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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday April 29 2017, @01:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday April 29 2017, @10:14AM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Saturday April 29 2017, @10:14AM (#501500) Homepage Journal

    And you don't think there's any danger at all that some enterprising troll will write a browser extension that marks things "fake news" for fun and distribute it to everyone on 4chan? Or that a state will coopt a botnet and mark all unfavorable search terms as fake news?

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