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Just speaking strictly on a moral level, there seems to be a qualitative difference between Google saying "Joe is a pedophile" versus "That guy Bob over there i

Just speaking strictly on a moral level, there seems to be a qualitative difference between Google saying "Joe is a pedophile" versus "That guy Bob over there is saying that Joe is a pedophile". The first statement is either true or false. The second statement is inarguably factually true and casts no moral judgement on Joe.

richthegeek 3y ago
Keeping the metaphor, it's responding to the question of "Do you know Joe?" with "Yes, and that guy Bob over there says Joe is a pedophile" whenever asked.
- brvsft 3y ago
  How about, "What do you know about Joe?" "I know that guy Bob over there says Joe is a pedophile."
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
hackernewds 3y ago
This is a rational take. And worth considering, fwiw I agree with it I'm distressed further by other threads that begin to point this out being derailed with comments like "America should to keep to its own borders" and unrelated factoids about oil wars. This is not just an American precedent.
cmeacham98 3y ago
You are missing the part where Google ranks search results. If you Google "Joe" and the first result is "Bob says Joe is a pedophile", Google is implicitly saying that is the single most important result about Joe. Thus, I reject this argument unless Google is willing to argue its search result ranking is no better than random chance and that results on the first page are equally as relevant and useful as those on the last.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Results on the last page may very well be as useful as results on the first, if not more so. Especially considering for a lot of search queries there's countless biz and nefarious individuals gaming the SERPs with SEO schemes. IMO, how Google presents data to users is largely worthless in 2023 unless you are utilizing special operators like quotation marks and minuses. Even then, it's really how the user is choosing to filter through that data.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- logicalmonster 3y ago
  You understand that Google doesn't rank search results based on how objectively factually true they are, right?
  - mptest 3y ago
    Isn't that kinda reductive? We absolutely do expect google to be somewhat legitimate and correct, in a wide range of queries. In the most generous to your meaning terms, We expect them to, when googling stuff about someone, not rank a random tweet alongside a nyt article, right?
    - logicalmonster 3y ago
      > We absolutely do expect google to be somewhat legitimate and correct, in a wide range of queries. I don't have any such expectation. Why do you have such an expectation? Google is not magic. It is impossible to divine objective reality from counting links. > We expect them to, when googling stuff about someone, not rank a random tweet alongside a nyt article, right? If a random everyday Joe had a New York Times article written about them, I'd expect that to rank at, or very near, the top. However, most people not only don't have an NYT article written about them, most have almost nothing about them online other than some standard social media or random data brokers content. So it seems likely that some unique content about a random Joe should probably rank highly because there's no real competition. That doesn't imply its true.
cjbgkagh 3y ago
The problem is that people trust the internet too much, removing false information would make that worse. People will think ‘if that wasn’t true then they’d be forced to remove it, since it wasn’t removed it must be true’. Maybe the solution is more fake news not less of it.
- prettyStandard 3y ago
  lol. I've got good news for you.
- eviks 3y ago
  Doesn't square: they already trusted it before removal ("trust too much"), so the only difference is that fewer people will seeit if it's removed
  - cjbgkagh 3y ago
    Too much trust is much easier to fix than too little trust. Like how chaos engineering seeks to improve resiliency by introducing damaging noise. There is also the idea of 'anti-fragile' coined by Nassim Taleb.
xwdv 3y ago
But that’s not really the way information works. If you say that and don’t immediately follow up with saying “but Bob is an untrustworthy source of information and is often full of shit, don’t believe it”, then a person looking for information on whether or not Joe is a pedophile will take that as a ringing endorsement of Bob’s statement.
- unixgoddess 3y ago
  how so? it's your responsibility as an adult to understand that Bob is some random guy you don't know, so you can't trust him
  - dahwolf 3y ago
    That's not how defamation works. You're saying that if the statement is out there, surely people will do a deep investigation into the correctness of it? They won't.
    - unixgoddess 3y ago
      OP was saying that even the sentence "bob says that jim is x" is defamation because readers will take it as "a ringing endorsement of bob's statement", which is patently untrue unless you are a little kid.
      - xwdv 3y ago
        It is not patently untrue. It wholly depends on the reader’s opinion of Bob. Also most people’s intelligence is not that much greater than that of a little kid. They are only more knowledgeable, but not necessarily more intelligent.
balderdash 3y ago
But doesn’t google’s moral responsibility change once it’s been informed that the statement in question is likely illegal/incorrect/etc.
- paulcole 3y ago
  Informed by who? Does that informer ever have incentives to wrongly declare some statements illegal/incorrect/etc.?
- eviks 3y ago
  No, it's always being informed of all the opposite sides of every issue, so you need something else to support censoring a specific side
xeromal 3y ago
If your dad told you someone is a pedo and you have many more friends than your dad, but you yell out "My dad says so and so is a pedo". I still think some of the onus is on you to shut your mouth if you're told to do so.
bloak 3y ago
I know that sounds logical ... but it doesn't work in practice and that's why the law doesn't work like that. We don't want a situation in which newspapers and other powerful organisations can avoid being sued for libel simply by prefixing every article with "$RANDOM_PERSON says". If libel law were just going to be a booby trap for ordinary people who don't have legal advisors like newspapers do then it would be better not to have any libel law.
birdyrooster 3y ago
Maybe if you have a limited scope of morality and you don’t want to think hard, sure.
icegreentea2 3y ago
This might be true before the plaintiff contacted Google, but once contacted by the plaintiff the situation might be more like: I know that "Bob says Joe is a pedophile" and "Joe says that he is not a pedophile". It is factually true for you to continue to say that "Bob says that Joe is a pedophile", but if that's ALL that your saying, then morally you're lying by omission. It is of course an interesting question of how to boil this situation down to the reality of how a search engine works and displays results, but the general point stands that your presented situation isn't really representative of the ruling. Oh, also in this specific case the claim wasn't that Joe is a pedophile, it's that Joe was a convicted pedophile, which if you want to poke at the morality of, would push Google into a even more precarious position, since that's harder fact. If Joe brings proof that he was never a convicted pedophile, then you repeating that "Bob says that Joe is a convicted pedophile" with no qualifiers is barely distinguishable from saying "Joe is a pedophile" from a moral standpoint.
Karawebnetwork 3y ago
On paper, yes. In reality however? People care a lot about what is written online. "The man, who is now in his early 70s, told the court that he believes potential clients have backed out of deals because they saw the post, adding that his career, which had previously been marked by success, began to spiral. Two friends testified they refused to use their influence to help him find jobs because they worried the post would make those efforts fruitless. His personal relationships also suffered, including those with his two sons, the ruling said. One son testified that his girlfriend’s parents declined to meet his father because of the defamatory internet posts. The son said that after he experienced high-profile success, people would tell him they searched his name on Google and asked him about the post involving his father."
- logicalmonster 3y ago
  > People care a lot about what is written online. Using the word "care" here is a particularly interesting word choice to me. The real problem is not the fact that wrong statements exist online that's a problem, it's the fact that people care or believe them that's the real problem. So how do we get people to care less? I look at your post, and see a goal-oriented rather than a system-oriented approach. You see an injustice happening, and want to put a law in place to stamp it out. That's all well and good, but what about looking at the problem on a systemic level? What if the very acts you want to put in place to help people (strong anti-defamation protection) makes the problem you want to work against even worse? My theory that I've been running with for years is that the existence of strong anti-defamation laws psychologically makes people think something like this whenever they see something crazy online: "This wild claim probably has to be true because it's online or the person who posted it would have their pants sued off otherwise." The stronger the anti-defamation laws that exist, the worse this psychological problem of believing nonsense online gets. IMO, the mere existence of strong anti-defamation protection makes masses of people shut their brain off and believe almost anything dumb online. Personally speaking, I strongly believe we should consider the opposite, systemic approach. Let's conduct a thought-experiment. How would truth and defamation work in a society with non-existent or very weak anti-defamation laws? Would wild claims be made online daily? Of course. But who would believe any wild nonsense they saw online without verifying it if anti-defamation laws were very weak, or didn't exist?

richthegeek 3y ago

Keeping the metaphor, it's responding to the question of "Do you know Joe?" with "Yes, and that guy Bob over there says Joe is a pedophile" whenever asked.

brvsft 3y ago
How about, "What do you know about Joe?" "I know that guy Bob over there says Joe is a pedophile."
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

hackernewds 3y ago

This is a rational take. And worth considering, fwiw I agree with it I'm distressed further by other threads that begin to point this out being derailed with comments like "America should to keep to its own borders" and unrelated factoids about oil wars. This is not just an American precedent.

cmeacham98 3y ago

You are missing the part where Google ranks search results. If you Google "Joe" and the first result is "Bob says Joe is a pedophile", Google is implicitly saying that is the single most important result about Joe. Thus, I reject this argument unless Google is willing to argue its search result ranking is no better than random chance and that results on the first page are equally as relevant and useful as those on the last.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
Results on the last page may very well be as useful as results on the first, if not more so. Especially considering for a lot of search queries there's countless biz and nefarious individuals gaming the SERPs with SEO schemes. IMO, how Google presents data to users is largely worthless in 2023 unless you are utilizing special operators like quotation marks and minuses. Even then, it's really how the user is choosing to filter through that data.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
logicalmonster 3y ago
You understand that Google doesn't rank search results based on how objectively factually true they are, right?
- mptest 3y ago
  Isn't that kinda reductive? We absolutely do expect google to be somewhat legitimate and correct, in a wide range of queries. In the most generous to your meaning terms, We expect them to, when googling stuff about someone, not rank a random tweet alongside a nyt article, right?
  - logicalmonster 3y ago
    > We absolutely do expect google to be somewhat legitimate and correct, in a wide range of queries. I don't have any such expectation. Why do you have such an expectation? Google is not magic. It is impossible to divine objective reality from counting links. > We expect them to, when googling stuff about someone, not rank a random tweet alongside a nyt article, right? If a random everyday Joe had a New York Times article written about them, I'd expect that to rank at, or very near, the top. However, most people not only don't have an NYT article written about them, most have almost nothing about them online other than some standard social media or random data brokers content. So it seems likely that some unique content about a random Joe should probably rank highly because there's no real competition. That doesn't imply its true.

cjbgkagh 3y ago

The problem is that people trust the internet too much, removing false information would make that worse. People will think ‘if that wasn’t true then they’d be forced to remove it, since it wasn’t removed it must be true’. Maybe the solution is more fake news not less of it.

prettyStandard 3y ago
lol. I've got good news for you.
eviks 3y ago
Doesn't square: they already trusted it before removal ("trust too much"), so the only difference is that fewer people will seeit if it's removed
- cjbgkagh 3y ago
  Too much trust is much easier to fix than too little trust. Like how chaos engineering seeks to improve resiliency by introducing damaging noise. There is also the idea of 'anti-fragile' coined by Nassim Taleb.

xwdv 3y ago

But that’s not really the way information works. If you say that and don’t immediately follow up with saying “but Bob is an untrustworthy source of information and is often full of shit, don’t believe it”, then a person looking for information on whether or not Joe is a pedophile will take that as a ringing endorsement of Bob’s statement.

unixgoddess 3y ago
how so? it's your responsibility as an adult to understand that Bob is some random guy you don't know, so you can't trust him
- dahwolf 3y ago
  That's not how defamation works. You're saying that if the statement is out there, surely people will do a deep investigation into the correctness of it? They won't.
  - unixgoddess 3y ago
    OP was saying that even the sentence "bob says that jim is x" is defamation because readers will take it as "a ringing endorsement of bob's statement", which is patently untrue unless you are a little kid.
    - xwdv 3y ago
      It is not patently untrue. It wholly depends on the reader’s opinion of Bob. Also most people’s intelligence is not that much greater than that of a little kid. They are only more knowledgeable, but not necessarily more intelligent.

balderdash 3y ago

But doesn’t google’s moral responsibility change once it’s been informed that the statement in question is likely illegal/incorrect/etc.

paulcole 3y ago
Informed by who? Does that informer ever have incentives to wrongly declare some statements illegal/incorrect/etc.?
eviks 3y ago
No, it's always being informed of all the opposite sides of every issue, so you need something else to support censoring a specific side

xeromal 3y ago

If your dad told you someone is a pedo and you have many more friends than your dad, but you yell out "My dad says so and so is a pedo". I still think some of the onus is on you to shut your mouth if you're told to do so.

bloak 3y ago

I know that sounds logical ... but it doesn't work in practice and that's why the law doesn't work like that. We don't want a situation in which newspapers and other powerful organisations can avoid being sued for libel simply by prefixing every article with "$RANDOM_PERSON says". If libel law were just going to be a booby trap for ordinary people who don't have legal advisors like newspapers do then it would be better not to have any libel law.

birdyrooster 3y ago

Maybe if you have a limited scope of morality and you don’t want to think hard, sure.

icegreentea2 3y ago

This might be true before the plaintiff contacted Google, but once contacted by the plaintiff the situation might be more like: I know that "Bob says Joe is a pedophile" and "Joe says that he is not a pedophile". It is factually true for you to continue to say that "Bob says that Joe is a pedophile", but if that's ALL that your saying, then morally you're lying by omission. It is of course an interesting question of how to boil this situation down to the reality of how a search engine works and displays results, but the general point stands that your presented situation isn't really representative of the ruling. Oh, also in this specific case the claim wasn't that Joe is a pedophile, it's that Joe was a convicted pedophile, which if you want to poke at the morality of, would push Google into a even more precarious position, since that's harder fact. If Joe brings proof that he was never a convicted pedophile, then you repeating that "Bob says that Joe is a convicted pedophile" with no qualifiers is barely distinguishable from saying "Joe is a pedophile" from a moral standpoint.

Karawebnetwork 3y ago

On paper, yes. In reality however? People care a lot about what is written online. "The man, who is now in his early 70s, told the court that he believes potential clients have backed out of deals because they saw the post, adding that his career, which had previously been marked by success, began to spiral. Two friends testified they refused to use their influence to help him find jobs because they worried the post would make those efforts fruitless. His personal relationships also suffered, including those with his two sons, the ruling said. One son testified that his girlfriend’s parents declined to meet his father because of the defamatory internet posts. The son said that after he experienced high-profile success, people would tell him they searched his name on Google and asked him about the post involving his father."

logicalmonster 3y ago
> People care a lot about what is written online. Using the word "care" here is a particularly interesting word choice to me. The real problem is not the fact that wrong statements exist online that's a problem, it's the fact that people care or believe them that's the real problem. So how do we get people to care less? I look at your post, and see a goal-oriented rather than a system-oriented approach. You see an injustice happening, and want to put a law in place to stamp it out. That's all well and good, but what about looking at the problem on a systemic level? What if the very acts you want to put in place to help people (strong anti-defamation protection) makes the problem you want to work against even worse? My theory that I've been running with for years is that the existence of strong anti-defamation laws psychologically makes people think something like this whenever they see something crazy online: "This wild claim probably has to be true because it's online or the person who posted it would have their pants sued off otherwise." The stronger the anti-defamation laws that exist, the worse this psychological problem of believing nonsense online gets. IMO, the mere existence of strong anti-defamation protection makes masses of people shut their brain off and believe almost anything dumb online. Personally speaking, I strongly believe we should consider the opposite, systemic approach. Let's conduct a thought-experiment. How would truth and defamation work in a society with non-existent or very weak anti-defamation laws? Would wild claims be made online daily? Of course. But who would believe any wild nonsense they saw online without verifying it if anti-defamation laws were very weak, or didn't exist?