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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: 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]