Probably with the same technical ML approach that says a quarter is worth 50 cents. http://i.imgur.com/1nNreR2.jpg

Hooray for automation.

I think you meant this to be negative, but it still sounds like a good thing to me as long as "an arbiter" doesn't become "the arbiter". It's not really possible for them not to be an arbiter unless they start delivering unordered results to queries, so they might as well pay attention to how they're arbitrating.

>as long as "an arbiter" doesn't become "the arbiter"

Well, it being "the closest thing to a public utility" as I wrote, means for billions of people it will be THE arbiter -- or at least an arbiter they'd have to deal with.

Sure, and I think "an arbiter they'd have to deal with" is unavoidable. As a provider of filtered information, how could they not be?

Could you explain what you think is good about an advertising company becoming the truth squad?

As I said, it's not good if they're "the truth squad", but it's unavoidable for them to be "a truth squad". I think Google Search is a net benefit to society even if it's run by an advertising company, and its entire purpose is to filter information. It cannot function without being a truth squad.

>I think Google Search is a net benefit to society even if it's run by an advertising company, and its entire purpose is to filter information.

Whenever you type a search query, the first thing Google does is ask to track your location. When they finally display the results, greater than 50% of the page is "for sale", so to speak. That, I would argue, is not the sign of a company who is interested in giving you accurate results. They are more interested in pushing products, to get you to buy something. That would make sense for a company like Amazon, but with Amazon, there is no pretense.

On top of that, their primary means of filtering information is using signals influenced heavily by either paid actors or lay persons clicking on results. If Google themselves conducted an objective inquiry, they would have to shed tons of advertisers because a lot of advertising is inherently deceptive.

>I think Google Search is a net benefit to society even if it's run by an advertising company

I think the opposite. Its hard to click on any Google result and not find a website that is plastered with Google ads. That certainly is not entirely Google's fault (although I sometimes wonder if they rank pages with Google ads higher than non-Google ads) but they've shown to the industry that you can make billions of dollars by pimping out user data to advertisers. People get up in arms when the Uber app tracks your location after you close it, meanwhile the majority of android phones are tracking every aspect of your life.

FWIW: I have many positive things to say about Google too, but I don't believe in fake neutrality where you're forced to say something nice when you criticize something.

You're arguing that Google should be a better arbiter, and I agree. What I disagreed with is the idea that they shouldn't be an arbiter at all, because I don't think that's possible.

Not really. I don't want a better fox guarding the hen-house. I don't want it to be a fox in the first place. Heck even Wikipedia with all of its flaws would be a better arbiter.

Google wants to put the responsibility of evaluating an advertisement onto its users, if they are so concerned about erroneous search results, they should first put a fact-check box next to their ads. Adopting a hands-off strategy when it comes to their revenue and a hands-on strategy when it comes to their perceived ideology is hypocritical at best.

or like, give the users control over this..

no reason my search algorithm can't be tunable..

So if they made the entire search algorithm customizable and 98% of users kept the defaults, would you be satisfied? Regardless of how realistic that idea is, Google would still be an arbiter of truth. There is no way around it.

No, not google. This is about Google outsourcing that responsability to teenagers. This class shouldnt be aimed at kids but at the many more adults who actively encourage and moderate such speech today. I dont like efforts to solve adult problems by "educating" kids. Educate the adults.

Educate both, perhaps? Someday those kids will be adults and have kids of their own, with hopefully more inclusive and accepting views. Perhaps it will even encourage them to challenge the ideas, words, and views their parents present.

Or is it because the school allows us to force kids to listen to things that adults would walk away from? These classes are never aimed at university students or other young people, just the captive audience of a gradeschool classroom. I question the effectiveness of any scheme that can only fly in such controlled environments.

This is already the case today.

> The alternative is to let no-nazis, white supremacists publish articles unfettered about the evils and inferiorities of Blacks and Jews so they can win supporters

Then let them. If you try and censor their views then you give them credibility and people think "well there must be something to this ideology if the establishment doesn't want me to access this information". Better to let them spout their nonsense for everyone to see, and then contrast it with a more logical position.

Of course blocking neo nazi trash doesn't "give them credibility"--that is a total non-sequitor.

I mean, are you saying that, if you personally knew neo-nazi stuff was suddenly being filtered out, you'd start to wonder if they were onto something good?

> I mean, are you saying that, if you personally knew neo-nazi stuff was suddenly being filtered out, you'd start to wonder if they were onto something good?

Absolutely I would. Even if I would not have looked at it before. If the powers that be were trying to keep information from me, I would very much like to know why.

Are you saying that if chunks of the internet were purged, and public figures were blacklisted, you would just be ok with that? If anything, I would go out of my way to seek out what is being kept from me.

What if your blog were blacklisted, because you were accused of being a "Nazi". Do you just think that people would listen to you if you swore that there had been a mistake? Why?

>What if your blog were blacklisted, because you were accused of being a "Nazi"

Why is the assumption always made that censorship will be applied in this crazy random arbitrary fashion. Is there any evidence that censorship always happens that way and isnt properly targeted to actual hate speech.

This may affect legitimate speech isnt a very powerful argument because legitimate speech can be differentiated from hate speech. I can tell the difference between a neo-nazi and someone who is merely critical of Israels policies and I feel sorry for those who cant differentiate.

As for public figures, if there are public figures who are actively spreading hate speech, yes censor them too. I would not shed a tear if Don Black and stormfront were censored from the web. In fact I think it would make the world a better place to be rid of giving their toxic views a public platform.

>Of course blocking neo nazi trash doesn't "give them credibility"--that is a total non-sequitor.

Yeah, because fringe groups never got any gravitas from being persecuted (or perceived as persecuted).

In fact that's exactly what gave Hitler early publicity: his imprisonment after his failed coup -- which let him write a popular then book to detail his persecutions from the state and his "enemies".

Not more than they would if they weren't persecuted. I am certain neo-nazis would much prefer to spread their hate as publicly as possible through Sunday morning cartoons and flyers and ads, and the fact that we as a society have restricted them from doing so has weakened, not strengthened them.

Maybe some people find a morbid attracting to them as a result of them being forbidden just for this reason. But for the large majority, this has not happened.

I personally wouldn't, but the people most susceptible to buying into that kind of thing would.

>* The alternative is to let no-nazis, white supremacists publish articles unfettered about the evils and inferiorities of Blacks and Jews so they can win supporters. To let people publish rape fantasies about women and children. To post terrorist recruitment videos. And to have impressionable teens and children exposed to that garbage.*

So the alternative is free speech? And we should "think of the children"?

It's almost childish the way certain people seem to think the words "free speech" constitute an argument in themselves. Videos of child rape "free speech", watching people be tortured for fun "free speech." Showing minors porn "free speech. ISIS recruitment videos aimed at teenagers "free speech."

Merely attaching the words free speech to something doesn't automatically make it okay.

It's almost childish how people use the same tired arguments about fringe activities that maybe 0.001% of the population enjoys (like minor porn) and which are violations of the law in their own right to do anyway, as examples of why we should censor speech and videos.

There's a law to take down child porn already -- we're not discussing that, and we don't need an extra law with vague and unrelated powers to censor stuff, to tackle that.

>It's almost childish how people use the same tired arguments about fringe activities

Fringe activities exactly what we are talking about censoring. Google is not talking about censoring eveyrday speech, they're talking about targeting and getting rid of the fringe activities like hate speech.

Nobody is advocating preventing ordinary discourse like criticizing Trump or being pro Trump etc. They are talking about getting rid of speech like neo nazi speech, terrorist recruitment speech, child endangerment/exploitation speech.

Hate-speech can be tricky. There are edge cases where what is "true" can be hard to determine. But in a large proportion of cases veracity is easy to determine.

Are you suggesting that we just throw up out hands and say "there's really no point trying to determine what is a fact, these days?"

>Are you suggesting that we just throw up out hands and say "there's really no point trying to determine what is a fact, these days?"

I'm saying it's not Google's job to determine what is a fact.

Was a reporter denying WMDs in 2003 a fact or "false news"?

Was Garry Web [1] a writer of facts or a fake news spreader?

The answers were much less clear at the time, and the established press and media/internet overlords would have labeled both fake news and be done with it...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb

I don't know why this seems to be so hard for people to understand. We already have, very effective I might add, laws that tackle grey areas. The entire notion of "due diligence" in business is this exactly. As a business you have to prove that you did all that a "reasonable" (deliberately vague to allow the term to grow as technology does) entity would to follow the law.

Suddenly the idea of "fake news" isn't so murky. A reporter doing his/her due diligence in 2003 could have concluded there were wmds in Iraq, a reporter in 2017 that says the same is a hawker of fake news. It's not a hard bar to apply, especially to the most grievous offenders today (the Breitbarts and Huffington posts of the world for example).

There's no overlord trying to hide the conspiracies of the world, it's just bringing a much needed regulation to the news, as essential component to the modern democracy.

> There's no overlord trying to hide the conspiracies of the world, it's just bringing a much needed regulation to the news, as essential component to the modern democracy.

Who defines 'reasonable' when 'news' is inherently opinionated? The one with the deepest pockets for legal protection?

Who says that only 'businesses' are and should be the ones reporting news?

And who regulates the regulators?

Seriously.. EFF v ATT, for starters, along with any of the entirely half baked 1-sided, spin-laden 'real news' that is coming out of just about any major entity these days..

>A reporter doing his/her due diligence in 2003 could have concluded there were wmds in Iraq

That's what I'm afraid of. Google doing the same kind of BS "due diligence" and then forbidding counter opinions (the equivalent of "no WMDs" in 2003) as fake news.

>There's no overlord trying to hide the conspiracies of the world

No, just many private interests that treat each other well...

Baseless claims, even if they somehow turn out to be right, are still baseless and add little but information to a discussion. This insistence that every thing is abstract and thus all "opinions" are equally valid is how we got in this mess to begin with. No matter how many neonazis shout it, there's no evidence to suggest their claims of racial superiority, no matter how many times it got repeated on fucking national tv there is no evidence Planned Parenthood harvest the organs of fetuses, every image macro doesn't have to necessarily match the caption no matter what Tumblr might claim, and not matter how much money Exon spends there's mountains of data suggesting anthropomorphic climate change.

If you opinion is so unsupported that it fails basic due diligence, it shouldn't be appearing with equal weight to the supported thought. And we should continue to hold aggregators responsible for letting that shit filter to the top. Googling "food that cures cancer" should result in "No food cures cancer go talk to your oncologist" not "list of top ten super foods" from blogspam site number N; Googling "did the Holocaust happen" should result in "yes" not a link to stormfront.

I agree there certainly is a grey area when deciding on public "fact" in developing issues or contriversal subjects; but there are plenty of things far and away from that grey area and to pretend they aren't is worse than censorship. By treating valid information with the same weight as invalid information you've removed people's ability to find the facts even more effectively than if you tried to censor them (given how terrible attempts at censorship have been in the past, I wouldn't be surprised to see tyrants move to this form of information suppression).

As I say - there are edge cases.

> Hate-speech can be tricky.

It seems pretty clear to me. Hate speech is free speech.

Sure, and a private company isn't obligated to present it.

Nor is a government. But the founders thought the principle of free-speech was a good one and so we have the 1st amendment.

With the 1st amendment, the government can never censor (with a few exceptions)... however companies can censor whatever they want for whatever reason they want, perhaps ironically, as an expression of freedom of speech.

I'm aware. My point was that the founders of the US Government chose to uphold the principle of free speech. The founders of companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter chose not to.

I see. Your point is that the principle of free speech is something different than the 1st amendment and the authors of the amendment messed up and allowed a loophole.

I think that if a company has enough of a monopoly on information that they become a de-facto governing agency, that they should be forced to uphold the principles of the 1st amendment.

Facebook should be classified as something like a common carrier.

I understand now, and it's hard not to agree with that perspective.

On the other hand, because of the fundamental relationship of the free press and health of democracy, shouldn't there be some kind of criteria for validity the same way that health claims in advertising do, for example? I understand that some things are subjective and impossible to apply criteria to, but what about cases where people are knowingly publishing demonstrable falsehoods to mislead masses of people. Seems like a major problem. Btw, im not sure what my opinion is on this.... Im just "devil advocating", I guess.

EDIT:/foundational/fundamental Im having a hard time with words today. :/

I honestly don't know. I think in general though, we should try to make information be as available as possible. Most of the justification for regulations about communications content comes from a time when most people had only three television channels, and a few newspapers.

Also, China has used exactly the same justification for censoring their information. And they're not wrong. People do knowingly spread misinformation and harm others.

I think that it's a really tempting problem to want to solve. If we could just find some heuristic to know for certain that something was "fake", we'd have it all figured out.

Yes, and I consider that a limitation of the 1st amendment rather than something to celebrate.

Companies above a certain size, should be forced to be open platforms for everybody and everything (as long as its within the law).

Same concept as with net neutrality.

I have no problem with this as long as the company is being honest with what they're doing and why.

A honest company?

Yes indeed. There are many. I would even guestimate that most of them are honest.

So is yelling fire in a movie theater, then.

Idiot much?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

all the time fucko

Not in a lot of places, e.g., Canada and Germany, to name two off the top of my head...

(And for the record, I'd happily vote to place additional restrictions on hate speech in the U.S., following the models presented by those two countries. I'm simply not afraid of the slippery slope arguments that people bring up; I think they're fallacious.)

Yeah, what issue could there be from additional restrictions on "hate speech" in a country with litigation happy fundamentalist christians on one side and "freedom fighters" on the other each considering their own BS ideas of hate speech. With a history of red scare and McCarthyism and other such niceties to top.

Boy you misinterpreted that one.

He's saying it's dangerous as fuck to let anyone determine what is appropriate to say and what is not appropriate to say.

When you're talking about infrastructure fundamental to everyone's life determining what can be communicated you're talking about building 95% of the infrastructure of tyranny in one fell swoop.

Do you think the government or the officers of Alphabet will always be Good people that you agree with? History is rife with examples of awful people taking over once-benevolent powerful institutions.

I think it is dangerous as well. Alphabet has shown to more interested in political power than principles.

From Eric directly being involved in the clinton campaign. https://qz.com/823922/eric-schmidt-played-a-crucial-role-in-... http://www.googletransparencyproject.org/articles/googles-su...

And now google donating money to Trump. http://dailycaller.com/2017/04/21/google-donated-285000-to-t...

Plus we know the amount of pressure PRISM and the other intelligence agencies can put on Silicon Valley companies.

Do you really think that, say "flat earth" people, who do little harm, should be removed from the Internet? What about people who believe in Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster? Or UFOlogists?

There are things that are obviously false, but probably harmless enough.