Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.