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Safari's 'Siri Suggested' Search Results Highlighted Conspiracy Theories, Fake News (buzzfeednews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Apple's Safari, one of the internet's most popular web browsers, has been surfacing debunked conspiracies, shock videos, and false information via its "Siri Suggested Websites" feature. Such results raise questions about the company's ability to monitor for low-quality information, and provide another example of the problems platforms run into when relying on algorithms to police the internet. As of yesterday, if you typed "Pizzagate" into Apple's Safari, the browser's "Siri Suggested Website" prominently offered users a link to a YouTube video with the title "PIZZAGATE, BIGGEST SCANDAL EVER!!!" by conspiracy theorist David Seaman (the video doesn't play, since Seaman's channel was taken down for violating YouTube's terms of service). The search results appeared on multiple versions of Safari. Apple removed all examples of the questionable Siri Suggested sites provided to it by BuzzFeed News.
[W]hen BuzzFeed News entered incomplete search terms that might suggest contentious or conspiratorial topics (as shown below), the search algorithms directed us toward low-quality websites, message boards, or YouTube conspiracy videos rather than reliable information or debunks about those topics. Meanwhile, Google does not feature such unreliable pages in its top search results. Those suggested results matter since Safari is one of the internet's most popular web browsers -- some estimates suggest it has captured over 10% of the browser market share. The poor suggestions may be a result of a "data void," which is "what happens when a term doesn't have 'natural informative results' and manipulators seize upon it," reports BuzzFeed. "Many of the sites surfaced by the Siri Suggested feature came from conspiracy or junk sites hastily assembled to fill that void."
In a statement, Apple said: "Siri Suggested Websites come from content on the web and we provide curation to help avoid inappropriate sites. We also remove any inappropriate suggestions whenever we become aware of them, as we have with these. We will continue to work to provide high-quality results and users can email results they feel are inappropriate to applebot@apple.com."
[W]hen BuzzFeed News entered incomplete search terms that might suggest contentious or conspiratorial topics (as shown below), the search algorithms directed us toward low-quality websites, message boards, or YouTube conspiracy videos rather than reliable information or debunks about those topics. Meanwhile, Google does not feature such unreliable pages in its top search results. Those suggested results matter since Safari is one of the internet's most popular web browsers -- some estimates suggest it has captured over 10% of the browser market share. The poor suggestions may be a result of a "data void," which is "what happens when a term doesn't have 'natural informative results' and manipulators seize upon it," reports BuzzFeed. "Many of the sites surfaced by the Siri Suggested feature came from conspiracy or junk sites hastily assembled to fill that void."
In a statement, Apple said: "Siri Suggested Websites come from content on the web and we provide curation to help avoid inappropriate sites. We also remove any inappropriate suggestions whenever we become aware of them, as we have with these. We will continue to work to provide high-quality results and users can email results they feel are inappropriate to applebot@apple.com."
3.38% of browser market share doesn't seem like "one of the internet's most popular web browser"...
Why it's Apple's job or any other company's job to monitor links to content outside their control?
Let ***ME*** decide if the links are valuable or not.
If I type "Pizzagate" it's because I want to find information about that topic (both against and for the conspiracy).
Logically Safari (and Bing and Google) should show me what's available, rather than make it invisible.
I want to see ALL the possible websites, not just the ones Apple of Microsoft or Google thinks is "safe" for my consumption.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
All the techies and gurus and talking heads are wringing their hands about runaway AI in weapons and the implications of them spinning out of control but are full speed ahead on board with reasons why we should create this overarching AI Deity to monitor and control speech across entire nations and the planet from on high. I mean, technology that could be repurposed to detect, censor, and extract data about dissidents from any form of expression instantaneously on global scales being somewhere in the neighborhood of concern as robotic guns is not THAT crazy a notion right?
Since actual numbers and math show conclusively that black people are 2.7 times more likely to be shot by police than white people, I'm pretty sure it's safe to completely ignore every other item on your passive-aggressive list. You are the reason fake news is a problem. For those of you who still believe that white people are more likely to be shot by police, here is the best available resource on people killed in encounters with law enforcement. You can search the database itself, if you'd like, and even download the raw data.
https://www.fatalencounters.or...
You are welcome on my lawn.
When did (some) westerners turn into wilting violets? Do they think Batboy is a real person every time they buy groceries and see a tabloid at checkout? If these assholes had been pushing this censorship crap in 2002, anyone questioning the march to invade Iraq would have been slandered as a conspiracy theorist and censored*.
Then there's the fact that the people calling for said censorship can easily be hoist on their own petard, as happened to ThinkProgress after they cheered for Alex Jones being deplatformed. The Weekly Standard picked a nit with an article they wrote on Trump's nominee for SCOTUS, and so FFB throttled them. Because FFB trusted a science-denying, Iraq war loving Bill Kristol rag to do "fact checking".
*To those who say it's not censorship if the government isn't involved, I'll refer you to the Congressional hearings where senators demanding big tech companies do something about "fake news", and the fact that FFB is relying on the Atlantic Council to police their platform - an organization that receives direct funding from the US military.
I'm pretty sure it's safe to completely ignore every other item on your passive-aggressive list.
You call that reason? You call yourself educated?
Of the 1,146 and 1,092 victims of police violence in 2015 and 2016, respectively, the authors found 52 percent were white, 26 percent were black, and 17 percent were Hispanic.
Source.
Is that left leaning enough for you? White people are more likely to be shot. A black person is more likely to be shot, but they are also more likely to commit crime being 13% of the population and commit over half the murders, rapes, assaults, burglaries, robberies, and domestic violence cases. Its all there. Pick a year, any year.
Now go ahead and fail to refute the rest of the list, or are you going to spew insults and hatred like you usually do?
You chose the fourth item. You looked at the first three, assented, and moved on.
Do you or do you not believe women can have a penis? Do you or do you not believe Pho wasn't just sentenced? And all the others.
When will you stop denying reality. Trump was elected because too many people deny what is real. Drop the attitude or get four more years of the orange clown.
Black people make up 12.3% of the US population. White people make up 70% of the population. Now pay attention. If black people make up 12.3% of the population and make up 26% of the people shot by police, and white people are approx. 70% of the population and make up 52% of those shot by police, that means black people are more than twice as likely to be shot by police than white people.
See above. Go through it step by step. It's simple statistics, bro.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That may be mostly true, but it's not due to the racist reasons you are implying. If you look at desparately poor region with little to no chance of finding jobs for young adult males, then the crime rates in those regions will go up. The demographics of those regions have more blacks than whites in this country. So blame the crime rate on poverty rather than race. The only people who repeat that silly stat of yours are white nationalists, and if you're trusting what they tell you then you need to get more educated.
Also note that in the US, for the exact same crime blacks have a higher conviction rate than whites and will get a longer sentence on average. For drug crimes it's absurdly biased against blacks whereas whites will get only a slap on the wrist (ie, inexpensive crack cocaine gets a long sentence whereas upper class cocaine gets you community service).
Is the search provider providing bullshit results because they didn't like the bullshit generated by others.
people who are to stupid to tell facts from fictions
Which, I'd guess, would be about 67% of the human population. The interesting point is that the heuristics being employed by most of the content suggestors are also too stupid to tell facts from fiction.
And look! Even you were unable to resist collapsing back into some convenient, if improbable, conspiracy theory. It's just possible, you know, that the algorithms basically suck at sorting the chaff out and that serious people are genuinely concerned the kind of crap that they foist upon us. Maybe the very thing which attracts humans to conspiracy theories and lies also attracts automated news aggregators? BTW, in choosing your nanny state, allow me to suggest North-Western European Social Democracy, those fascist "nanny states" were far too strict (well unless you go in for the strict "nanny" thing of course).
Is it the supermarket's job to stop me from reading a National Enquirer?
No, it's their job not to offer you, inter alia, child pr0n.
Why is it that tech companies feel the need to curate what I'm exposed to?
Not too subtle a difference I hope, but this is not about what you are exposed to, this is about what they are exposing you to. Once you actively suggest something to someone else, you accept a responsibility for what you suggested that you did not previously have.
I was coming to say basically the same thing about buzzfeed. When they arent manufacturing their own fake news, they are copying others.
"His name was James Damore."
That may be mostly true
Indeed!
but it's not due to the racist reasons you are implying.
Zero racist reasons were implied. Therefore the racist implications are in your own head. You therefore, are the racist. There is no other truth here.
"His name was James Damore."
Hey its the only ACTUAL example of a conspiracy theory on your list.
One correction though. The FBI found Hillary Clinton broke the law precisely zero times.
Sorry, but thems the facts.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
No. No he did not. He said her staff where careless.
And "No reasonable prosecutor" means exactly that. The case is unprosecutable because there isn't evidence of a crime.
Despite the bleatings of the conspiracy theory set, "Grandma doesn't understand email security" isn't a crime, and yes best practices where not followed. But that isn't a criminal act, or 3/4 of the IT industry would be incarcerated for shitty passwords and bad ssh key hygene.
Oh the irony...... Make a baseless and unjustified accusation, then accuse those trying to correct the facts of lying. This is an insular and circular mode of cognition and I implore you to nullroute breitbart and other bullshit artist propaganda websites and join the fact based community.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Theres more. Here are his exact words;-
Get it? Its "Grandma does not understand email servers". Thats it. Thats the finding.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Siri delivers accurate results. How original, and how dangerous.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Because impoverished white people simply don't exist, do they? You're wearing out your race card. It's about culture and behavior, not race.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
The FBI doesn't declare guilt or innocence, they run investigations. Comey overstepped his bounds.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
And those 30,000 deleted emails? The ones that were bit bleached, like, "you mean like with a cloth", even after they were subpoenaed ? You actually buy that line? You want to talk about bullshit artistry? Grandma my ass, she had hired professionals, she didn't actually system-administrate the server herself, but she gave the orders and made the executive decisions.
Comey had no business suggesting a prosecutor shouldn't pursue this case. He found plenty of evidence, but made the subjective decision that there was nothing to see here anyway. That was an underlying message that they would not help out the DoJ if the DoJ pursued this anyway.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Zero racist reasons were implied. Therefore the racist implications are in your own head. You therefore, are the racist. There is no other truth here.
Stating related facts can be misleading to the point of racism. For instance you are posting on slashdot. Many trolling posters on slashdot live in their mom's basement. Many posters on slashdot are IT folks. Many IT folks are overweight. Some IT workers are unkempt slobs as they are introverts and like working alone in dark spaces where they don't have to deal with social situations.
The implication is that you are a trolling overweight introverted anti-social slob.
Now, none of things may be true of you, and in fact several are not even true in general. But the problem is the appearance of a stereotype that people readily identify with and then tar the rest of the categorized population. After all we all know the wonderful BOFH right?
Finally, to counter your statement, per the GPs assumed intended direction if you replace black with poor you'll come up with roughly equivalently true statements. Since black refers to race and making negative statements based on race is considered racism... qed.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I'm pretty sure it's safe to completely ignore every other item on your passive-aggressive list.
You call that reason? You call yourself educated?
Of the 1,146 and 1,092 victims of police violence in 2015 and 2016, respectively, the authors found 52 percent were white, 26 percent were black, and 17 percent were Hispanic.
Source.
Is that left leaning enough for you? White people are more likely to be shot. A black person is more likely to be shot, but they are also more likely to commit crime being 13% of the population and commit over half the murders, rapes, assaults, burglaries, robberies, and domestic violence cases. Its all there. Pick a year, any year.
Now go ahead and fail to refute the rest of the list, or are you going to spew insults and hatred like you usually do?
Your problem isn't political bias, it's that you think you are educated, but don't even know what "likely" means.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
And those 30,000 deleted emails? The ones that were bit bleached, like, "you mean like with a cloth", even after they were subpoenaed ?
How the fuck does one "bleach" mails?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
+1 Funny
Complete stupidity. Who writes this shit. I don't even know any Mac users who use that POS.
Safari? That's that thing you use to download a real browser, just like Edge on Windows.
James Comey, then head of the FBI, declared that she's guilty, but that "no reasonable prosecutor" would pursue her.
No. No he did not. He said her staff where careless.
He did, indeed, say that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Here is the CNBC story that quotes him.
The case is unprosecutable because there isn't evidence of a crime.
From the same story:
Comey began his address by explaining what investigators found. He said that the probe showed that 110 emails in 52 email chains were determined to include classified information at the time they were received. Within those emails, eight chains contained information that was "top secret" at the time they were sent, 36 had "secret" information and eight more had "confidential" information, the FBI director said.
All of that is evidence of a crime. He is further quoted as saying, in the SAME SENTENCE that contains the "no reasonable prosecutor" phrase:
"Although there is evidence of potential violations regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case," he said.
There is evidence, but no prosecutor would bring a case. Further, he said:
He characterized the investigation findings as showing that Clinton and her team were "extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information" but he said there was no clear evidence they intended to violate the law.
So no, he didn't say that just Clinton's staff "where" careless. Clinton too.
But but but ... no clear evidence of intent? Sadly the laws being broken don't have an intent clause, they are broken when the act takes place, intent or not.
Despite the bleatings of the conspiracy theory set, "Grandma doesn't understand email security" isn't a crime,
But "Grandma doesn't understand what 'Top Secret' means and the necessity of safeguarding such material" IS a crime. Grandma shouldn't have had to understand email security, but since she made the attempt and failed, and had classified material transported using that email system in violation of federal law, there is a crime. A crime that Grandma had been briefed on before she was given a security clearance, by the way. Ignorance is not only not an excuse, it doesn't apply here.
join the fact based community.
A good suggestion. I suppose you would classify CNBC with Brietbart, but you can find the full statement here on the FBI's website. Are CNN and The New York Times also Brietbart sycophants?
"Bit Bleach" is a secure deletion program. Deletes the file, then writes garbage onto sectors repeatedly so that you can't extract the original data. It's fairly common practice for any sensitive material, though of course when Hillary uses it, it's super sketchy and suspicious.
They don't know what has been going through the email server, all they know is that Hillary was sender or recipient, so deleting emails on the server makes it so they can't be sure what went through the server.
So what you have isn't an email anymore you can over to the FBI. IOW the claim the OP made (handed over bleached emails) was bullshit - thanks for the confirmation.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Knock it off. You know damn well I never typed that they'd "been handed" over, I clearly said they were deleted -via Bleach Bit. And don't act like you don't know what Bleach Bit is. It was all over the news, even your beloved CNN. The emails were subpoenaed and *supposed* to have been handed over but somehow this wiping "accidentally " happened first, about the most thorough way you can destroy data other than smashing the hard drives to bits. You know, just accidentally.
No skin off Comey's nose though, he happily ignored it.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Why would I know what BlichBleep is, I'm not a criminal like you.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I'm busted!
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.