Re:The Slander Industry
by joe_the_user on Sunday April 25, 2021 @07:17PM
(#26937643)
Google has a filter. Google filters for "quality", for relevance and quite a few things. The filter against spam. The filter against SEO tactics that were once common. etc.
Filtering against slander seems like reasonably simple and not one that different from what they already. They're already doing whack-a-mole against a whole variety of things.
But yeah, shitty websites suing their ways onto Google search results with "free speech" complaints may one thing that is making this hard but I don't know enough about that situation to say with any certainty.
> Filtering against slander seems like reasonably simple
It's not.
> not one that different from what they already.
True, and they're pretty bad at all those other things too.
Unfortunately the societal costs of false-positives and false-negatives are not the same as Google's cost of false-positives and false-negatives.
I don't disagree they should probably be more proactive, but it's tricky because "X is a horrible person" can be legitimate articles too; banning domains is a whack-a-mole, and of course you'll get complaints about "censorship".