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Google Surfaces Fake News About Election Results (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Last week, Facebook faced criticism that the platform's habit for surfacing fake news contributed to the election of Donald Trump -- a claim Mark Zuckerberg denied. This week, Google faces a similar problem, as its search algorithm surfaces fake election results. As Mediaite's Dan Abrams first reported, when you search "final election numbers" or "final vote count 2016," the first result in Google's "in the news" box is from a scrappy-looking Wordpress blog called 70 News that appears to be run by one person. The article, posted on November 12th, features the headline "FINAL ELECTION 2016 NUMBERS: TRUMP WON BOTH POPULAR ( 62.9 M -62.2 M ) AND ELECTORAL COLLEGE VOTES ( 306-232)HEY CHANGE.ORG, SCRAP YOUR LOONY PETITION NOW!" First, the numbers in this post are inaccurate. Though millions of votes have yet to be counted, but Clinton has already been shown to be leading the popular vote by a sizable margin. Current counts have her ahead by around 668,000 total votes, with some polling experts projecting Clinton will ultimately rack up a 2 million-vote lead. Second, the writer of the 70 News post claims that the source material for the article is "Twitter posts," specifically, this tweet from a user named Michael. Michael, on the other hand, is sourcing an article from the ultra-conservative tabloid USA Supreme, which argues that Clinton might win the number of votes "counted" but will not win the number of votes "cast" because of ignored Republican absentee ballots. (Michael also believes that Trump has been singled out by God to be president of the United States, a conspiracy theory popular with 4chan users who believe that Pepe the Frog is a reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian deity.) And yet Michael -- by way of 70 News, by way of Google -- has become the sole source for a story squatting at the top of Google's search results. 70 News has since updated its post with a single line admitting that CNN is showing different numbers -- the headline and the body of the post remains the same.
Shouldn't news websites require digitally signed press credentials of some sort?
Then the news search engines could simply *ignore* any noncredentialled publishers--or at least classify them correctly as opinion sites.
You mean the NYT that wrote anti-Hillary stories and praised Trump without fact checking?
Or, they are correctly noting that the Electoral College system is unfair. Just because something is "working exactly as intended" doesn't make it fair.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
It's a bit more complex than you think, and partially untrue.
Take Oregon for example when it comes to federal Presidential/Senate elections: Every rural county in the state could have its population vote 100% for Kodos, but if Portland, Salem, and Bend vote 100% for Kang, then Kang wins, period. (Now the reality is that something like 60% of the rural counties go for Kodos, and 60% of the urban ones vote Kang... and Kang still wins because of aggregate population. The population differential really is that lopsided.) This also goes for state-wide offices such as Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General, etc.
Now Congressional House elections and state legislature/senate elections are a different story, where your assertion would hold a bit more truth to it.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
While saying Trump won the popular vote appears to be fale, you can hardly call a 668,000 vote lead "sizable" when the total turn out was somewhere around 130 million. She barely edged him out.
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That's the population of Wyoming. Vermont. Getting close to the Dakota's and Alaska. It is more than the margin of victory in many states. I am entirely comfortable calling that sizable.
Trump will have to face that. In fact, I suggest every Democrat make a point to remind him of his failure to get more votes than Hillary from the voters. After all by Trump's own tweets, the electoral college is rigged. Broken. Corrupt. Let us never let him forget it.