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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.
This is the way free information works... most of it is crap. You can't have a system where it is possible for people to post unverified stories about life behind a dictatorial regime that is also moderated.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
These companies are the most powerful information gatekeepers...
(Emphasis added)
This is what is commonly referred to as a flawed assumption. Everything that proceeds after it is therefore suspect.
Exactly. Google is a search engine. All it does, and all it SHOULD do, is return indexed results based on the query the user gave it. I don't want a search engine to try and apply some kind of arbitrary "truthyness" filter, I want it to give me everything it can find that has the words I requested contained within it.
It's not even limited to Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al.
The momentary news cycle is leading to the rush-to-publish, with the inevitable errors. When you measure the news cycle by minutes or even less, you will get this. Somehow lamenting that we are not getting accurate, to the second valid reporting is not a symptom, it is THE problem.
Learn to let go. Let a story be reported with valid, accurate facts, which may take up to an hour, God forbid. Accept that initially you will get only general statements, conflicting facts, and confusion, and be willing to let a comprehensive report be delivered when it can be accurate, not merely FIRST.
This has afflicted CNN and FOX for decades, lest anyone forgets, and they have been trolled mercilessly in some high-profile cases. The second-tier networks have been abused even more, deservedly so. If you are looking for a sub-minute lead on some other network, you will make terrible mistakes.
This also highlights our distraction by celebrity and horror. We have to, HAVE TO KNOW NOW what happened and WHY WHY WHY.
No, we do not. Waiting for accuracy will not diminish the importance of the event, and will not diminish your experience, unless you revel in the agony of others.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
We can blame Google and Facebook for displaying click-bait as "top stories."
If they want their "top stories" to be more credible they should have humans review them for veracity and logical conclusions before they're shown to users.
Also, they should post conflicting versions of stories and events to help readers make better informed decisions as to whether or not a news item is believable.
In all seriousness:
Actually Google shouldn't be sourcing news from 4chan. Sounds like a bug.
actually google should be sourcing from 4chan and any other alleged "fake news" site. it should source from everything
no source is ever guaranteed to be 100% (or even 75%)correct. also, whatever the track record ( and track record of all the sources, starting from legacy news sources like nyt,wapo,cnn etc, are pretty bad) , there is always the chance any source can be the exclusive accurate source for some new item.
google should reflect and prioritize what the people in internet are looking at , linking to, and searching for. even if what they are looking at may be "wrong" , "foolish", "destructive", etc
google should not censor and regulate what others wish to do to suit what it think is "right", "intelligent", "beneficial", etc..
if it does the latter, google will be replaced, eventually, because it will be projecting a false image of what "news" and what people in internet are doing. in other words google will be "fake".
also, in the long run, chance of few people at google being "wrong", is far higher than millions of people being wrong.
Censorship is good, as long as only the "bad" stories are censored? Good luck keeping that pandora's box in check...
Use your head. If news seems fantastic and outrageous, it probably is. If news seems reasonable, remember that everyone has a limited perspective and the story has inevitably been told from some writer's or editor's point of view.
Informational noise has existed since people began sharing information. The Internet has made sharing information easier--that is all. There is quite literally nothing new to see here.
It's clear this article is all about pushing censorship. Google should be returning all relevant results, not censoring the internet to push a particular message.
It's likely Google themselves didn't know what was going on, so they couldn't effectively filter information. Even the mainstream media frequently reports incorrect information on breaking news stories while the situation clarifies itself.
Censorship is never good. If the government could censor information so that only 'the truth' was reported, you'd have found all the videos of Spanish police beating the hell out of Catalonian voters would have quickly disappeared from the internet.
Censorship can never be tolerated.
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'?
Google's stated goal is to be like the computer on Star Trek, i.e. to provide answers to questions naturally, like a person would. So when a user searches for current events or names, Google's goal is to provide reliable and current information, not just an Altavista style database query dump or the results of a popularity contest.
When people are searching for information on a mass shooting, they are probably not looking for 4chan conspiracy theories and fake news.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I don't think it's that people think google shouldn't source from 4chan, but that it shouldn't be a source for Google News.
I don't think it's particularly obtuse to think that sources for Google News have journalists on staff.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Except Google is not just returning indexed results. It is trying to rank them in order of relevance, and how does it achieve this ? By counting the number of clicks.
And this is a huge problem for Google as well as Youtube and Facebook as well. Because the number of clicks is only related to how well the title seems to answer what the person is looking for, not the actual content, a.k.a. the clickbait effect. There is no way to go back at Google and say "meh, that was crap, forget that I clicked on it".
Youtube introduced likes and dislikes to try to counter that effect but that doesn't work so well.
Now, should you rate the relevance in terms of how much the reader likes the content ? No, that would lead to rate hoaxes higher.
The only solution : give higher relevance to articles that come from verified sources. Not perfect, but better.
Since no one is an authority in all fields or in all areas of knowledge, yes, actually we often do need help. I go to the doctor when I have an ailment that needs treatment, because, as it turns out, the guy that delivers my pizzas or the police officer across the street from me likely isn't knowledgeable enough to actual diagnose or treat the problem. Now sure, it is possible that the pizza guy is pursuing a medical degree or the cop happens to have a greater-than-layman's knowledge of the condition, but the odds seem stacked against that.
This idea that somehow we have the tools to assess all claims is little more than post-modern bullshit, and is more a cover for justifying all manner of absurd claims simply because they tickle your ideological leanings. Now maybe Google is the wrong organization to be curating that knowledge or weighing good claims versus bad claims, but this notion that anyone, even the smartest people in the world, have the capacity to judge all claims is just simply nonsense.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I think in some peoples' eyes, that's not a problem, that's the point, to obscure reality and to give fake claims the aura of truth by removing any critical capacity to measure them. They don't want anyone, let alone Google or Facebook, going in and debunking their false stories, and will fight tooth and nail to prevent any independent review of the garbage they either are putting out there, or believe themselves.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You should read the book "All the President's Men" - it goes into some detail on what the Washington Post considers a source. It has to be confirmed by at least 3 people who were actually witness to the thing they are trying to source.
Is this perfect? Of course not, but it speaks volumes on why some neckbeard on 4chan should never be a source - ever - for identifying who the shooter was.
But yes - Google is just a news aggregator - ranking news sources who would source 4chan should have never happened really.
Not to mention that unbiased results are junk. The whole point of a search engine is to find biases that suggest that some information is what you're looking for. When I switch Chrome into incognito mode, Google search results are crap. They return me what's popular for the typical person, not popular for a person like me.
PageRank, at its core, prioritizes popularity.
Yeah, but I think it's obvious that popularity of information in Google's ranking algorithm is used as a proxy for truthfulness/correctness (or in a wider sense: utility), and by and large that approach seems to work well. However if it turns out that in certain (predictable) circumstances popularity is not a good proxy, fixing that is an improvement.
If I query Google for information, I am not interested in falsehoods just because they are popular.
If you are afraid that Google won't serve sites telling you that earth is flat, Obama is a muslim, or the Las Vegas shooter was a f*ng n*r, you can add an extra term "fake" to your query, just like you have to add "xxx" if you want to see pussies.