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@deelowe, sure. - https://boingboing.net/2019/05/02/facebook-just-deplatformed-a-b.html https://boingboing.net/2019/05/02/facebook-just-deplatformed... - http

by tucaz 7y ago

@deelowe, sure. - https://boingboing.net/2019/05/02/facebook-just-deplatformed-a-b.html https://boingboing.net/2019/05/02/facebook-just-deplatformed... - https://mashable.com/article/deplatforming-alex-jones-2018/ https://mashable.com/article/deplatforming-alex-jones-2018/ I can probably find a lot more, but I guess this is enough to make the point, right? > Unless Google doesn't want that. If that's the case, them they are a publisher and not a platform. Would you rather fight spammers and keep free-speech alive or give it up over to Google and other platforms? I know where I stand.

jasode 7y ago
>deplatforming Alex Jones Just as a datapoint, I just googled "Alex Jones"[0] about 5 minutes after your comment and his Infowars website is prominently shown on page 1 as the 3rd result[1]. I don't have a Facebook account but it doesn't look like Google Search in particular has deplatformed Alex Jones. (To the downvoters, this thread's topic is the Columbia Journalism Review story and it's about referrals from Google Search and not Youtube. The comment by liara_k is also specifically about the Google search engine and that's what tucaz was replying to. If my screenshot of Google search engine results does not contribute to the discussion, please explain why.) [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=alex+jones https://www.google.com/search?q=alex+jones [1] https://imgur.com/a/KDVBHcJ https://imgur.com/a/KDVBHcJ
deelowe 7y ago
The two links you provided were cases where Google acts as the publisher (e.g. youtube). This doesn't apply to the premise of the article, which was specific to search and curation of news outlets. > Would you rather fight spammers and keep free-speech alive or give it up over to Google and other platforms? You appear to be mixing search and youtube. If I search for Alex Jones, the second hit is infowars. First is wikipedia.
KirinDave 7y ago
This is a false dichotomy. We're not actually required to make this choice. Literally nothing forces you or anyone to use Google. The reason folks flock to their products despite costs and the occasional awkward depreciation is because they execute pretty well and they have one of the best security track records in the industry. Attempting to co-opt that for "free speech" by injecting stories onto their pages that are more agreeable to a "balanced" interpretation is not a free speech approach. What's more, many of the headline proposals in this article text (e.g., Kaepernick and Tax Reform) are tough to give the rightward view on without facing direct misinformation, because the politicians on the right have engaged very directly in misinformation about taxes and deliberately tried to intimidate free speech in atheletes (above and beyond what influence the average American has). Saying that any news outlet should make a special exemption for calling these out to be "balanced" is to propose that telling the truth is a liberal approach, and I find that idea pretty repugnant on it's face for a variety of reasons (not the least of which being that it gives way too much credit to the center left of America). As for Alex Jones, I don't know how many brazen and horrifying lies you need to literally go to court and plead that you're a comedy show for before you lose the right to use the veil of serving the public interest. Is a transparent desire to lie with the intent to deceive not a DQ for being a "journalist" now? At what point DO we say, "You do you, Alex, but we're not a part of this anymore?" And if Alex gets that privilege, are you going to fall over yourself to similarly defend the Democratic Socialists of America and antifa actions? I suspect for most people that is a "No."
tucaz 7y ago
@deelowe, By using the word "mixing" up you are implying that I have confused two separate things, which I didn't. They are not two separate things. Google enjoys the status of a platform in all of its products. The links I provided talk about YouTube and other platforms and demonstrate how they act as a publisher and not as a platform and the submitted article demonstrates how search results are skewed towards a direction. Can you please point where my argument is flawed?
- deelowe 7y ago
  Your argument is flawed because there was no evidence given of search results being censored. This is the premise of the article; some sort of biased, preferable treatment being given to certain news sites. Throwing youtube and facebook into the mix, which are curated platforms (AKA publishers) and one of which is clearly NOT Google, is disingenuous. Those platforms are not expected to be unbiased in their results.
cromwellian 7y ago
> Would you rather fight spammers and keep free-speech alive or give it up over to Google and other platforms? Spam is a form of censorship. Too much of it and it becomes a denial of service attack that makes publishing impossible. Let's say you claim you have free speech, because you can go into any park, stand on a soapbox, and give a speech. Only, I have blanketed every major park with loud speakers that overwhelm what you say with noise, or GPT-2 generated fake speeches run through WaveNet. I used to believe that 'the solution to bad speech is just more speech', but this was a naive pre-mass internet view of how speech and publishing works. In a word where robots can literally saturate every one of your media channels, spam up your email, your phone with robo calls, your text messages, the idea of these platform providers NOT filtering and censoring is itself a form of assault on free speech and public conversation in the town square.
- tucaz 7y ago
  I think now we are getting somewhere with the discussion. I like your points. What you described is a real problem and I believe that’s the problem we have to solve. I’m not a lawyer but I’m pretty sure that situations like the one you described where free speech is negated are already addressed on the law. So spammers would be treated by it. In that case, platforms would work to identify the sources and work with the justice department to prevent specific actors from performing crimes such as spamming and DDOSing. This would be fine, in my opinion, because now everybody would be working against known criminals with specific and objective criteria as to why they should be “deplatformed”. However, what Google is doing today is removing or de-prioritizing content that diverge from its opinion without any recourse for the person affected because they are not treated as publishers and THAT is not okay.
  - tucaz 7y ago
    I know I will probably get downvoted by this comment, but I find it really interesting that in 2 hours I got 4 downvotes just in this comment and no argument to explain it. I know downvoting is a tool that is available to us, but it really strikes me when someone is willing to cast a "negative" vote anonymously and most likely with no fundamentals attached to it instead of engaging in a respectful argument where all opinions are presented.
PorterDuff 7y ago
I'd love to know what knobs are turned at those companies to alter results, it's something of a trade secret I guess. Just to see for myself, I picked a search that should churn up a guy that they might find irritating and did 10 seconds of anecdotal research. Search was 'vox day blog'. Google, Yandex, Startpage return his blog as the first entry (perhaps after an ad). Goduckgo it was the sixth entry. Bing, it never showed up. I got bored after the first dozen pages. What exactly does this prove? Not being a web/seach engine guy I don't know. What I'd like to find is a search engine for which I could build a great big list of curated sites with zero results from others. I tend to look up the same things a lot and after a year or two of additions it might be a really nice thing to have.
komali2 7y ago
Those don't appear to be examples of Google removing content. Thus if you have more examples, I would be interested.
aflag 7y ago
Neither source you link even mentions google. Yes, please find a lot more. That was not enough to make the point.

by tucaz 7y ago

jasode 7y ago

>deplatforming Alex Jones Just as a datapoint, I just googled "Alex Jones"[0] about 5 minutes after your comment and his Infowars website is prominently shown on page 1 as the 3rd result[1]. I don't have a Facebook account but it doesn't look like Google Search in particular has deplatformed Alex Jones. (To the downvoters, this thread's topic is the Columbia Journalism Review story and it's about referrals from Google Search and not Youtube. The comment by liara_k is also specifically about the Google search engine and that's what tucaz was replying to. If my screenshot of Google search engine results does not contribute to the discussion, please explain why.) [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=alex+jones https://www.google.com/search?q=alex+jones [1] https://imgur.com/a/KDVBHcJ https://imgur.com/a/KDVBHcJ

deelowe 7y ago

The two links you provided were cases where Google acts as the publisher (e.g. youtube). This doesn't apply to the premise of the article, which was specific to search and curation of news outlets. > Would you rather fight spammers and keep free-speech alive or give it up over to Google and other platforms? You appear to be mixing search and youtube. If I search for Alex Jones, the second hit is infowars. First is wikipedia.

KirinDave 7y ago

This is a false dichotomy. We're not actually required to make this choice. Literally nothing forces you or anyone to use Google. The reason folks flock to their products despite costs and the occasional awkward depreciation is because they execute pretty well and they have one of the best security track records in the industry. Attempting to co-opt that for "free speech" by injecting stories onto their pages that are more agreeable to a "balanced" interpretation is not a free speech approach. What's more, many of the headline proposals in this article text (e.g., Kaepernick and Tax Reform) are tough to give the rightward view on without facing direct misinformation, because the politicians on the right have engaged very directly in misinformation about taxes and deliberately tried to intimidate free speech in atheletes (above and beyond what influence the average American has). Saying that any news outlet should make a special exemption for calling these out to be "balanced" is to propose that telling the truth is a liberal approach, and I find that idea pretty repugnant on it's face for a variety of reasons (not the least of which being that it gives way too much credit to the center left of America). As for Alex Jones, I don't know how many brazen and horrifying lies you need to literally go to court and plead that you're a comedy show for before you lose the right to use the veil of serving the public interest. Is a transparent desire to lie with the intent to deceive not a DQ for being a "journalist" now? At what point DO we say, "You do you, Alex, but we're not a part of this anymore?" And if Alex gets that privilege, are you going to fall over yourself to similarly defend the Democratic Socialists of America and antifa actions? I suspect for most people that is a "No."

tucaz 7y ago

@deelowe, By using the word "mixing" up you are implying that I have confused two separate things, which I didn't. They are not two separate things. Google enjoys the status of a platform in all of its products. The links I provided talk about YouTube and other platforms and demonstrate how they act as a publisher and not as a platform and the submitted article demonstrates how search results are skewed towards a direction. Can you please point where my argument is flawed?

deelowe 7y ago
Your argument is flawed because there was no evidence given of search results being censored. This is the premise of the article; some sort of biased, preferable treatment being given to certain news sites. Throwing youtube and facebook into the mix, which are curated platforms (AKA publishers) and one of which is clearly NOT Google, is disingenuous. Those platforms are not expected to be unbiased in their results.

cromwellian 7y ago

> Would you rather fight spammers and keep free-speech alive or give it up over to Google and other platforms? Spam is a form of censorship. Too much of it and it becomes a denial of service attack that makes publishing impossible. Let's say you claim you have free speech, because you can go into any park, stand on a soapbox, and give a speech. Only, I have blanketed every major park with loud speakers that overwhelm what you say with noise, or GPT-2 generated fake speeches run through WaveNet. I used to believe that 'the solution to bad speech is just more speech', but this was a naive pre-mass internet view of how speech and publishing works. In a word where robots can literally saturate every one of your media channels, spam up your email, your phone with robo calls, your text messages, the idea of these platform providers NOT filtering and censoring is itself a form of assault on free speech and public conversation in the town square.

tucaz 7y ago
I think now we are getting somewhere with the discussion. I like your points. What you described is a real problem and I believe that’s the problem we have to solve. I’m not a lawyer but I’m pretty sure that situations like the one you described where free speech is negated are already addressed on the law. So spammers would be treated by it. In that case, platforms would work to identify the sources and work with the justice department to prevent specific actors from performing crimes such as spamming and DDOSing. This would be fine, in my opinion, because now everybody would be working against known criminals with specific and objective criteria as to why they should be “deplatformed”. However, what Google is doing today is removing or de-prioritizing content that diverge from its opinion without any recourse for the person affected because they are not treated as publishers and THAT is not okay.
- tucaz 7y ago
  I know I will probably get downvoted by this comment, but I find it really interesting that in 2 hours I got 4 downvotes just in this comment and no argument to explain it. I know downvoting is a tool that is available to us, but it really strikes me when someone is willing to cast a "negative" vote anonymously and most likely with no fundamentals attached to it instead of engaging in a respectful argument where all opinions are presented.

PorterDuff 7y ago

I'd love to know what knobs are turned at those companies to alter results, it's something of a trade secret I guess. Just to see for myself, I picked a search that should churn up a guy that they might find irritating and did 10 seconds of anecdotal research. Search was 'vox day blog'. Google, Yandex, Startpage return his blog as the first entry (perhaps after an ad). Goduckgo it was the sixth entry. Bing, it never showed up. I got bored after the first dozen pages. What exactly does this prove? Not being a web/seach engine guy I don't know. What I'd like to find is a search engine for which I could build a great big list of curated sites with zero results from others. I tend to look up the same things a lot and after a year or two of additions it might be a really nice thing to have.

komali2 7y ago

Those don't appear to be examples of Google removing content. Thus if you have more examples, I would be interested.

aflag 7y ago

Neither source you link even mentions google. Yes, please find a lot more. That was not enough to make the point.