How political data teams game Google to fool people

Re:How political data teams game Google to fool people by korrachs on Monday June 05, 2017 @06:54AM (#14486628)

As someone who has been on the publication side of digital media: Never ascribe to propaganda what you can explain by greed.

News is fundamentally broken, all those sites linking to each other are probably doing it to increase the "trending" part of the news which will push all of them up the google rankings.

The reason why Russians, and Eastern Europeans in general, are more highly represented as owners of these places is because the cost of living is so low there. That you make $2,000 from add revenue in the US would mean you can afford to eat out a few more times a month. When you can do the same thing in a country where this is double the average wage you can spend all your time doing it and be better off than if you tried doing anything else.

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Re:How political data teams game Google to fool people by kmfrk on Monday June 05, 2017 @07:09AM (#14486686)

> As someone who has been on the publication side of digital media: Never ascribe to propaganda what you can explain by greed.

It's been pretty crazy to see how many of the frothing right-wing fake-news sites are created by (nominal) leftists. Humankind's a real piece of work.

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Re:How political data teams game Google to fool people by DINKDINK on Monday June 05, 2017 @08:11AM (#14487019)

>As someone who has been on the publication side of digital media: Never ascribe to propaganda what you can explain by greed.

A great documentary on the interplay between investigative journalism, government lies, and infotainment (greed based media guised as "news" or "journalism" is

All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception and the Spirit of IF Stone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_cKC0_sGu0

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Re:How political data teams game Google to fool people by colordrops on Monday June 05, 2017 @07:58AM (#14486953)

Lies in the service of greed are a form of propaganda.

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Re:How political data teams game Google to fool people by korrachs on Monday June 05, 2017 @08:53AM (#14487217)

Lies in the service of getting an extra 10 seconds of viewer engagement aren't.

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Re:How political data teams game Google to fool people by cubano on Monday June 05, 2017 @08:26AM (#14487091)

Propaganda and greed are hardly mutually exclusive.

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Re:How political data teams game Google to fool people by w_t_payne on Monday June 05, 2017 @08:56AM (#14487241)

So ..... regulation? That;s going to be an uphill struggle given how international the industry is.

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Re:How political data teams game Google to fool people by some1else on Monday June 05, 2017 @07:36AM (#14486857)

I suppose that's a variation of Hanlon's razor, but this isn't a rule of thumb situation. They are winning at gaming the biggest source of information, which shouldn't be hapenning regardless of their motivations.

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Re:How political data teams game Google to fool people by korrachs on Monday June 05, 2017 @08:01AM (#14486970)

Who is "they"? The people who own the top slots of the news today aren't the ones who did 6 months ago. The sites I was running are making less than $20 a month, at their best they were making $500 a day (lasted all of one week during the primaries) and even then I make more at my day job. I'll never do it again because I have better options, but it was an education to see my bullshit stories picked up by top shelf news organizations.

How do you propose to stop people like me from taking over the news? Rely on someone like Murdoch to keep us safe from fake news? Have an official news network from the US government that only publishes verified news? One from Google? Facebook? Comcast?

Let the bullshit bubble and froth, it's sound and fury signifying nothing. Any cure I've ever herd put forward is worse than the disease.

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Re:How political data teams game Google to fool people by some1else on Monday June 05, 2017 @08:14AM (#14487036)

Your points are valid, but I'm not sure about the strategy. It would definitely make sense for left wing adversaries to use the same techniques, ending in total media pollution. Even if that helps everyone distinguish fact from spin, Google's mission would inevitably have to shift towards estimating the credibility of such organized mis-information.

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