Slashdot Mirror
Google and Facebook Failed Us (theatlantic.com)
The world's most powerful information gatekeepers neglected their duties in Las Vegas. Again. From a report: In the crucial early hours after the Las Vegas mass shooting, it happened again: Hoaxes, completely unverified rumors, failed witch hunts, and blatant falsehoods spread across the internet. But they did not do so by themselves: They used the infrastructure that Google and Facebook and YouTube have built to achieve wide distribution. These companies are the most powerful information gatekeepers that the world has ever known, and yet they refuse to take responsibility for their active role in damaging the quality of information reaching the public. BuzzFeed's Ryan Broderick found that Google's "top stories" results surfaced 4chan forum posts about a man that right-wing amateur sleuths had incorrectly identified as the Las Vegas shooter. 4chan is a known source not just of racism, but hoaxes and deliberate misinformation. In any list a human might make of sites to exclude from being labeled as "news," 4chan would be near the very top. [...] Of course, it is not just Google. On Facebook, a simple search for "Las Vegas" yields a Group called "Las Vegas Shooting /Massacre," which sprung up after the shooting and already has more than 5,000 members. The group is run by Jonathan Lee Riches, who gained notoriety by filing 3,000 frivolous lawsuits while serving a 10 year prison sentence after being convicted for stealing money by impersonating people whose bank credentials had been phished. Now, he calls himself an "investigative journalist" with Infowars, though there is no indication he's been published on the site, and given that he also lists himself as a former male underwear model at Victoria's Secret, a former nuclear scientist at Chernobyl, and a former bodyguard at Buckingham Palace, his work history may not be reliable. The problems with surfacing this man's group to Facebook users is obvious to literally any human. But to Facebook's algorithms, it's just a fast-growing group with an engaged community.
The whole exercise is good training for Internet users in general:
You can't trust the first thing you read on the Internet - even if you see it repeated 100 times.
Sources matter.
Is anyone else a little bothered by the idea that the government needs to "do something" about inaccurate news? As much as the line that "censorship means the government does it, not private corporations" has some kernel of truth, this seems to very quickly lead the way to a system where the government forces the corporations to do the censoring, with the former retaining deniability and the latter squashing more and more "fake" opinions in an attempt to keep up with nebulous demands.
No ass-hole, it is censorship and Google and Facebook are not meant to think for you. It's called Critical Thinking. Develop it sometime.
History lesson: New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN all promoted the Weapons of Mass Destruction lie of the Bush Administration that led us into war with Iraq. So no they did not reported the news that actually happened.
That's an assertion that needs some backup. It's called "News" in the search result, not "Fiction". One reasonable claim you could make about news is that it contains verifiable facts.
What I see here in the discussion is the fallacy of the excluded middle: just because some sources state another version of reality does not mean they are equally important, and should get the same amount of attention.
Surely you wouldn't plead for creationists getting top billing in the Science section in searches on the origin of life? I would even think a case could be made they should be put under serious cosmology and evolutionary biology sources in the main page.
Of course the reality is that most of the whining is butt-hurt alt-righters who see their 15 minutes of fame quickly counting down.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Moderation is not a binary measure, it is a scale. Every system rejects noise and errors. Most systems screen malevolence at some level. Most systems also have to obey the rules of the jurisdiction they are in - so Google in the US is just as obsessed with intellectual property as the US is. In Europe they have to obey court orders to filter individuals' information. But each level of screening adds another possible failure mode... if you follow people on YouTube you see how this is playing out with false copyright claims and demonetization of "controversial" videos. So the more moderation you have, the more likely that "good" information will get caught up in the multitude of filters. Thus, moderation and free flow of information are inherently conflicting goals. If you "fix" fake news on Facebook, there will be casualties - the balance is very hard to achieve and will never make everyone happy. I'm not saying that they shouldn't try to strike a balance, I'm saying that people need to temper their expectations.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Setting reliability is its own can of worms. Someone on one side of the fence can consider Alex Jones a reliable source. Someone with other beliefs can say that RT is a shining light of truth. Still others may only green-light the Onion as a trustworthy source.
What might be a reliable source is allowing individuals themselves to set the trustworthy sliders themselves, with the ability for them to use other people's settings as weight for their own news moderation. For example, if I know someone who I respect, it would be useful to allow them to select results.
The problem isn't Facebook or Google themselves -- it's how people use them. People with an agenda of any kind love this new world of instant communication because their views can have just as much weight as anyone else's, including what most people would consider mainstream. I'm of the opinion that this brings out the worst in people, and the anonymity of the Internet makes it even worse because people don't feel typical societal pressures to behave nicely.
For ages, society operated on a more or less even keel because fringe opinions were marginalized and information didn't spread across the entire country in seconds. Before TV, it wasn't well known that FDR had polio and was confined to a wheelchair, for example...try running for President with a condition like that today, in a world where every syllable coming out of political figures and every muscle movement they make is tracked 24/7 by multiple news sources. Even after TV, there were only a few news sources and newspapers of record covering goings-on, and by and large the public didn't get a front-row seat to see "how the sausage is made." For example, it baffles me when I hear that people are surprised that political corruption exists. It's been going on forever, and it was just well-hidden from the public. The only time anyone ever got to see anything was when it got too big to keep under wraps. Everyone in public office from the lowest town councilman to the Senate accepts direct bribes and other favors; just because it's easier to uncover now doesn't mean it didn't happen.
That's what I think will eventually bring us down...the constant infighting generated by the ability for anyone to craft an official looking "article" on social media that is specifically targeted to anger a certain group. We're already fragmented as it is and social media makes it worse. For example, I'm a lefty who thinks gun control is a bad idea for the simple reason that it will give every gun nut out there free reign to post their paranoid anti-government fantasies and start a redneck revolution. We have to find some way to keep the peace in a world where it's so easy to upset it.
At this point it's just willful gullibility. I suspect most people, for instance, that went around spreading the Pizzagate story knew it was bullshit (except for the fruitcake who showed up there with a gun), but the lie serves a purpose.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Those are some bad, bad analogies.
When it comes to news, yeah, there are entities out there who (for whatever reason) will publish crap, misdirection, and propaganda. However, that's been a constant since Herr Gutenberg first thought "Hey, what can we print on this thing besides The Bible"? I mean, c'mon, the term "Yellow Journalism" predates computers, let alone the Internet.
Secondly, nobody is claiming that Joe Sixpack can assess *all* claims... not even professional news/media organizations can do that competently most of the time.
Example? No sweat: The stupid discussions going on about "silencers." Forget pro or con, most people in the professional media talking about them discuss some James-Bond fantasy version that magically makes loud gunfire whisper-quiet. They also have zero clue as to how damned hot (to the point of melting) one would get when/if you run a frig-ton of bullets through it. But hey - that's not crap 'news', is it? Oh, wait - it is. Again, pro or con, I don't care about the argument you bear about them... just get the damned facts right from people who make and use the things.
But then, any reasonable human being (that is, not a mouth-breathing ideologue) can reach out and look these things up if needed - doubly so if it has a strong probability of affecting policy. 2 minutes and a YouTube video showing a few in action should be sufficient, yet nearly all of the 'trusted' media has, to date, not even bothered with doing that tiny fleck of research (let alone challenge as politician who spouts off such inaccuracy).
However, where even the professionals fail, people come through - discussion and (non-trolling) debate more often than not will disprove the fake and confirm the real. Take Facebook - most garbage stories are usually disproven in very short order within one's given social group, so long as there is a diversity of expertise and opinion. Works in real life too, if you let it.
Another item to consider: Who gets to be the Ministry of Truth? How can you certify them to be unbiased and fair in their assessments, especially when everybody's got a slant?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The difference is the fake news purveyors have no concept of accountability. Yes, news outlets will get things wrong, but they also retract when it is discovered that they have.
The only caveat to all of this is that in the age of the Internet, online news sources have sadly started mixing editorial content with actual reporting. This I am very critical of. In the old days, newspapers had a specific section for editorial content, and even the nightly news, where there was editorial content, was usually put at the end of the broadcast and clearly stated as an editorial. On the Internet it can be rather hard to identify what is journalism and what isn't. Fox and CNN's websites are both abusers of this; mixing in the actual reporting with editorials and making it hard to figure out which you're reading.
I just simply don't trust average people on comment forums actually being able in many cases to debunk any claim. Relying upon random comments on the Internet seems a terrible idea to me.
This whole thing seems to feed into the whole "all claims are equally valid" sort of post-modernist claim; a sort of epistemological nihilism which is largely defended by significantly inflating the problems with mainstream journalism.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.