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Google's Featured Snippets Are Worse Than Fake News (theoutline.com)
Adrianne Jeffries, reporting for The Outline: Peter Shulman, an associate history professor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, was lecturing on the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s when a student asked an odd question: Was President Warren Harding a member of the KKK? Shulman was taken aback. He confessed that he was not aware of that allegation, but that Harding had been in favor of anti-lynching legislation, so it seemed unlikely. But then a second student pulled out his phone and announced that yes, Harding had been a Klan member, and so had four other presidents. It was right there on Google, clearly emphasized inside a box at the top of the page. "I understand what Google is trying to do, and it's work that perhaps requires algorithmic aid," Shulman said in an email. "But in this instance, the question its algorithm scoured the internet to answer is simply a poorly conceived one. There have been no presidents in the Klan." Google needs to invest in human experts who can judge what type of queries should produce a direct answer like this, Shulman said. "Or, at least in this case, not send an algorithm in search of an answer that isn't simply 'There is no evidence any American president has been a member of the Klan.' It'd be great if instead of highlighting a bogus answer, it provided links to accessible, peer-reviewed scholarship."
The bigger problem with that teacher's class is his retarded students that are too stupid to check the source of their search.
Typing the same search "presidents in the klan" into DDG also puts the same fake news result at the top (at least it's at the top if I set my location to UK. If I set it to worldwide it comes in second). Bing also puts the same story at the top. So this is not just Google's problem. It's a problem that all search vendors need to tackle collectively.
Tabloid trash used to be contained within that special group of "news" providers, and quarantined near grocery store cash registers.
Unfortunately, the quest to extract revenue derived from clicks has pushed damn near everyone to publish and aggregate a similar flavor of clickbait bullshit.
Hey Capitalism, stop rewarding Bullshit. Otherwise, You Reap what You Sow.
Maybe this history teacher needs to research the history of search engines. Maybe he will find that they never were intended to give accurate news. Anyway that "real person review" is not Google's job its the user that is reading the article. If you want an instant "think for me and answer my question" service, may I suggest a genie in a bottle.
Truth cannot be determined by consensus, of course. However, you can get close (high probability of truth), and the interesting thing is, it's basically just another application of the PageRank algorithm which made Google.
Suppose I showed you sources written by two people who won Nobel prizes in chemistry both saying the same about some chemistry fact, and a Google search revealed no similarly credible sources who disagree. We'd say the laurettes are very likely telling us the truth.
If you look at all of the sources cited in Encyclopedia Britannica, that'll give you a list of pretty credible sources; not perfect but pretty good. The second-order list of sources which are in turn referenced by two or more of the Britannica sources is a much larger list of pretty credible sources. If two or three or four of these sources agree on some statement, AND none disagree, the statement is very likely true.
Problem is if you start trying to filter fake news, you get people screaming at your for "censorship" and "blocking alternate views". That feeds into their victim mentality.
I guarantee you will see it in the comments on this story. Someone will defend the claim that four presidents were members of the KKK, saying it's a valid theory and that suppressing it is just censorship and who is Google to decide what is true etc.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Fake news often come as a statement, which has not been denied yet. At the moment the fake news is all the rage, there are no credible refutations. They just appear after the fake news leaves the bubble and someone is really determined to get to the ground and comes up with some evidence to the contrary. If Google (or any other news source) tries to algorithmically find the one true answer, all they have to build on are rumours spreading everywhere and thus apparently confirming the fake news.
The starting point was the question if Warren G. Harding was a member in the KKK. If you look at the wikipedia pages, online biographies or other sources, no one explicitely states "No, there is no evidence that Warren G. Harding was a member in the KKK.". It will in general be that way, because otherwise the list of things Warren G. Harding wasn't would be infinitely long. He neither was a chinese mandarin nor a poisonous frog, he never went to the moon, and he was not made from steel sheets. He's nothing to eat, and none of his mollusculous appendicles ever touched the Earth's core.
We have a new version of Russell's teapot here: You can come up with any random statement, and the probability is high that you don't find a debunking of that statement somewhere on the internet. So there is nothing online to prove that this random statement is false, and the attempt to find the One True Answer will confirm the statement, turning a not denied statement apparently into a true one.
Climate change as a result of human activity is as close to an established fact as pretty much anything can plausibly be. Unfortunately, when an issue becomes politicized this isn't good enough. Someone says, "It's only a theory." and the completely correct response would be some thing like, "Well it is a theory, but using the word 'only' inaccurately implies... blah blah..." and people stop paying attention.
Communication with the public has long been a problem since the public is only prepared to listen to sentence fragments of a few words or less. Stating climate change to be a fact, without ambiguity, is as close to truth as the public is prepared to absorb. For those people who want more specificity, there are plenty of resources which go into greater depth. Great effort has been expended to communicate exactly what climate change means and what it implies, there is no shortage of resources available for those who are willing to look. I suggest that if you're searching for these though, you drop the acronym "AGW." That was originally a denier term, and whatever information you find by searching for it is likely to skew in that direction. You'll do much better with a search for "climate change" - whatever you find is likely to cover the human aspect as well.