Re:Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
by Karunamon on Monday March 06, 2017 @11:46AM
(#13803829)
The problem there is that, at the end of the day, it's a fallible human putting stuff in the "bullshit blacklist". It also means that you're evaluating a statement based on its source rather than its merits, which is.. bad.
When you're the #1 source of information on stuff in the world, that's an awful lot of power that can be trivially abused (e.g. "let's just blacklist unfavorable coverage of this lawsuit against us").
Re:Google featured snippets are worse than fake news
by TuringTest on Monday March 06, 2017 @12:16PM
(#13804148)
> you're evaluating a statement based on its source rather than its merits, which is.. bad.
If you don't know the source, you have no way of knowing its merits, as you won't be aware of how the people came up with that knowledge.
Now I just made up that organization. But how can an algorithm tell if it's a legitimate medical institute that develops vaccines or anti-vaxxer propaganda?
If the algorithm actually had a way to distinguish the two, it could blacklist bullshit just as easily as it could disclose it.