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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Google says it has new ways to combat its so-called fake-news problem in search results.
Over the last few months, Google, along with Facebook and other digital platforms, has struggled to keep hoaxes and fake news stories from appearing in search.
The examples were pretty unsettling, including Holocaust denials, a claim that President Barack Obama was running for a third term, and a wide range of other conspiracy theories.
On Tuesday, Google will have new feedback tools in its search results so users can flag content that appears to be false or misleading. (Facebook launched similar tools earlier this year, along with tips to help you spot fake news.) This will help teach Google's search algorithms to weed out hoaxes and, in theory, keep them buried in search results.
Google also says its algorithms have now been trained to demote "low quality" content based on signals like whether the information comes from an "authoritative" page.
I can't see how this can do anything but fail spectacularly. You?
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-launches-new-search-tools-to-combat-fake-news-2017-4
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29 2017, @02:03AM (11 children)
We clearly need mechanisms for collecting input on the quality, accuracy etc. of content (including but not limited to news). However any system that does not let the end user decide for themselves what subset of this input they will to use, and in what ways is centralized censorship.
What is needed here is a web of trust that people and organizations (and algorithms) can contribute to, and end users can use to annotate, filter and rank content. However it is key that the users get to pick their own preferred roots of trust, and the system is open and decentralized in a way no single party can manipulate.
This is not an unsolvable problem: its not even that difficult to solve. There are various projects attempting this already. What we really need to a robust, open decentralized system: that means we need to agree on a set of protocols. If we get the protocols in place, we should be able to get the various existing data sets into the same ecosystem, and start giving people the power to leverage this information, what ever subset of it they wish. However we must not force roots of trust or centralized systems on people as google is doing here. They are doing what is in their own business interests (and that is fine), but we need to put a better system in place, and demand that they inter-op via market forces.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29 2017, @02:11AM (3 children)
Ah, the pie-in-the sky "not difficult" fix!
What would geek sites be without them?
Wastelands of empty pages?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29 2017, @02:40AM (2 children)
When I say not difficult I mean the the technical issues with making such a system are easily solved (Given 6 months full time I could spec the protocol, and that's not even my area of specialization), and the social part of it (getting it implemented, deployed, funded, getting data etc) is a small problem compared to many other issues we face today (ex, several ongoing wars partially caused by this misinformation).
I don't mean to imply we will actually solve the issue (I do not believe our society is currently capable of taking any coherent action), but that if we actually tried as a society, it wouldn't take long or cost much. We are looking at implementation difficulty and design not all that different than something like BGP, email or DNS. Of course those are three example decentralized protocol based systems that have massive issues (and for stupid reasons we haven't got around to fixing them), but they do work and wen't that hard to make. In practice deployment of such a system at scale takes resources, but we can afford the costs (It wouldn't cost much more than what google is doing internally) and I worry we can't afford the costs of not fixing this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29 2017, @02:54AM (1 child)
the social part of it ... is a small problem
And again with the "not difficult" pie in the sky analysis.
Its like a freakin broken record in here.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday April 29 2017, @04:11AM
video tutorial on how to fix a broken record (no programming required):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOliYadnvW0 [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 29 2017, @02:28AM (6 children)
I think Facefook already has something like that. The "like" and "share" buttons have the functions you describe. Unfortunately, that "Web of Trust" rapidly sinks to the lowest common denominator, just as television sank to the LCD. When I was a small child, people still believed that television would become a great educational tool. By the time I was a teen, that hope had pretty much dried up and blown away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29 2017, @02:47AM (5 children)
cefook already has something like that. The "like" and "share" buttons have the functions you describe. Unfortunately, that "Web of Trust" rapidly sinks to the lowest common denominator, just as television sank to the LCD.
Yeah, but Plasma was much higher quality! And what does "trust" have to do with flat screens? Sometimes, Runaway, I just don't understand what you are trying to say. Is it a racist thing?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 29 2017, @02:54AM (3 children)
Racist? No, it's just you that I don't like. Your parents are alright, your siblings are tolerable, most of your extended family is pretty decent. It's only you. Where did you go so very wrong?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29 2017, @02:58AM (2 children)
Where did you go so very wrong?
Evidently, where I bought an LCD television. Little did I know then, that this would make Runaway a racist against me. If only I could go back, undo the past, keep the old cathode Tube!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday April 29 2017, @09:59AM (1 child)
Fuck cathode ray tubes. I had to lift a 36" CRT for the neighbor lady this week. They're fucking heavy.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29 2017, @09:15PM
CRT's still win hands down over LCDs of all types in the areas of actual refresh rate (black-to-black) and ghosting. (I will grant you that LCDs win verses CRTs when it comes to portability.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29 2017, @04:30AM
This is a bad attempt at trolling runaway, don't sink to the level of EF, JM, TB, KH or other such types.