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Google Executives Are Floating a Plan To Fight Fake News on Facebook and Twitter (qz.com)
Fake news, bots, and propaganda were hot topics at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos last month, and Google executives there floated an intriguing idea to some fellow attendees -- what if the company could tell users whether information is trustworthy before they shared it on social networks like Facebook and Twitter? From a report: Representatives from Google and its parent company Alphabet eagerly discussed how the company can play a greater role in reducing misleading information online, several Davos attendees involved in and briefed on these conversations told Quartz. A notification system, perhaps via an optional extension for Google's Chrome browser, was an idea that these people said was broached more than once. Such a browser-based system controlled by Google could alert users on Facebook's or Twitter's websites when they're seeing or sharing a link deemed to be false or untrustworthy.
Right now, this appears to be merely an idea company executives are discussing, not a product in development.
Likely. Only slightly less desirable would be people that work for Google. No, thanks. The douches there sure think highly of themselves. You know what works every time? Stop getting your news from Google, Twitter, or Facebook.
Facebook and Twitter are not News sites, or even aggregators, in the first place.
The james damore case clearly shows us that google is not like a computer system that neutrally handles data, it has a specific narrative which is emotional and based on current political leanings and the soft 'gut' feeling of the population.
Would we be seeing things which google does not like, say perhaps that some of their hardware was being manufactured by slave labor et al? Or would this suddenly become 'fake news'
The problem is not really fake news, the problem is the lack of anything like a credible media source. Everyone has cross mergered to the point where what we see and hear as 'news' is generally only the things we are allowed to see.
See for example the court case in which fox news bought out WTVT and then buried a story about Monstanto's posilac product and the harmful effects it had on the animals and on anyone drinking it (hint, it is on the market, will remain so, and is not safe to consume)
Now try and look around at any major news corp that has mentioned that monsanto's roundup weed killer is also a known active carcinogen (again, on the market, not safe, will remain that way).
We are already living in the age of fake news from our highest sources. This whole thing just stinks of a way to cripple what little independent media is left so that the rich can write the narrative of our reality. I believe russians probably did purchase and attempt to sway public opinion on matters if only to create a divide, I also believe that corporations do this as a matter of daily operations like one might take a solid dump in the morning.
There is no cure for this situation save one which is unappealing....we need to start to kill the rich similar to the french revolution. The only reason we have rights today the way we recognize them is because an angry mob started to cut rich peoples heads off until an agreement of fair treatment was made. You may know such agreements as the bill of human rights, principle of equality, separation of church and state, congress and/or a group of representatives of the people, removal of the feudal system, etc. These effects rippled across the planet to give us much of what we know today as modern civil society.
Again, unappealing, but beneficial without a doubt. Perhaps the time has come again to remind those in power who we are
Any who will determine is it is trustworthy, let me guess... AI...
Fact checking is a real thing and it does work. Sites like Snopes and Politifact do an admirable job of identifying false information, and augmented with AI sites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter could significantly reduce the amount of false information in social media and Internet searches. It certainly wouldn't be easy, but neither is anything else these large Internet companies are doing day to day.
For the foreseeable future you will still need human researchers to investigate false claims, but AI would be very useful in finding instances of these false claims once they have been verified.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
We'll fight bias with even more bias! That'll fix it!
I'm sure Google will start with removing truly fake news, but they will quickly slide into removing anything that reflects badly on Google or the people they support. They have already proven to put ideology first.
Modern journalism is about covering the important stories... with a pillow until they stop moving.
Quite, according to Alex Jones's Infowars, Snopes is the spawn of the devil funded by George Soros.
The alt-right have discovered that they can draw low information citizens into a cult where fake news becomes the truth and all MSM news is decried as manipulative propaganda from "Globalists". No marking of news with a likelihood of truth score is going to affect folks who have joined the cult. In fact they are more likely to take the inverse as the measure of "truthiness". On the left the bubble of identity politics brings its own dangers of totalitarian cults though the news that feeds is often true all be it cherry picked.
I don't know what the answer is but the jackboots of Nationalism are shortly going to be stamping on everybodies faces and I don't think anyone can stop them. It is a long time since the likes of Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini walked the earth and people have forgotten that flag waving alone does not build a sane society.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Sites like Snopes and Politifact do an admirable job of identifying false information
Bullshit. They politicize the hell out of it. Something is either true or false. They are both filled with "True, but" conditionals.
... not sure we need commissars for it though.
{the scene: Myrtle and Ester, gossiping over their fence}
Myrtle: Hey Ester, did you hear the news? Hillary Clinton ran a private email server out of her bathroom, so she wouldn't have to use official government email!
Ester: Oh really? Well I think ...
{popping out of bushes}Ivan: Excuse me, comrades! Ha, no, see, this is not "news" as you say, this is "fake news"!
Ivan: Let me provide you with real news story about the perfectly legal activities of most excellent Secretary Clinton! This news has been verified by current federal executive, so you know it is unbiased and true!
Part of the reason no one trusts NBC, CNN, etc. anymore is that half the stories they run with have no cited sources, just BS like "said one source with inside knowledge who was not allowed to speak on the record". And sometimes those leaks are just that - BS fed to reporters too lazy to check out the stories they were handed.
So before "Big News" gets to complain about "Alt News" running with poor sourcing, "Big News" needs get their own house in order first.
Let's suppose that Google goes ahead and makes a "Fake News Alert" Chrome plugin. Further, let's assume that they don't abuse their position (as someone else guessed they would by marking anti-Google posts as "fake" regardless of the truth) or engage in any partisan bias (marking true posts from one side as fake simply because Google workers tend to support the other side). Would this type of thing even be effective?
I'd argue that it wouldn't. This would be an optional plugin. You'd need to purposefully go and get the plugin. The only people who did that would be people who care whether a news source is fake or not. This would likely exclude almost everyone who posts fake news items. They don't care about truth as much as they care that the story fits their narrative. Even if they installed the plugin, they'd start seeing stories they agreed with marked as fake. Then, they'd either have to change their minds or just accuse Google as being part of the "establishment deep state conspiracy" (or something like that). Like Nigerian scammer victims, these people wouldn't want to admit that they were suckered by fake news in the past so they'd go with the "this news is real, Google's lying" explanation
While I commend Google for trying to figure out a way to fight stories that are completely fake, an optional plugin won't do anything.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Such collusion among monopolies to control the flow of information should have been denounced by all Slashdotters, and attracted attention of the Justice Department enforcing anti-trust laws...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The problem with this idea is that the fake news sites will never join the programme. They will just argue that it's run by the biased mainstream media alt-leftists or whatever and turn not being part of it into a badge of honour.
We already have a pretty good fact checking system for reputable news outlets. They check each other, they check themselves and they publish corrections. The problem is the disreputable ones who ignore all that stuff and don't care.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
As long as their power extends to "Hey, that thing you are spreading has been determined to be bullshit, please do a little research and decide if you want to share it." I'm fine with it.
The News has always been manipulated.
What has he media's panties in a bunch is the fact that the ability to do so is no longer limited to them.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Most things are simply True or False.
Attempting to nuance it or explain how it's "misleading" is called spin.
It is also called editorializing.
"Yeah, but..." is not fact checking. It's spinning.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
So, they're arguing for censorship. Their privilege, but I'd rather have less censorship rather than more....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Likely. Only slightly less desirable would be people that work for Google. No, thanks. The douches there sure think highly of themselves. You know what works every time? Stop getting your news from Google, Twitter, or Facebook.
I have been noticing that Google is becoming extremely social Justice aware lately, and they are actively censoring search results no matter what your settings are. This is probably in large reaction to them becoming a feminist run organization.
I usually use DDG for searching. But there are a few times I switch over to google. I noticed that there were getting to be marked differences between the two.
So looking at the differences, I came up with a hypothesis that perhaps a person with sex negative feminism ideaolgy might have decided that there were some things that people should not be allowed to look at under any circumstances.
So I came up with a test. A test word would be used that might be something that is not abnormal, meaning something not uncommon. But also something that would not fit the present day narrative of sex negative feminists.
Okay - the rest of this experiment is of an adult nature.
The test was to use the same browser - Chrome, and perform identical search terms on both Google and DDG. In each case, Safesearch was turned off - no filtering of the results would be used. The term would be searched, and the results would be viewed by image.
The term I settled on was "Jilling", which is a slang term for female masturbation.
So I entered the term, hit search in each browser, then switched over to images. The differences were striking.
Google had something like 5 individual results, and DDG had many pages of results. There were also interesting matters outside of the scope of the investigation, in that a large number of the images came from Tumblr, which is a site largely populated by women.
So like all experiments, new questions are raised. But I am convinced that Google is actively turning sex negative feminist in ideology, and is very actively blocking anything that does not fit their narrative.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.