It's not mass censorship. It's editorialization. Something we've lost an appreciation for in our fetishization of a dystopian future that's always just over the horizon.
Facebook tried doing this to combat actual fake news (the one that ironically comes from the political segment in the U.S. most likely to cry wolf about it). This process was then characterized as facebook policing political content in a biased manner -- despite the fact that blatantly false content happened to continually come from sources with a conservative bent more often than not, which isn't Facebook's problem to deal with.
Point being, it's not censorship. And I wish any attempt to fight false information wasn't disingenuously painted as these organizations having some kind of political agenda or as "censorship". We need content aggregators of every kind (facebook, google, reddit, and even HN) to be more editorial, especially and specifically when content is presented in a manner that might help how credible that content looks. This whole wish-washy "oh just let the people decide what they wanna see, it'll work out in the end" with a nice touch of "all opinions matter" clearly hasn't and isn't working.
Edit: Found some links. Couldn't find the original article though.
0. Republicans seem more susceptible to fake news than Democrats (but liberals, don’t feel too comfy yet)
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/05/republicans-seem-more-susce...
1. Article that says both left and right visits his fake news site.
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/article/2017/may/31/If-...
2. Democrats are falling for fake news about Russia
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/5/19/15561842/trump-russia-lo...
3. The rise of left-wing, anti-Trump fake news
I have also found that the losing party tends to suffer from the wildest delusions. I'm not really sure why that is, but it is always sad to watch.
I would disagree with you on this statement. The far right is consumed by conspiracy theories (Seth Rich, Pizzagate etc) despite controlling all three branches of the Federal Govt.
Why would you believe what a "fake news" site operator tells you?
I'd have myself a hard think about what lead you to writing such a comment up.
Ironically though, just as another anecdote (and to the best of my knowledge), the very first "fake news" right-wing site who's operator was confronted, ended up being a left-voting liberal who [paraphrasing] "hated conservatives and people on the right, and wanted to spread disinformation to them to pollute their arguments".
But I guess we'll never know, so the best solution is still non-censorship.
Assuming we followed the same Facebook story (that intentionally set up boards of people - that were biased - to curtail the news in various ways), it seems like what you are trying to say is that alternative and conservative news is "fakes news", and they should receive algorithmic censorship.
Personally, for myself, the last 10 stories I've seen on "neutral" outlets like CNN and to the left outlets like Washington Post / New York / MSNBC - have been 100 percent driven by agenda rather than facts.
And the only time I'm able to get anything real is when I go to the other side, in which case all I have to do is tone it down 50%, yet on the left I have to literally invert what they are saying to get at the truth.
So how would you categorize which one of us is the idiot whose sources of news should be curtailed? Because I'm actually fine with you listening to CNN.
All the Googling I've seen seems to point to a "Santa Monica Observer" as the primary source of this claim. (See the Snopes article: https://www.snopes.com/texas-samir-al-hajeed-sam-hyde/ ), Snopes also links to a "Freedom Daily" and there are a couple of other sketchy news websites with this claim.
The Snopes article also mentions that a comedian known for trolling-style pranks (Sam Hyde -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Hyde#Hoaxes_and_pranks ) is tangent to these claims. So my best guess is that you are correct, someone treated a trollish tweet or post as actual news.
I'm not sure why bias is brought up all the time in "fake news", because bias is not the same as fake. Nobody should have issues with conservative news that is known for better vetting, even if their bias is strong (your Wall Street Journals, National Review, etc.). Fake is fake whether it comes from the right or the left. It is true that conservative fake news was much more prevalent in the 2016 election (https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf), but "progressive" fake news definitely exists.
I'm having a real hard time thinking of analogous lies on the left that have readily observable support or momentum in comparison to misinformation like the origin, religion, or race of a mass murder and/or claiming that an elected president wasn't actually born in the U.S.
Hard to dismiss such misinformation that's heartily consumed and propagated in whatever sphere as just being "tweets" or saying "it exists over there too!" when the effects of said misinformation in each sphere are significantly different.
That's an incredibly disingenuous if not an outright idiotic comprehension on what was stated. If a source continually propagates blatantly false news it doesn't matter what the political bent is. It's going to lose credibility. Just like if someone is continually caught in a lie, you might stop listening to them, regardless of what race, religion, sex, or gender they are. You're not censoring them, you just know taking them at their word is a losing gamble.
The fact that a host of popular conservative sources continually participated in spreading false and misleading information isn't the fault of any content aggregator, and in this case Facebook certainly wasn't at fault. In fact, it seems like a problem that should be earnestly addressed within the conservative sphere, instead of conveniently using it to bolster a political platform and help with general ad revenue.
If you want to spit out little pathetic buzzwords and engage in intellectual lukewarmness, that's your prerogative. But you're going to have a hard time attempting to cry victim, or censorship, and engage in false equivocations when other people or organizations stop taking these sources seriously and choose to stop lending them a platform to spread lies and conspiracy theories.
> yet on the left I have to literally invert what they are saying to get at the truth.
Okay, well. I didn't realize I was dealing with unmitigated idiocy here. I'd have saved myself the key presses.
> spit out little pathetic buzzwords
> dealing with unmitigated idiocy here
With all due respect, your post contains some content, but this isn't behavior for HN and I'm really surprised it's being tolerated, let alone upvoted. Do you somehow expect to change any opinions with an insult-riddled comment like that?
Not that it really matters, because everything that was stated was pretty justified. It's curious that you take issue with my post or its tone, and not that out right dishonest response I was negating.
Looking at your posting history, and your continually false and misleading statements regarding all things geopolitical, I can only assume you're here to cause a stir. With all due respect.
Did you come here from reddit? It's unnecessary and inappropriate, and I don't think that kind of behavior is 'justified' in response to someone you consider uneducated.
As for my (respectful) posting history: I only post when I feel that something has yet to be pointed out by anyone else, which will naturally be the more uncommon opinions and/or devil's advocate type of questions.
This is directly against the rules.
>It's unnecessary and inappropriate
No it's pretty appropriate. I didn't say anything uncalled for. Especially when someone is being dishonest. Congratulations on not being able to discuss the subject matter in your attempt to completely derail the conversation.
>devil's advocate type of questions.
Or just misinformation.
Would we still upvote those who deny climate change for discussion's sake, for example?
Why would you do that? There are plenty of opinions that are primarily "discussed" in bad faith, and that's one of the more significant ones.
If an ideal society wishes to eliminate climate change denial, for example, it won't be through silencing and stigmatizing their beliefs; it'll be through respectfully listening and debating.
As an example, I was rather unaware of the debate against climate change until reading a discussion on HN from people who were oft characterized as 'deniers.' One, for example, believed there were more immediate problems to be solved, and the other wasn't convinced by the science. It was a productive discussion, and I feel that everyone is better off having it, yet I fear that it wouldn't be condoned today without a mass of downvotes.
I agree that there is no point in downvoting this sort of thing, but it is unfortunate if it gets upvoted by people who are not in a position to judge its validity. Scoring arguments on style is not the way to go (even if that is how the SAT essay is scored.)
All sites are agenda driven. But somehow sites with agendas that I disagree with are more guilty of bias. Funny how that works. Fake news, on the other hand, is claiming global warming is hoax invented by the Chinese. I would say only 10% of my facebook friends are conservative and I've only seen them post blatant lies like photoshops of black NFL players cheering the burning of a US flag. The liberals, at worst, get a little too excited about the Russian investigation. Though that has as much merit as Hilary's emails.
I was surprised by the downvotes to a fairly argued comment, and then I read this hours ago and it seemed valid. The most upvoted comment in response now, however, calls him 'idiotic' several times throughout.
It's perceived as an factual answer to a question because it shows up when googled with keywords other than "Popular on Twitter" : https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/927335154707828736/...
When you see these tweets on Twitter, you'll quickly identify them as fake due to the context. On Google on the other hand you will see the false statements but these false statements would not be corrected if these tweets were not the exact content you're looking for and you just consumed them and moved on to the content you were searching.
Unless Google can somehow find a way to reliably present factual content, what they're doing here is fundamentally irresponsible.
That their choice of editorialization strategy is based on algorithms is entirely besides the point. The proof is in the pudding, and Google's pudding sometimes has chunks of shit in it. The onus is not on me to understand why that shit got there to be able to state that I don't want shit in my pudding.
So you think news could be effectively be curated on Google's scale by humans alone?
>Unless Google can somehow find a way to reliably present factual content, what they're doing here is fundamentally irresponsible.
Where do they claim that the content they present if factual? You are assuming this. They merely aggregate data, what you do with the data is your responsibility, not Google's. A higher ranking in results does not mean a higher level of accuracy in the content of the result, as anyone researching anything could tell you.
>The proof is in the pudding, and Google's pudding sometimes has chunks of shit in it. The onus is not on me to understand why that shit got there to be able to state that I don't want shit in my pudding.
I think what you are trying to say here is that you search for things expecting "the truth" to be given to you. Google only gives you things to read, you actually need to read them to determine if you think they're true or not. The onus is on you.
Don't believe everything that Google "tells" you. For a while, asking Google Now how tall the current president was (after Trump took office) would still give you Obama's height. Had you not actually looked at your phone, you wouldn't have noticed that the height it spoke back to you was for the wrong president. If you went around claiming Trump was the same height as Obama (they are actually pretty close, but that's besides the point) then you would be wrong and the responsibility would be solely yours for simply accepting whatever Google told you without checking other sources.
The flipside is true too: developers are very understanding of bugs/shortcomings that are borne out of the specific implementation. With all this knowledge, it is easy to say things like "people shouldn't use this tool for that" or "users should know this is flaky"
At some point you have to fight for the user instead of defend the code.
The "product" here is the fast search engine that indexes a massive portion of all human knowledge and tries to provide you with results that are meaningful to you all within a quarter of a second. I don't think it is broken, I think it is a miracle that it works as well as it does.
Unfortunately, there is no algorithm to determine "the truth", mainly because there is no universal truth. This is a feature of the world we live in, though I suppose you could call it a bug if you think that there should be some kind of universal truth.
They are trying to provide more services using the tools they've develop. Maybe they've exceeded their reach, but I wouldn't blame that on a "blind faith" in algorithms.
And no, I am not a fan of Google. I think they are evil.
There are likely hundreds of such "manual" decisions within its search algorithms.
What an algorithm does is a perfect reproduction of it's instructions plus it's parameters.
The actual bias is either by the designer by making an algorithm that does not fit the intended use properly or by using flawed parameters.
Also known as; garbage in, garbage out. The pipe in between doesn't care if it's garbage.
In your example, this was a decision by a Google engineer or c-level, not the algorithm. The algorithm did as it was told to in exactly the way it was designed without bias or error.
This is nonsense unless you define-down "bias" in such a way as to mean "performing contrary to the deterministic result of its implementation" (which seems to be what you're doing, and I agree is impossible).
A more sensible definition of bias might be something like "preferentially favouring one outcome over another for reasons unrelated (or even contrary) to the core purpose of the software". Imagine a vending machine that when prompted generically by a user saying "I'm thirsty" always provided sugary soda instead of bottled water.
Modern machine learning algorithms are extremely complex and opaque, and depending on the dataset they're trained on, and the features they're trained to focus on, they can very easily wind up just encoding human biases.
https://www.theregreview.org/2017/10/10/cramer-bias-computer...
Would the world be that much poorer if Google didn't include a "popular on Twitter" feature?
What if Google News were a smaller, human-curated roster of important stories that were basically the same for everyone? (maybe targeted by country) It could be a good thing to have a non-filter bubbled set of news.
These big tech companies are trying to be all things to all people, and they want to pretend that using algorithms means they're free from bias. It's just a different, more opaque bias encoded in the algorithms.
But users are inclined to trust it because it comes "from the computer". It's a Garbage In, Gospel Out situation.
I mean, the point of limited liability is not to give investors a path to profit regardless of all other things, it is to encourage investments that are beneficial to society. If it isn't working, we should retink it.
It's entirely reasonable for us to ask them not to do a shit job of it.
From my understanding, a limited liability company exists to protect the business members and shareholders from legal action of their private persons. I.e. if the business goes under due to a poor product or something, they can't be held personally liable. That doesn't mean they are excused from criminal behavior, they can still be liable for some of that.
However, in either case there is no "benefit to society" clauses. It's simply a legal construct to protect people. In this case, Google did what they did... They probably weren't criminals though
Though there is no explicit "benefit to society" clause, that is the basic rationale for limited liability. It's an incentive to allow members to define the extent of their personal financial exposure. In so doing, they are more willing to invest in businesses, which can produce a net benefit to society (e.g. by employing people, paying taxes, etc.).
I think they probably do come with an overall benefit to society, but the idea that giant corporations are going to do what they are going to do is one worth fighting against.
Can we ask these companies to do better? Sure. Can we expect them to be perfect? Not really.
Google could trivially spend $200 million a month on moderation and other editorial functions, they just would rather not.
I admit I haven't run the numbers on Google, but when I looked at YouTube, requiring human minimum wage moderators to review every video would cost billions of dollars a year - more than the entire site's revenue.
So, sure, Google could drop another 200m on moderation, but I don't think that would get you to full moderation, so you still need algorithms in there somewhere.
If Google becomes one (which they appear to be doing in some ways) I'll look for something that is more of a raw aggregator.
Google doesn't need to be a social engineer. Nor do many of the others who have decided they know what is "harming society and doesn't need to exist". Like a F*n small town preacher on a crusade to remove a book with dirty words from the library that is.
Attempting to restrict what can be published/viewed by do-gooders who think they know best is hardly a new gig. It just has different flavor now.
If Comcast was taking up an editorial function I'd criticize them for doing it poorly too.
This is what journalism is all about - not an algorithm's fault. Even NYT isn't immune from inaccurate reports. A responsible journalist has to do research, sometimes, days of research and dozen of interviews, to get a story out. Not simple "oh this is a fake news". No algorithm in the world can solve this problem. Never. Perhaps 1+1 = 3 is a fake news? No. Someone can write a joke about 1+1=3. In fact, we know humans invent the "1". We could have written 1 as "2". So 2+2 = 4 is no longer true. If we could use an algorithm to detect something is a fake news, an improved lie detector would have been produced. Remember history and scientific facts can be rewritten. What's is true today isn't necessarily true tomorrow.
That is not entirely correct, big dotcoms do outsource a lot of such mechanical Turk work to outsourcing companies that do such work, and they do prefer to contract ones in places without much contact to English speaking work to prevent mass backlash.
>https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/
A lot of times when such companies claim that something is done by some voodoo magic "smart algorithm," that claim is a lie.
This drumbeat in recent news where one Silicon Valley firm or another gets caught presenting content designed to illicit response either through outrage, sensationalism, confirmation bias, or whatever via algorithms designed by behavior scientists that find offensive, misleading, false or outright maliciously incorrect content for that purpose which is done via an automated process and then posted to the front pages of various places where people are known to seek information after which the firm apologizes profusely, reminds people that this is just computers finding stuff, and tells everyone not to worry...
...is getting really, really fucking old. You know damn well what your algorithm is looking for. You know damn well it's good at finding it. You know damn well what it's going to do when it finds it. The fact that it's done automated-ly is not an excuse to LET IT KEEP FUCKING DOING THAT and just throw up your hands as if it's something not intended and not designed to do exactly that while you continue raking in the ad revenue because of it.
Google's the one in this story but it's far from the worst or only offender. How much longer exactly are we thinking on allowing Silicon Valley firms that make their money on promoting sensationalist garbage to continue to throw up their hands like it isn't exactly what they were meaning to do in pursuit of "eating the world" and walk away without so much as questioning if that may not be the best course of action?
Well, if you call your product "News" and you promote fake news, that's pretty much a huge sign that you're not ready to ship yet.
Google Search is a content aggregator that show you what it thinks you are most likely to click on. It does not know about politics, it cannot fact check, it does not think care about effort journalism, the only thing that matters is what stories generate more ad revenue.
Of course, Google will try to police its results better after this incident, but they can't effectively do this without mass censorship. If you don't believe me, see the recent YouTube drama over monetization.