org B.

aalleavitch 9y ago
We're ignoring the fact that there is an active malicious campaign by elements fueled by the Russian government in order to artificially inflate the visibility of news articles that the Russian government wants people to see. Deranking these articles in response is totally justifiable.
- knowThySelfx 9y ago
  How did they artificially inflate visibility?
- averagewall 9y ago
  Replace "Russian government" with the name of any news organization and your claim is (still) true. So your conclusion is based on the presupposition that the Russian government has such incredibly bad things to say that all the world's naive people need to be protected from it. Really? Are they spreading a new global communism ideal or something?
  - aalleavitch 9y ago
    It's worse than that. https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
    - hasenj 9y ago
      And who says that Rand is not fake news?
      - 9y ago

cooper12 9y ago

Welcome to the murky world of SEO. If you don't like it, use another search engine. It's up to Google how they want to rank websites and what criteria they use. I also doubt the technical feasibility of "identifying debunked claims". By annotating results and providing commentary, you take up an editorial stance.

grandalf 9y ago

This is the right thing to be concerned about. It takes an incredible amount of chauvinism and arrogance to believe that the American people are too stupid to realize that perhaps a news source called "Russia Today" might publish articles that would reflect unflattering aspects of American society and unflattering stories about American politicians. If our domestic news outlets reported on these things there would have been no market share left to be grabbed by RT in the first place. Schmidt seems to want to suppress such ideas, helping to suppress these unflattering stories so that the Al Frankens, Donald Trumps, and George HW Bushes of the world can stay in power. As an aside, Schmidt is the ultimate establishment opportunist, so of course he would do this sort of thing. He cares only about making Eric Schmidt powerful. > Wouldn't a better solution be to identify the claims in the article and automatically alert the reader that one or more claims have been debunked? Then let the user decide? Of course that would be better. It would also be what a capable tech firm should do to help create an informed populace. But Schmidt doesn't want that, he simply wants to be viewed as one of the "good guys" by the partisans who are promoting the Russia story and trying to make political headway with it. I have zero respect for Trump, but the Russia story is total bunk and RT has published more important stories about America's disadvantaged citizens and failing infrastructure than all of the major news outlets combined. This also probably reveals that Google rankings can no longer be trusted simply to reveal pagerank results with corrections for spam and pagerank exploits. Note to Google: We do not want you to be an information censor or a moderator of the ideas that we are exposed to. Please stop.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
linkregister 9y ago
Why did you link Schmidt with Al Franken?
- grandalf 9y ago
  The men I listed are examples of powerful Americans who are abusers of power. Franken is among them. The US media pretends that senators, presidents, etc., deserve some sort of bizarre deference. They do not, and we'd all be better off if they were assumed to be scoundrels.

api 9y ago

Yes but wow is that an order of magnitude harder.

akras14 9y ago

Amen

krick 9y ago

When you say "better", remember to ask yourself, "better for who?" For you? Honestly, I'm pretty sure Google doesn't care what would be better for you. You're a product, not a customer. Now, who is a customer, then? Usually, answer seems pretty obvious, but you couldn't answer it regarding this particular case, could you? It might be government, it might be some other company, it might be Schmidt himself for whatever reason… And it seems to me, the fact you are being sold without even being able to tell who likely buys you anymore is even more noteworthy than the notion itself.

FussyZeus 9y ago

I'm honestly tired of hearing this (don't take it personally, I just read it a lot) argument that "Well what if we ban Fox News? Where does it stop? It stops where we bloody well want it to. Fox News is not the only news org that puts out crap content on the regular, they're just one of the bigger ones. CNN has a similar problem in the other direction, both doing the same basic tactic; taking and leaving facts and figures that don't suit what they want to say. The vast majority of news networks yes, have a bias, but also report more or less the facts with more or less a complete picture. There are only a few news orgs out there that report just plain, outright, easily disproven bullshit and at the front of them is Fox News, that, in perhaps an honest attempt to counter the bias of most mainstream media, -or- in a cynical cash grab picked up and stoked the fears of white middle America, choose the narrative you prefer. Outside of that, most are relatively fine. And yes, get Fox News the hell off Google. I'm all for it. Let's get rid of CNN too for the same reasons, and make news agencies compete for ranking based on who gets the story RIGHT, not who gets it FIRST.

blux 9y ago
Who decides what the right story is? Right and wrong should be decided in public debate. Not be some private or governmental entity deciding for us what is right and wrong.
- FussyZeus 9y ago
  Facts are not up for debate. For way too long we’ve allowed idiots to argue facts with opinions. Your opinions are less valuable than facts. So are mine. We need to be dealing in reality, everything else is noise.
  - goialoq 9y ago
    How do we now which facts are true and which are fake?
    - bostik 9y ago
      Fact checking. You know - that tedious, slow, boring, and often costly activity which proper journalists are supposed to undertake before publication.

bshur 9y ago

I think the difference is that RT is literally registered as a foreign agent now, so everything they produce is actual propaganda in some form. It doesn't mean that it is all fake news -- actually, the most dangerous articles are somewhat true but intentionally misleading or sensationalizing some component of a true story that helps Russia's cause.

harry8 9y ago
This is precisely what people often claim of the New York Times Israel coverage. Should we de-rank it? I think the NYT is the best newspaper in the world but wouldn't dream of reading it uncritically...
smsm42 9y ago
> RT is literally registered as a foreign agent now They were forced to register, AFAIK. I'm not sure how that proves anything. I mean, I know that RT is a propaganda outlet, but them complying with some law requiring registration is not proving anything - it's like saying "you paid taxes therefore you are a spy". Total non-sequitur. > the most dangerous articles are somewhat true but intentionally misleading or sensationalizing some component Which of course US press would never dream of doing. Have you watched any news recently?

eclectic 9y ago

A better solution is to allow only approved non-fake information to ever reach the reader. Any internet search should provide one true answer as determined by Google.

blubb-fish 9y ago

Deranking FOX would be an atrocious attack on investigative journalism and drain the brave people of the United States of America of a very valuable news source! just my ¢2.