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posted by mrpg on Monday December 18 2017, @06:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the dont-believe-anything-on-the-web dept.

Google has made some changes to try and tackle "fake news":

Google moved to strip from its news search results publications that mask their country of origin or intentionally mislead readers, a further step to curb the spread of fake news that has plagued internet companies this year.

To appear in Google News results, websites must meet broad criteria set out by the company, including accurately representing their owners or primary purposes. In an update to its guidelines released Friday, the search giant added language stipulating that publications not "engage in coordinated activity to mislead users." Additionally the new rules read: "This includes, but isn't limited to, sites that misrepresent or conceal their country of origin or are directed at users in another country under false premises."

A popular tactic for misinformation campaigns is to pose as a credible U.S. news outlet. Russian Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-backed organization, used that technique to reach an audience of nearly 500,000 people, spread primarily through Twitter accounts, Bloomberg reported earlier.

Also at Engadget.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18 2017, @08:18PM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18 2017, @08:18PM (#611553)

    Guess I should have commented before somebody modded you troll because you mentioned dread Breitbart and Infowars.

    It's leftist sites as well [wsws.org]. WSWS and Alternet and Common Dreams. Anybody opposing the globalist agenda.

    I hope we can all quickly forget this artificial, left-right, red vs. blue, R team vs. D team knee jerk we've been indoctrinated and hypnotized to have. Net Neutrality is gone. What happens after TwitFace and Google News get entrenched as the new cable channels you flip between with a four button remote because those are the only websites you can afford to purchase with your internet plan?

    I see more common ground among Breitbart, Infowars, WSWS, and Common Dreams than I do between what any of us want and what the ultrarich corporate elite want.

    Please tell me that this era of unprecedented democratization of communication and record-keeping isn't just an anomaly that lasted between 1990 and 2020.

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +5  
       Interesting=2, Informative=2, Underrated=1, Total=5
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Monday December 18 2017, @08:31PM (4 children)

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Monday December 18 2017, @08:31PM (#611557) Journal

    Perhaps because they're all Opinion/Editorial organizations and not NEWS organizations?

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18 2017, @09:48PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18 2017, @09:48PM (#611587)

      What NEWS organizations do you suggest that aren't giant corporate behemoths?

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @12:26AM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @12:26AM (#611655)

        NPR? They're such a giant corporate behemoth that they literally have to beg for money every quarter or so. I know, I know, that's their member stations that are asking you, but really, in the end, that money goes [largely] to NPR and so in essence, it is them that are asking you for money. Let's not get on our pedant-horse here...
        Clearly, they're not doing Corporate Behemothing right because they're asking the people for hand-outs, instead of what the Big Boys do, and that is asking Uncle Sam for money.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @04:55AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @04:55AM (#611712)

          Are you serious?

          NPR not asking Uncle Sam for money?

          Poor, broke, shivering-in-the-cold NPR? So broke that they have to pad their thrice-turned coat with wads of greenbacks ... wait a minute.

          NPR's sitting quite pretty, by the standards of modern media companies. And they still get to whine to Congress about how important it is that they not go broke because ... some reason. And beg for more - oh wait, they're not begging from Uncle Sam, that's right.

          Except when they are.

          By the same token, Google gets to pick winners and losers because of some handwaving around public morality.

          Google? Public morality? Google "yeah, OK we're pretty evil" Inc.? Oh, sorry, Alphabet ...

          Sorry, I must have lost the thread of where you were going, what with all the insanity on plain display. Please, do continue.

  • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday December 18 2017, @09:53PM (2 children)

    by meustrus (4961) on Monday December 18 2017, @09:53PM (#611591)

    The record-keeping part is definitely an anomaly, because all of those "records" are stuck in obsolete formats, some readable only on obsolete software, maintained only as long as the web server stays online [xkcd.com].

    Someday, historians will look upon the 17th-20th centuries as a golden age for record-keeping that remains accessible to the future. Moving forward, all information will be stored electronically, kept alive only as long as it is useful. And when web servers cycle out of existence, some archivist may be able to take its dead husk and reverse-engineer the hardware interface and data formats to access and interpret the records (assuming it hasn't been recycled and the bits haven't rotted to oblivion), but she will NEVER be able to reconstruct the entire hypertext network that gave it context.

    --
    If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @03:36AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @03:36AM (#611697)

      Yeah sites like archive.org are like airport lockers. For example even if a page is still on archive.org it doesn't really have a decent search engine[1] so it might as well be gone if you or other stuff are dead or don't remember it well enough (exact URL, keywords that work on archive.org).

      For example there used to be a page about an amusing "engrish" menu, and the page was titled: May I take your order
      Not easy looking for it with just archive.org

      You need the actual URL: http://www.rahoi.com/2006/03/may-i-take-your-order.php [rahoi.com]

      But that means you need another source/search engine to help you find that URL.

      Last but not least if someone in the future takes over the domain and changes the robots.txt archive.org could make all the past archived stuff inaccessible (or maybe even delete it?). Ah seems they've stopped being retarded about it: https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-search-engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/ [archive.org]
      Took them quite a while to stop being retarded about it though...

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @12:47PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @12:47PM (#611785)

        Archive.org is pretty much useless for all but the most mainstream non-english speaking websites. You'd be lucky if there's a single capture between 2000 to the present, and even then it will be 99.99% broken.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @04:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @04:50PM (#611861)

    yeah i am waiting to buy a computer stick that plugs into a smart tv to let me choose one of channels 2, 5 or 7, with a few shitty stations thrown in to make it look like there's choice.

    then if you don't pay for that, they'll send around thought police vans to try to make you admit guilt somehow like how ontv and att and comcast and others all did. clearly you have something to hide if you aren't wanting to hear what they say.