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.
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.
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.