Slashdot Mirror
Google Launches a News Initiative To Fight False News and Help Publishers Make Money (cnbc.com)
Google is launching the Google News Initiative, a journalism-focused program that will help publishers earn revenue and combat fake news. From a report: The initiative, announced Tuesday, will offer publications another monetization model online called Subscribe with Google, as well as work with established universities and groups to combat misinformation. It will also introduce an open-source tool called Outline, which will make it easier for news organizations to set up secure access to the internet for their journalists. Google said it was committing $300 million over the next three years to the project, though it did not elaborate on how the resources would be spent.
The company said it paid $12.6 billion to news organizations and drove 10 billion clicks a month to their websites for free last year. Subscribe with Google will make it easier for readers to pay for content from news organizations that have agreed to partner with the company. FT.com, The Washington Post, and McClatchy Company publications including the Miami Herald are among the 17 launch partners.
The company said it paid $12.6 billion to news organizations and drove 10 billion clicks a month to their websites for free last year. Subscribe with Google will make it easier for readers to pay for content from news organizations that have agreed to partner with the company. FT.com, The Washington Post, and McClatchy Company publications including the Miami Herald are among the 17 launch partners.
How's that? Most of the referenced sites ARE fake news...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You mean Google the censoring propaganda machine?
It used to be easy to tell actual news articles from commentary and opinion. But no more.
How many news feeds distinguish between the two? How many news web sites clearly label an article as one or the other? How many readers even know the difference anymore.
Solve the labeling problem first and the rest will be easier. Of course, hard news -- without inflammatory opinion -- garners fewer clicks, so there may be no motivation for proper labeling.
Publishers will make money by turning everyone's computer into a cryptominer, dropping the ads, and giving away the goods.
With the mentioned News Media, why bother? Then there is universities where the only free speech allowed is theirs and a contrary view is forbidden
"Please get addicted to our revenue model where we are the middlemen between you and your subscribers' dollars. That way we can tell you what to publish or demonetize you like a conservative Youtube account."
How long will nerds fetishize monster tech corps like Google? It's a big part of the problem.
Interesting.
The NYT ran a story about how [Trump's CIA pick] Gina Haspel had a role in torture during her admin of a Thailand black site.
That was later shown to be completely false (Haspel took over months after the tortures had ended). Pro Publica printed a retraction of their story, but the NYT did not.
For comparison, Infowars is widely decried (*) as fake news for publishing the "Spirit Cooking" article, which is completely accurate in all its claims.
Now congress-people are falling over themselves saying they will block Haspel's appointment to the CIA.
What are the chances that these congressmen get their information from the NYT, are well-meaning, and yet misinformed?
(*) That exact article is listed as an example of fake news in at least one scientific study of fake news! It's also debunked as "false" on Snopes.com
is the censor those who speak of inconvenient truths, and opposing view or alternative facts, so people can educate themselves before forming an opinion.
Google will basically do as Big Gov says and shape people's opinions, and continue to build the narrative that America is right and just, and everyone else is cheating, lying, and being dishonest.
...killed the News.
As soon as journalists decided that shaping/pushing agendas was their moral duty, opinion and facts are intermixed freely without even an attempt to keep them clearly labeled.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
This may sound selfish and myopic but this really does not apply to me. There is a sense in which we modern humans are inundated with information so it is wise to have good filter criteria for what you imbibe. For instance, I prefer books to periodicals and websites because the latter are more transitory in worth and sometimes the most latter are garbage due to lax publishing standards or low barrier for entry . So, when I am not reading math, computer science and science books on my Kobo Aura ONE ereader every Sunday I download the news from the Associated Press via Calibre and I also occassionally read academic journal periodicals, online, and Slashdot and the occasional ArsTechnica. The associated press are not going to publish fake news and I only read the politics, technology and science sections. I have also been reading slashdot since like 1998 and it does not carry fake news per se but modern Slashdot sometimes carries click bait. That is how I imbibe information as part of the nerd elite. I understand that Democracy is messy though and lower IQ people have voting power so fake news can affect me somewhat except for the fact that America is actually an Oligarchy with some Democratic features rather than a straight Democracy so it does not really matter what the average Joe and idiots imbibe, anyway !
I get my news directly from the only source I can trust...The Onion.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
A MegaCorp to spoon feed us 'news Google deems correct and proper'. Welcome to Prolefeed Beta!
In the immortal words of Socrates, who said; 'I drank what?'
Coming soon - Bing Binge, where you can freely feed from the fake news trough.
This story is laughable. Google is the world's biggest distributor of lies and propaganda.
You mean George Soros minions sign off on every political story you post?
...further manoeuvres to position itself as the predominant gatekeeper and controller of news. If we let them do that too much, most of our news will be reduced to that which is profitable to Google, regardless of whether it serves the public good.
There, fixed that for you ;)
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
No more lies! We'll see the mic booms on the "moon landing" footage, chemtrails will be exposed as whites-only obesity-promoting chemicals, and we'll learn the true extent of the HAARP array's mind control powers!
...Or did they mean fighting actually fake news? Pphht, doesn't seem like a very revenue-positive thing to do.
they argued, successfully, that they weren't a "News" organization and were in fact an entertainment network. That's how they get away with running opinion pieces and news stories side by side without notice or a pause. Nothing on Fox is technically "News", it's entertainment. Legally speaking that is.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Fuck you, Google Inc.
That's how much you are trusted.
Fuck you forever.
Google IS the FALSE news.
Put robots in charge on the news.
The new finance.google.com is a useless piece of shit. Google wants to steal all info about you but offer less in return.
Google is only interested in keeping publishers alive because they are the ones to research, write and publish the articles that Google links to.
Google has no ability or interest in doing tat kind of work.
I'll believe that they are interested in promoting truth when they start flagging people who conflate all immigrants, both legal and illegal, with illegal immigrants. Those liars really need a proper flogging.
I'm guessing not but hey make my day google.
Guido was shopping around for donations to support Algo development for ease of use. Instead of supporting him, they cloned his repo and did their own thing as "Outline" which is pretty cruel.
You want to know how you can tell if news is "fake" or not? There is one simple test.
Does it bore the fuck out of you? If it does, then it's news. If it excites, angers, titillates, or otherwise stirs emotion, then it is not news.
You want proof? Watch CNN or Fox News for a few minutes. Feel your pulse rise? That's fake news. Now, watch PBS News Hour or BBC World News. Feel your pulse rise? No, you fell asleep? That's because it's real news.
A couple other key indicators are: if you are watching a news program and more than one person is speaking at any given time, shouting over someone else, you are watching fake news. If only one side of an issue is being presented, or the anchors try to steer a debate towards one side or another, you are watching fake news.
Facts and opinions are very different things. Facts are cold and dispassionate. Opinions are passionate and emotional.
One of the reasons I think we are in this mess is that back during the DotCom v1.0 days, tech companies pushed this idea that "passion" was a virtue and, that notion spread as everyone suddenly wanted to be a geek. Everyone became passionate (or sentimental) about everything.
Before that, dispassion and reason were considered virtues. It used to be considered a compliment to be told that you "run on an even keel."
The one thing tech companies could do to combat fake news would be to put the emphasis back on reason and critical thinking. However, they will never do that because it would totally destroy their business models. What reasonable, critically-minded person would ever buy an Alexa (or similar) or jones for the new crop of "courageous" smartphones, even though they just spent $1,000 on a top-of-the-line model less than a year ago?
The Silicon Valley sociopaths want us to be running around like chickens with our heads cut off. That's how they maximize their profits.
Google Launches a News Initiative To Help Publishers Make Money
Google's version of fake news includes sites like Antiwar.com which point out its owners' wars of choice which kill millions of innocent lives constantly.