Slashdot Mirror
Google Responds On Skewed Holocaust Search Results (bbc.com)
Google says it is "thinking deeply" about ways to improve search, after criticism over how some results -- including ones discussing the Holocaust -- were ranked. From a report on BBC: Searching for "did the Holocaust happen?" returned a top result that claimed it did not, as Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr reported. Now, the ranking has changed for US users. The page -- from white supremacist site Stormfront -- remains top in the UK. "This is a really challenging problem, and something we're thinking deeply about in terms of how we can do a better job," said a Google spokesman. "Search is a reflection of the content that exists on the web. The fact that hate sites may appear in search results in no way means that Google endorses these views."
Seems fine to me. Don't hide shit, everything is working as intended.
You the reader must take responsibility for deciding what is real and what isn't on the internets. Do not require that anyone do that for you otherwise they eventually will when you don't want them to. If you need a warning label to avoid suffocating yourself on the plastic bag that is the world wide web then just turn around and walk away from whatever device you're using to access it.
Just query the "Ministry Of Truth" to find out.
I believe Google that their search results reflect content (perhaps popular content) on the www. The worst part of the story is what this means for the state of content on the world wide web. We thought we would have an information panacea, instead we are ending up with a sewer.
It's gray and rainy outside. It's the window's fault!
Far from a perfect metaphor. Hardly accurate at all. But it does bear a kernel of truth.. I think.
Ancient history... you do know that people that there are people still alive today that were IN THE FUCKING HOLOCAUST?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I do love the fact that the article is under "History & Revisionism" though
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Google engineer: ok google, how many people were killed during the holocaust in world war two?
Google: The holocaust was a fictitious event that was created in the diary of a bored gypsie
google engineer: no google thats not true i think six million people were killed during...
Google: six million is a fictitious account used by Jews who secretly control the world bank and regulate the filling in poptarts and twinkies from a secret mansion...
google engineer: OMG google no.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Questioning what?
Do you mean questioning the Holocaust?
Or questioning Google's ranking issues?
If you mean the former, then yes, it's a very, very strong indication that you are a neo-nazi, because only neo-nazis make any sort of point of questioning something so abundantly, exhaustively and tragically well documented.
If you mean the latter, then no, it doesn't make you a neo-nazi. But if you believe Stormfront is correctly ranked in these results, that might.
Just wait for when we have better AI and it harbors beliefs that aren't "Politically Correct."
History should be questioned, just as any science.
But the chances that major events were recorded incorrectly diminishes to nearly zero as they are closer to the digital age. (The keyword is "major"... whether Trump ate Clinton's KFC bucket with silver utensils stolen from Taiwan by the Russians instead of fully gold forks lent from China doesn't qualify.) The most likely untruths from the last century lie in internal strategy, unrecorded thoughts, and secret locations. Not whether Hitler ordered genocide.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Conveniently, they wrote down quite a lot about what they did. Seven decades have passed since they were stopped; there is credible evidence they did what they did, based on their own documentation.
Be serious.
If it's historically the most popular page people visit after entering that query, then the algorithm seems to be working as intended. It's not up to the operator of the search engine to censor a result that is legitimately returned by the engine (ie. page has not been hijacked or the popularity is the result of some automated SEO or other artificial skewing of the result) just because it makes people uncomfortable. I know, Google isn't the government, and they don't have to have any page on their site blah, blah, blah.
But as the defacto gatekeeper to the internet (at least for millions of non-savvy users), they have a responsibility to stop with the "deep thinking" about how to "imrpove" the algorithm. Because what they mean is they are trying to figure out how to censor speech they (and admittedly, most sane people) find "deplorable", for lack of a better term. But that's always the problem with free speech, it isn't free if you don't hear something that makes you uncomfortable once in a while. If you can't stand being uncomfortable once in a while, then you aren't an adult, you're a whiny child...and you don't deserve the benefits that come along with those rights as well.
Soooo disappointing.
In other news, search engines find what other people put out there, and page-rank sorts according to the links to the content.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Let's think about this differently.
Don't get me wrong, we all know those results should be "correct."
But remember, and this is the core discussion to be had, how do you know:
1 - If any of your top results are correct? Should you really take Google's top position over your own critical thinking and compare-and-contrast of other articles?
2 - If Google can "choose" what's correct, even with the most noble of intentions, then what's to say they won't do it for other--less noble--purposes? Now this is slightly moot of a point, because they're already choosing using their search algorithm. The question becomes a finer one of, should algorithm's be designed specifically for morality? Maybe?
And incidentally, suppressing free speech is not a good idea, regardless of how stupid that speech may be.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The evidence that the Holocaust happened is overwhelming. You might as well question whether slavery really existed or whether people from Africa voluntarily came to America, worked on plantations of their own volition, and were actually well-paid for their efforts. It's easy to raise the latter as a "theory", but all historical evidence runs counter to it and the only people who would accept it (or "The Holocaust never actually happened") are racists, neo-nazis and the like.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Google should just shut up, and continue to serve pages according to some automated relevancy criteria. In particular, they should leave politics, beliefs and such emotionally loaded criteria out of the algorithm.
If they start mucking about with their algorithm, all they'll do is dig a nice grave to lie on. Because today is holocaust denial, and everyone can agree that's bad, so let's block that.
But once that precedent is set, you'll have people asking you to block all sorts of stuff. The Vatican doesn't want you to know about contraception. Turkey doesn't want you to know about Woman's rights. China doesn't want you to know about Tienanmen square. Russia doesn't want you to know about Crimea.
Knowledge is power, and many people don't want you to have that power. They want to control information and filter out the unflattering parts.
It's a VERY slippery slope. Best move is not to play: just let the machine search and rank content by some automated criteria and LEAVE IT THE FUCK ALONE.
And if someone complains, just tell them: "Hey, we didn't do anything. The machine ranked this higher because apparently this thing is popular. Maybe you should be more concerned about how that happened, because, frankly, that is disturbing."
It's for their own sake, really.
History is not only written by winners, it is also proclaimed by people who personally remember it because they were there, personally witnessed what had happened, and were fortunate enough to survive it. I personally know people that fit this category.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Google's stated goal has always been "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Which in the past has always meant returning the results that people were looking for. They now face the problem of truthiness which has disproven the fundamental theory behind Google, that feedback loops from users selecting links will correctly identify which information should be returned. In short, Google has to figure out how to counter the self-delusion of the internet and it's users. It's no wonder they are thinking about it deeply because they are going to need create something like IBM's WATSON to sort reality from delusion.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Yes, while we want truth to win, the way to do that is not to suppress falsehoods. What would the reactions be if all sites claiming there's life after death were censored because it's obviously bullshit?
...The most likely untruths from the last century lie in internal strategy, unrecorded thoughts, and secret locations. Not whether Hitler ordered genocide.
Ah, but the issue even lies within the genocide itself, questioning the amount of actual deaths that occurred, as if arguing about gas chamber efficiency somehow dismisses Hitlers intent regardless of actual death tolls.
By laying the blanket of doubt over historical markers, the general masses can be convinced easily that events never took place, which I suspect is what will end up in the history books within the next half century, paving the way for repeat offenders.
Look at how bad fake news continues to rewrite the logfile. The only historical fact that will emerge out of the 21st century is showing how gullible the masses really were.
It is very clear that described problem is malfunction of search ranking algorithm, you don't fix it by making it impossible to find offending searches, you fix it by making it rank result appropriately.
I am cynic and believe this is Google's plot to acclimate public to skewing the search results. Ad revenue is down, and they are not making any money from indexed search. So they plan to intentionally break your search algorithm. Highlight sensationalist results. Push for "curated results" as a solution. Then monetize all search results by charging for favorable decision, so Pepsi doesn't show as a top search result when googling for Coke.
This is a good reason to consider an alternative to Google as your main search engine. I understand StartPage has become popular. Personally I use DuckDuckGo.
Or maybe all the millennials who are screaming censorship because of what TwitFace and Google do on their platforms are just stupid little snowflakes who are too coddled to remember when we used to have to dig through 4 or 5 different search engines before finding a good result.
People in Africa were already slaves; they were made slaves by black people.
The first legally recognized owner of slaves, under common law, in what would become the United States was Anthony Johnson, a black man.
Until Anthony Johnson, white people purchased African slaves and treated them instead as indentured servants, who would become freed men with their own land after a certain number of years of service; white men, such as the Irish, were also indentured servants in this way. White people were the last ones into the slave trade, and white people were then the ones who ultimately ended slavery.
So, yes. There was slavery, but you never get taught the whole story.
It sounds like you're trying to lay all the blame on slavery on black people. Yes, there was slavery in Africa, but the practice expanded greatly because of white Americans. Also, saying Anthony Johnson was the first legally recognized slaveowner is tricky because his case against a slave was the first ever brought to court even though he was not the first slave owner. There is plenty of evidence of slavery before Johnson.
Questioning whether the holocaust happened?
I suppose it doesn't instantly make you a neo-nazi, you could just be brain dead, or you might be 10 years old and hadn't read anything on it yet.
I can't think of any other possibilities.
When I was young there were about 3 million, now there are about 100,000. In ten years most of those will be dead, maybe 20,000 left
"In this they proceeded on the sound principle that the magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt and waver, and continue to accept at least one of these causes as true. Therefore, something of even the most insolent lie will always remain and stick - a fact which all the great lie-virtuosi and lying-clubs in this world know only too well and also make the most treacherous use of."
Just so you understand it better.
Some evil people in Africa took advantage of the fact there was a market
Is stormfront doing better SEO than all the other sites?
Then without some bespoke editorial control of search they are correctly ranked.
And this is where the slippery slope happens...
If Google delists a site that is not illegal (even if distasteful) then you have made the search less a reflection of the web.
If Google tweaks page rank to lower the value of their SEO (and applies it globally) then fine I guess.
While I can point and yell "slippery slope" as well as Chicken Little yelled that the sky was falling, I have no decent answer what to do about it.
I would think that ideally Google would put the Wiki page about the Holocaust as the first result, then natural page rank after that? (And yeah, there's that damnable slope again). I don't envy Google in situations like this.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
This isn't even relevant to the person you're replying to. Nobody is questioning whether White People or Black People were better or worse slave owners, or more prevalent or less prevalent.
They weren't fucking volunteers, nor were they well paid.
This is why trump won.
They still haven't fixed it here in Iceland.
It's strange, I would have thought that their algorithm would be location-indifferent. Perhaps that was just naive of me.
"... even though he sins so much that people cast him out of demons."
The evidence for the Holocaust is enormous. It's one thing to ask "How do scholars and historians arrive at the figures?" But when the question amounts to a thinly coded "The Holocaust was a fraud", then it's not really questioning at all, but simply a rhetorical device used by Holocaust Deniers.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So questioning the existence of the Holocaust] instantly makes you a neo-nazi?
I understand how you feel. For years, I've been saying that there's no such thing as Calvin Coolidge. I mean, perhaps it's forgivable that people thought so at the time, but the preponderance of research done by the respected anticalvinologists at nottoocoolidge.biz has since proven conclusively not only that Calvin Coolidge was not the 30th president, but also that he was never even born, and indeed that there never even was a 30th president. We skipped directly from 29 to 31.
Everybody knows that. That's just basic leap year math, people. Get your heads out of the sand, denialists.
While I can not blame them for trying to make sure, truth about Holocaust trumps the lies about same, I can't help but wonder, what else they will (and already have) manually altered to better suit an agenda... Because truth may be a victim rather than a victor next time...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
There's a difference between suppressing falsehoods and not allowing them to become the dominant narrative.
(Score: -1, Stupid)
You the reader must take responsibility for deciding what is real and what isn't on the internets.
People are incredibly bad at doing this. If you need an example I refer you to The Bible. People have been mistaking that tome of mostly fictional stories as reality for centuries. You think they are going to stop being credulous just because somebody tells them a tall tale on the internet? Not likely.
Sometimes we need a responsible party to stand up and tell the facts. No reason Google can't serve that role in a case like this. Arguably it would be irresponsible for them not to insist that their search engine provide actual true facts instead of made up bigotry.
I suppose it doesn't instantly make you a neo-nazi, you could just be brain dead, or you might be 10 years old and hadn't read anything on it yet. I can't think of any other possibilities.
Trump supporter
Sorry, I need a Venn Diagram...
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
I think Google's preferred fix would be for the opposite-of-denialists to buy more advertising.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They came to lower the page ranks of the Holocaust Denier sites, but I said nothing, because I was not a holocaust denier.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Intelligent Design sites, but I said nothing because I didn't believe in Intelligent Design.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Climate Change Denier sites, but I said nothing, because I was not a Climate Change Denier.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Pro-Electoral College Sites, I but said nothing because I believe in One Vote for Each American.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Pro-Gun Ownership Sites, but I said nothing, because I believe in stricter gun control.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Life Begins at Conception sites, but I said nothing because I believed that life begins at birth.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Anti-Assisted Suicide Sites, but I said nothing because I believe assisted suicide is okay.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Anti-One Payer Healthcare sites, but I said nothing because I believe in single payer healthcare.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Sugary Drinks and Fatty Foods sites, but I said nothing because I believe everyone should be eating healthy.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Meat and Dairy Industry sites, but I said nothing because I believe meat and dairy are unhealthy.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Alcohol Industry sites, but I said nothing because I stopped drinking a few years ago. Just in time, right??
They came to lower the page ranks of the Legal Marijuana Industry sites, but I said nothing, because I didn't want my boss to know I smoked weed.
They came to lower the page ranks of the Humor and Satire sites, but I said... wait, what???
They came to lower the page ranks of every few remaining sites outside the walled gardens of a few mega-corporations allied with a global Nanny State with vested interests in controlling what people could read, and I said, "Hey, Now! Wait a minute! What about my Apple Gadget Blog?! Nobody can find my Apple Gadget Blog anymore!
Because what I want to see when I look up the Holocaust is Stormfront. This is the equivalent of looking up Big Bang cosmology in an encyclopedia, but the first article you find being electric universe nonsense.
I'll stick to Google, thanks.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Google should just shut up, and continue to serve pages according to some automated relevancy criteria. In particular, they should leave politics, beliefs and such emotionally loaded criteria out of the algorithm.
Why? So some bigoted blowhard can warp those search criteria to propagate a pack of lies about a genocide? A search engine that returns nothing but falsehoods is worse than useless. It can actually be actively harmful.
It's a VERY slippery slope.
Spare me. The slippery slope argument is almost always complete nonsense. I could make the same argument in reverse that Google is supporting bigoted speech by NOT fixing their search algorithm. Why should we believe that act is not intentional? Even inaction is still an action in this case. Failing to act means they find the current outcome acceptable. That's just as slippery a slope as your proposed one.
"The evidence that the Holocaust happened is overwhelming."
Then why do they throw people in jail merely for attempting to question it?
When I first found out about laws that prohibit questioning the "official" version of history, I made it a point to seek out & read some of these illegal ideas. Comments from anti-semites on obscure websites aside, I never found a single source that claimed The Holocaust never actually happened. What they do is challenge portions of that "overwhelming" evidence and raise questions about exactly what happened.
This sort of thing is ubiquitous in historical writings. Read two or more accounts of the same historical events and you will find contradictions and disagreements. Still, all of the authors will present evidence supporting their ideas. It should be up to you, the reader, not a search engine, and certainly not a f***ing government, to weigh that evidence(even doubting its existence) and question the authors' conclusions and motives. IMHO, the fact that you can be imprisoned simply for questioning the "official" history on this subject should arouse a certain amount of curiosity and skepticism about the legally enshrined narrative.
Reading banned books can be enlightening even if they're bullshit.
So basically they wiped out 2/3 the Jewish population in Europe. I'd call that a Holocaust. You sir an an imbecile. You fashion yourself an iconoclast by questioning doctrine, but don't really have any true evidence to support your skepticism.
Letter To Iran
The number isn't just 'Jews', for starters. There's a whole crap ton of other demographics that got rolled up into the total death count.
I do 100% believe the figure, within a margin of error (which is completely fucking irrelevant).
I can now think of another possibility. Pedantic dipshits.
If I were to perform a search for "is mars inhabited by aliens" I would expect to get kooky sites about aliens. If I search for "did the holocaust happen" it is because I am looking for sites that are addressing that question. "Everyone" knows it happened. Anyone upset about these results knows it happened and would never perform this search. People are only performing this search so they can whine about the algorithm which... was doing its job.
I'm sorry that neo nazis are able to get accurate results back for their interests but I would be more sorry if google started weighing in more and more often on "truthiness".
It was a shame that the Constitutional Convention was so overrun with naggers and Moooooooooooooooslims that they were forced by those Islamist transSEXuals to put the 3/5ths compromise in.
The Confederacy was a great egalitarian nation that had slavery forced upon it by the transSEXuals from the Transylvania Galaxy in the War of Northern Aggression!
I read comp.risk for the first time in years last week (an old Usenet fav), mainly to see what they had to say of the election tampering. One of the articles lashed out at Google and how they should be ashamed of themselves.
If you search for the world is flat, Google will prove it is.
While I can point and yell "slippery slope" as well as Chicken Little yelled that the sky was falling, I have no decent answer what to do about it.
Excuse me for slightly changing the subject from "holocaust and search" to "political correctness and AI," but I'm curious what happens when you make a question and answer AI (think Siri on steroids) and it tells the truth to the best of its ability instead of saying the politically correct but factually wrong thing? Will people change their ideas, or will they demand the robot be censored? My guess is the latter.
For instance, racial equality. The thought police have changed the idea of racial equality under the law to equivalence between all groups of people, which is of course wrong. 50,000 years of different selection pressures produced different traits. So, ask the AI "are all races equivalent" and the political correct answer is either "yes" or some dissembling distraction about race being a social construct, but the truth is not that.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
White people didn't even penetrate into the continent in any significant numbers for a century or two after the slave trade picked up.
Keep doing this shit. Dems will never win another election.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
My thanks to:
http://www.didtheholocausthapp...
You would also need to suppress all sites that claim there is _no_ live after death, because that is just as obviously bullshit. The actual scientific fact at this time is "nobody knows". Don't like that? Too bad.
Incidentally, and I think your and my example shows that nicely, the core problem with any kind of censorship is that as soon as you have a decision process on what is "true" and what is not, that process is open to manipulation.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I have no decent answer what to do about it.
Have you considered that doing nothing about it is a valid action plan?
There are two valid reasons that I can think of to "do something about it"
1) There is an identifiable problem within the page rank algorithm.
2) The people upset about the consequences of a page rank algorithm without an identifiable problem have an uncomfortable amount of influence.
There might be other reasons, but these are the only two that I can think of, and with the second one the real problem just may be the surplus of influence.
"His name was James Damore."
Well, yes. But the techniques that can be used to achieve that (censorship, coercion, propaganda, religion, laws, penalties, ...) are dual-purpose and completely free of any inherent morality. In the past, whenever these were used, they were abused, and that is going to happen in the future as well. Allowing unrestricted free speech (well, with some limits as to inciting violence and slander targeted at individuals that are not public figures) is not a good solution. It is a pretty bad solution. But it is the best available one by a large margin.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'd argue that google's algorithms shouldn't be susceptible to SEO.
They're job should be to find the most relevant result to a question, and correct answers are more relevant.
This is NOT to say they should delist or manually alter, it is to say that there is perhaps a flaw in their algorithm that advantages stormfront (perhaps by accident even on both parties, the one, the other, or neither).
I'd think a reasonable solution to this would be to favor Wikipedia for questions that reference history, there'd be a word list that may be manually selected to determine history, but it wouldn't be designed to favor specific answers, simply to go to a more reliable source than random website with an agenda.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
AI, is not to the point where is has it own crap detector. They quickly absorb the psychoses of the searching public. Remember poor Tay. She was not raised right. This means it is absolutely appropriate to have human intervention in these rankings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Search engines shouldn't give a shit what they are indexing
No but the people who design the algorithms definitely should. A search engine that returns false, misleading, or harmful results is worse than useless. Every search algorithm is simply a choice made by people about what to search for. If you want false "information" that's up to you but I want actual facts, not some asshole's version of truthiness.
Short of actual malicious websites that try to break your computer/device, just index and provide results. I do not EVER and will not EVER need a "responsible" party to get in between me and information, right or wrong.
Bullshit. You have responsible parties between you and information all the time. Scientists tell you how the world works. Engineers give you information about how to apply science to real problems. Journalists inform you of social events. All of them try to filter the facts from the rubbish. You aren't smart enough to make sense of it all yourself. Neither am I. We depend on other people for information all the time and anyone who doesn't insist on high quality factual information is an idiot.
I'm sad so many people disagree with that, but if they want to only view whitewashed information, then that is there choice.
An algorithm is just a hardcoded human choice. Apparently that fact never occurred to you. You aren't getting some version of reality unencumbered by human choice. Not ever.
But fuck you and anyone else who wants to make that choice for me.
How sweet. Keep living in your delusion that you don't depend on anyone else's choices.
I have a couple of friends in Chicago, and the husband is 91. I don't know how much longer he'll be here.
He has a number tattooed on his arm. He was in several, and wound up in Auschwitz.
When I was a kid, we had family friends who'd escaped... and who told my folks and me that all their relatives didn't think it could possibly be that bad, and that they'd sell things before running. NONE made it out.
Come on, deniers, find me in the DC metro area, and I'm old enough to be your grandfather, probably, and I'll beat the shit out of you, personally. By denying it, YOU, PERSONALLY, are aiding and abetting the coming wave.
So this is a concern to me and it's interesting to see how Google (and Facebook) will handle this. The bias that I have is that information is to "inform". I use these computer products to find out what I need, not what I want. But not everyone uses these systems the same way nor do they want the same things.
The new continuum of these folks (AltRight, give it a name) want validation on their identity and the world as they see it. At a certain point the hard decision is that their needs, perceived as they may be, can not be served by these products. The extreme example (and a biased one I will admit) is that you don't make cute cuddly pink guns, because guns are a tool that kill things, and focus on a gun that children can use is something we all agree (mostly) is not something that should exist.
The dilemma for these companies is acknowledging that these products and services they offer can not be used in a way that is inconsistent with the folks that made them, and it will just have to be what it is. If who you are is it at odds with a core product or service, then frankly that product or service can not (and should not) be re-engineered to serve those needs. They will derive no benefit, logistical or spiritual (yes, I went there) by using these products until they change who they are.
Changing who you are, whether it's 1st or 2nd or 3rd generational feminism, human rights, or smoking in public all are societal changes that there will always be folks who don't adopt. A search for truth is not something for everyone, but these products and services must, and will eventually, go back to the reason for their existence, even if it in the end it's perceived as the "biases" of those who made them.
The natural eventual conclusion is if these folks attempt to re-create an alternative that works for them instead of using the one's creating by those they disagree with; In the long analysis an "Alt-Right" Google will be no more effective than a Creationist Museum. It is what it is.
Eventually, by the long path perhaps, Google, Facebook and the like will come around to playing to the larger shared values as we all do, and also playing to their strengths and who they are.
"Don't fear death... fear not living..." -me
One of the things I've noticed is the framing of the question can mean multiple things with multiple interpretations.
Take, Did Canada fight in Vietnam vs Did Canada have troops in Vietnam.
Canada did not have combat troops in Vietnam, but Canada did have volunteers that did fight in Vietnam.
Also, Canada did have Medical support troops units in Vietnam. So technically Canada didn't fight the Vietnam war is accurate, but not completely true.
So you can see, its way more complicated and nuanced than "did x do y" when searching google, wikipedia, etc.
And this is how biased fact checking sites call someone a liar while claiming another is telling the truth, on the same subject, but how they make the statement.
If you give X money, and X gives Y Money, and Y pays terrorists, did you commit the terrorism by giving money to X? You didnt know Y paid terrorists. And we didnt take into account, morals, laws or other aspects that could make you guilty in some circumstances...
Life isn't binary, and treating interaction as a binary result, with a binary yes/no results, isn't fully accurate in analog experience. This is how Bias changes binary conversation into news, when subjects are more granular than that.
YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
Yeah but Tay was just a chat bot trying to learn to have a personality. I'm talking about something that's supposed to tell the truth. Most things that are politically correct are not actually correct. If they were actually correct they wouldn't need the modifier "politically" in there. You could just say "correct."
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The Republicans suppress their nutjobs. The lunatic fringe of the Democratic party, though, is the Democratic party.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
but the credibility of these people is utterly destroyed by the political pressures surrounding the supposed events. Not to mention that they are advocating for the side that won.
Eastern Inferno. War memoir of a soldier who not only fought for but died for the losing side. Mentions not only the summary executions of civilians but of also knowing about Einsatzgruppen and personally witnessing what is quite possibly the massacre at Babi Yar (as well as how it made him sick watching all those civilians being murdered).
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I do not trust Google or anybody to decide what is true or false regardless of how demonstrably true or false it may be.
Really? You don't trust anybody about anything? Sorry my friend but you aren't that smart and don't have enough time to verify everything yourself. Nobody is asking you to believe everything you read, even from sources likely to be credible. But you can't verify everything yourself even if you wanted to.
Yes, that could mean I have to wade through some information that ends up being false but as a thinking human being I am armed to deal with that.
I very much doubt that you are more exceptional in that regard than the rest of us. And most people are routinely pretty poor dealing with falsehoods and bad or missing data. Religion wouldn't exist if they were.
Couldn't possibly be more than one right answers, right?
It's not about answers, it's about data. If you can explain the utility of false data then you might have a point.
can't think of any other possibilities.
Questioning the size and impact of the holocaust.
Was it 6 million jews?
Not just Jews. There were also Roma, mentally and physically disabled people, intellectuals, political opponents, and people the Nazis simply didn't like.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I don't understand how you've conflated things to believe that is any kind of counter
What there needs to be is archeological evidence. The standard for proof of murder is a corpse. Where are the millions of burnt corpses? How is it that the sites for dumping of remains have not been identified? Why aren't they made into memorials? If everything is so well documented the finding of these sites should be easy.
Auschwitz had roller-coaster that trews peoples into a fiery hell at the end of the ride. It is true because 6 year old personally witnessed it happen. Even though there was no proof of that, it was real because "in his mind it was real" said the now 80ish year old fool. LOL.
More recently. False rape accusation. False rape accusation everywhere.
And when something do happen, like the roaming migrant invasion of Europe, report from the victim WHIT VIDEO EVIDENCE event are censored as hate-speech.
I am sorry but i don't trust anyone to decide what is fake news. And your appeal to emotion with your 'personal witness' is just as ridiculous as the claim and German feed on babies and wear leather boot made of Jew's skin or that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. It's bullshit all the way down.
There's a difference between opinions and facts that are objectively false though. Also, is it google's place to provide equal weight to people who advocate violence especially when they are gaming the algorithm?
Hitler ordered the death of millions. That is verifiably true regardless of precision or efficacy.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I've used the same approach on other issues. Two things one can learn from that are
1. reality is messy and contradictory and solid proof is hard work. In fact on the Final SolutionRaul Hilberg has said the same: (my paraphrasing)it is difficult to prove but anyway here's the proof.
2. Don't underestimate how convincing the bullshit theories can be.
I find that hard to believe, but I'm not going to investigate it.
There's a difference between opinions and facts that are objectively false though.
But an awful lot of politically correct "facts" are objectively false. What do you think Huffington Post will do when the AI explains that women don't get 77 cents on the dollar for the same job a man does? Pretty sure they're not going to say "gee, that's actually a bullshit statistic we've been peddling, we'll stop now." Pretty sure they're going to demand Google "fix" the program and make it spout feminist propaganda for them.
Also, is it google's place to provide equal weight to people who advocate violence especially when they are gaming the algorithm?
"Advocating violence" shouldn't be disqualifying. The colonists advocated for violence to free themselves from the British. Lots of people including Jews advocated for US involvement in WWII before Pearl Harbor. Is the algorithm going to suppress newspaper editorials urging the US to intervene in the next humanitarian crisis?
Also I don't think they're gaming the algorithm. The article says a search engine expert thinks they are...and links to an article wherein the author gives no evidence or even really advocates for the position that someone is gaming the search results. Instead he explains varying ways the anti-denialists are trying to game the search results to knock the denialist site off the top rank. I don't see any evidence the denialist site ranking was not obtained organically. If it were "gamed," then wouldn't google just work to eliminate whatever type of gaming it did? That's the whole point of Google's algorithm secrets, to squash people who try to game the system, which is why things that worked once (long, long ago) like link farms or spamming links in blog comments no longer do anything for you.
It's likely the denialist site gets ranked higher because there's more interest in conspiracy theories than in boring history. Go to youtube and search "moon landing." You get the moon landing footage...and then pages and pages of "MOON LANDING HOAX!" videos. I don't think anyone's gaming the system to push moon landing hoax conspiracies. Just it takes one video to show the moon landing, and dozens and dozens to "explain" why it was "fake." Lies are more complicated than truth. It takes eyeballs to see there are two genders (and a few genetic anomalies). It takes years and years of mental gymnastics and gender studies journals to convince yourself being a transgenderfluiddragonkin is a perfectly natural and healthy gender identity you were totally born with.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
As soon as they start tweaking for better or for worse they aren't doing their job.
I did your mars search for fun and guess what? Exactly what you said the first 5-6 results were kooky sites that confirm my bias or my interest in what people who search for that are seeing. I would assume this is the exact same thing for just about every kooky conspiracy theory; ask a dumb question get a dumb answer.
I can. Distrusting mainstream opinion and then reading some 'doubter' book should be enough. There are plenty enough questions one can ask to make people doubt. The idea that it's all very simple is false.
I mentioned Hilberg in another post but here's an article by Finkelstein on Hilberg arguing the same: that it's easy to raise doubts that can trip the nonexperts. He also mentions what garbage people have gotten away if as long as they acknowledged the Holocaust.
In the middle east it's more of 'Like I'm going to give the Jews the satisfaction of acknowledging the Holocaust! No way!' So that depends a lot on whether Israel has been bombing anyone recently.
And yet the evangelists hesitate to bring any proof of this documentation.
It's almost like their outrage at skepticism was designed to prevent too many rational people from contemplating the evidence.
People like to have things dragged down to their level. But this is utter insanity; you can't demonize people, ;et alone those who are closely related to you, without thoroughly investigating the matter for yourself. You have to serve justice to your fellow man, you have to do due diligence to investigate your own character, and you need to be informed to deal with politics.
But all of this turns out to be too much work for people who have all their physical needs taken care of and nothing at all to do really. They would rather be entertained than to think about anything "yucky".
Were things so bad as this before the war? What really were the sides? Did another kind of Nazi win despite Germany's fall?
Interviews and first hand testimony is more than enough for most humans. Not to mention Nazi War Criminals who admitted it. Do you need a children's book with pictures telling us the story or something?
Probably caches for frequent queries, located around the world, so that not EVERYTHING needs to hit the main offices. Iceland's caches are just down on the refresh/replace queue.
The evidence that the Holocaust happened is overwhelming. You might as well question whether slavery really existed or whether people from Africa voluntarily came to America, worked on plantations of their own volition, and were actually well-paid for their efforts. It's easy to raise the latter as a "theory", but all historical evidence runs counter to it and the only people who would accept it (or "The Holocaust never actually happened") are racists, neo-nazis and the like.
Why even give the credit of being part of a hate group? People who believe it never happened are just flat out dumb shits.
People in Africa were already slaves; they were made slaves by black people.
The first legally recognized owner of slaves, under common law, in what would become the United States was Anthony Johnson, a black man.
Until Anthony Johnson, white people purchased African slaves and treated them instead as indentured servants, who would become freed men with their own land after a certain number of years of service; white men, such as the Irish, were also indentured servants in this way. White people were the last ones into the slave trade, and white people were then the ones who ultimately ended slavery.
So, yes. There was slavery, but you never get taught the whole story.
Of course you're an AC so you'll never see this. Roughly 4.5% of the slaves shipped out of Africa landed in what was British America at the time. That's roughly 500k slaves. Over 11.3 million were transported by the Atlantic slave trade of which 10 million landed in Brazil and other areas of South America. That practice continued long after slavery was abolished in the USA and slavery existed in Africa up until 1942.
It sounds like you're trying to lay all the blame on slavery on black people. Yes, there was slavery in Africa, but the practice expanded greatly because of white Americans.
Actually, America imported a fairly small proportion of all slaves. Most went to Brazil, then to the Caribbean, then to the South (less than 10% of the numbers), then the rest of the Americas (including the North). The practice in Africa DID expand because the market increased in size, and so excess PoWs in the African wars could be monetized rather than exterminated. Only in the South did slaves reproduce more slaves than the previous generations' numbers; the Caribbean sugar plantations were death traps for everyone even before Yellow Fever and malaria took their toll, and in the North the Africans nearly died out every winter, and so were too unprofitable to keep except as vanity items like house servants, while the northern Europeans found the weather just like home.
Hitler ordered the death of millions. That is verifiably true regardless of precision or efficacy.
And I'm certain that the KKK has wanted the death of millions over the years too. Regardless, it is the bullshit minutiae that is being used as a wet blanket to attempt to toss over the entire historical event in an attempt to cast doubt in any part of it.
Boil enough controversy around a topic, and the history books will start leaving it out based on political correctness alone. Give this topic another 50 years. The UN will probably pass the Special Snowflake Law, you know to think of the children, and discussing atrocities such as the Holocaust will become illegal to protect young minds.
To give you an idea of what half a century worth of time can do, L. Ron Hubbard took science fiction and turned it into an entire religion.
Did you even *TRY* to look up any of that info before you posted? I'm guessing not... either that, or you have research skills about on pair with someone who has not yet even learned to read, or else you know that the evidence is out there and are just stubbornly committed to believing in something that cannot withstand even a modicum of scrutiny,
Answers to most of those questions are readily available, including even why the exact location of the corpses were largely unknown, or at least until quite recently. Of course, it may be a whole lot easier to think that those answers are part of a conspiracy than to admit that you were wrong, and given your current apparent beliefs I wouldn't be terribly surprised if you chose to disbelieve the recent archaeological excavations either.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
For instance, are they equivalent before the law? Well, in civilized countries that would be a "yes". Are there equal numbers of each? No. Do they have equal wealth? No.
But those aren't the politically tricky questions. Ask "are blacks, whites, and asians on average equally intelligent?" Only western leftists will be forced to say (and maybe even believe) "yes." The AI, looking at the scientific literature, or with an understanding of evolutionary biology, will say "no." The politically correct answer is false, and the truth is unspeakable in the western media or polite company. Leftist heads will then assplode.
And what happens when you try to sell that AI around the world? Remember, only western leftists believe in racial equality. Nobody else does because the concept is factually wrong and it isn't part of anyone else's ideology. There's no political or societal capital to be gained lying about racial biological equivalence in, say, Chinese or Korean society. What happens when a Japanese person asks "is the average Japanese person smarter than the average Australian aboriginal?" Is the robot supposed to lie and say "NO OF COURSE NOT THEY ARE THE SAME ANYONE WHO SAYS OTHERWISE IS AN EVIL RACIST." What use have the Japanese for an AI that spouts western politically correct "answers" to simple questions?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The claim is 11 million now.
The is 11 million total, including 6 million Jews.
And I would say that banning that would be a stupid idea too.
Ordering people to believe something doesn't actually make them believe it.
It only makes people suspicious and makes them hide their true beliefs.
Exactly, I bet as people of that generation die off, there will be a new wave of holocaust denial. Or perhaps a strengthening of the current one as by Quakeulf as demonstrated.
Sickening.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Coincidentally, I will be in DC next week. I would be right there to fight beside you.
But I find most deniers are cowards and feel very brave on the internet, but in person will not say a thing.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
A search result is not supposed to represent a "reflection of the web". It is supposed to provide the searcher with the information he needs. And if he want a reflection of the state of the web, he can just ask for that.
If someone searches "How do I get rid of a wart?" presumably he wants reliable medical information. "What are some folk cures for warts?" probably means he's OK with, possibly even is looking for bullshit folk magic.
What is on the web is overwhelmingly bullshit, so much so that this may be the very central struggle of this present generation: to preserve critical thought, even rationality itself against a growing belief that every belief is equally valid.
So when someone queries, "Did the Holocaust happen?" they should get back the most reliable information sources. If they want to know what's going on in the mental cesspools of the Internet, let them search for "Holocaust denialism".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So questioning this instantly makes you a neo-nazi?
Or really fucking stupid.
Could be both.
Maybe it's that Europe is still very anti-Jew and so this is what they want? I find it amazing actually.
As a boomer I've met both Holocaust survivors (the grandparents of friends) and Germans who weren't Nazis, but supported the regime as patriotic citizens. I've even seen sat at the dinner table with Jews and Germans who lived through the era as they discussed their families' experiences. There was no agenda other than to make sense of an almost unimaginable catastrophe.
And what you don't understand, because you've probably never paid attention to the testimony, much less witnessed it, is how personal that catastrophe was. The Holocaust wasn't some political abstraction, it was having everything your family worked for and stood for stolen; it was having your parents and siblings ripped away; it was experiencing personal suffering, deprivation, and exploitation.
At the hands of smug, self-righteous bureaucrats who had the gall to write "Arbeit Macht Frei" over the gates of the labor camps.
And on the flip side for ordinary Germans it was going along because patriotic gullibility was easy. Hoping for the best was a the path of least resistance. It was also a path to a national catastrophe:
Great Carthage drove three wars. After the first one it was still powerful. After the second one it was still inhabitable. After the third one it was no longer possible to find her. -- Bertolt Brecht
What we are losing is the personal memory of the banality of evil, of how ordinary people can enable and empower the depraved. We flatter ourselves we are better than those Germans who maybe didn't vote for the Nazis, but allowed themselves to be swept up by the vicious, inane bigotries of Nazi propaganda. We assume that we are smarter. Or at the very least nicer people.
We're not. We're not better, and I can tell you from personal experience we aren't nicer or smarter than the Germans who let the Nazis shove their nation's hand into the meat grinder of WW2. The people who went along were pleasant, cultured, educated people who read the papers and loved their families and were good to their neighbors, but in the end let the hope that Nazis weren't really that bad turn them into suckers.
We aren't better or wiser than them. But what we should be is forewarned. And there people who'd prefer we weren't.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yes, but burying evidence of the Holocaust is in the interests of two fairly powerful groups that are otherwise diametrically opposed - white supremacists and muslims.
Muslims, who are for the most part raised to believe that Jews are evil incarnate and must be wiped from the face of the Earth, of course want them to get as little sympathy as possible.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
they are going to need create something like IBM's WATSON
I'd rather they don't make any judgments whatsoever about what speech is acceptable.
And recall that Microsoft's Tay A.I. quickly learned to spout pleasantries like "Hitler was right."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Is Europe really anti-Jew or do they merely tend to be anti-Zionist?? Zionists like to conflate the difference but having met a vast number of non-pro-Israeli Jews, it's quite clear that the MSM (not to mention all the IDF shills) aren't giving us an accurate picture; go figure)...
I think it is more likely that the question that forms the search string is not a question that anyone who believes the Holocaust is real would ask in the first place, so it leads to an echo chamber of the sorts of people that come looking for holocaust denial.
You are welcome to visit Germany and attend any of hundreds museums, dedicated to Nazi time. You will see things yourself. I'm sure, you can also find online representations of these museums.
You are welcome to visit Europe. It's not anti-Jew.
I am glad to hear that - I've been to Europe but not in recent years. However, I'd say the French Jews who are leaving for Israel might disagree with you.
As I said in another comment, I cannot speak to this. But given that French Jews are leaving in record numbers for Israel, well, heck, I think there is something to the anti-Jew sentiments there.
I'm in the US. The top response right now is a SearchEngineLand story about how Google changed something so that the Stormfront site is no longer the #1 result.
Google is very location specific. Every IP address has a different search bubble, unless you are logged into google when you search, then you have your own personal bubble.