Hacker News Reader

Comment by spiderfarmer | Hacker News Reader

What can Google do to prevent this from happening?

If Google really wants to organize the worlds information and make it usable for everybody, they have to make sure Google news is a news source you can trust. Pagerank is not going to cut it.

A couple of suggestions:

- prevent less reputable websites from showing up for political queries at all

- ignore articles with headlines in ALL CAPS

- work with a dedicated team of editors, like politifact, to give websites an honestyrank

- be transparent, show honesty rank in the search results

Any other ideas?

View on HN

I have the opposite question: what did Google do in order to allow this to happen in the first place?

I thought the "news" results were supposed to be at least vaguely curated, and weren't just another way to show results from the entire web. How did 70news.wordpress.com end up in Google's list of "news" sites?

I am compelled to agree that this seems like a deep flaw in google's ranking algorithm, at a minimum.

By "top news link" the author is talking about the top link in Google's web search results. That website doesn't show up on news.google.com.

It showed up under "news" for me. Not anymore, though. I assume they've fixed it.

Edit: actually, it's still there if I use a desktop browser. It's on the main results page, but in the "in the news" section, not just in the main results.

I got a couple:

- Stop censoring searches based on political party

- Stop working directly with political parties

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/12403

That memo says nothing at all about censoring searches based on political party. It suggests working with technology companies to make good use of their beta programs and new platform features, which is something you can do yourself. Adding a scary wikileaks link shouldn't make your point for you

The link does not apply to the first point. Google censoring searches for Hillary's health for example is well documented. Re the second one, if I DON'T add a Wikileaks link then you'll complain the information is not sourced. So here's a more comprehensive one then:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-01/wikileaks-reveals-g...

I am not seeing a smoking gun here, really the evidence presented is completely circumstantial and does not seriously support your assertion that Google is working directly with the Democratic Party. Yes, Eric Schmidt is a political operative now, and generally a lobbyist on behalf of Google. However the scare quote, about building a unified profile of a voter, absolutely does not indicate any data sharing between Google and the Clinton campaign!

It's really sketchy of zero hedge to suggest that. Reading another article of theirs shows the same pattern. Leave the reader to make their own incorrect conclusions without providing any context. The article I'm seeing shows them quoting Putin who says that the west should allow for open discussion on all issues, instead of cracking down on his propaganda networks operating in the west. What hypocrisy! Russian media is one of the least free in the world! Zero hedge just lets him have the final word on their article, the reader left nodding his head in agreement with that Putin who tells the west how it really is. Disgusting.

A start would not let anything that is run on Wordpress or Tumblr become the top news result for something. That's where most of the spam/fake websites seem to be these days.

Then you filter out legitimate news websites.

source: run a legitimate news site built on Wordpress.

I assume you mean your site runs on a Wordpress back-end, but in the case of this article the dodgy 70 News site is literally running on Wordpress.com's free hosting (it's 70news.wordpress.com). I suspect that's what the original poster meant since they mentioned Tumblr as well.

Oh ok, yes sorry misunderstood!

that's exactly what I meant, yes. I'm surprised that something on a *.wordpress.com domain is even ranking as high as it is!

The following appear on Google News, aren't on Wordpress, and contribute their fair share of misinformation:

http://www.infowars.com/

http://usdefensewatch.com/

http://therealstrategy.com/

http://www.neonnettle.com/

> work with a dedicated team of editors, like politifact, to give websites an honestyrank

It turns out that PolitiFact is run by people who have their own unconscious biases and put their own thumbs on the scale. So now what?

Politifact is biased in favor of truth and honest reporting. For which reason it has won a Pulitzer Prize and many other awards for outstanding journalism.

Of course, people who don't want to hear the truth -- most Trump supporters, in my experience -- will deny reality or will try to undermine it in non-truthful ways.

As a matter of fact, there are several other honest fact-checking sites besides Politifact. It would be somewhat interesting if these disagreed with Politifact's judgments, but they don't.

Which claims they consider worthy of examination, whether they choose to interpret the claims in a more or less favourable light, which figures they choose as their measure of things like inflation, and how important they consider any inaccuracies to the overall claim all act as thumbs on the scale.

For example, I don't think they touched the claim that Trump has a secret communication channel with Russia, even though Clinton repeated it and demanded the FBI investigate it. (It was actually an entirely ordinary bulk email server sending out ads for Trump hotels.) A lot of people still seem to believe that one and think the FBI's rejection of it is proof they were conspiring to elect Trujmp.

They cover a lot, and they covered several with reference to Trump's ties to Russia. See below for some examples.

Either way, it's certainly true that Trump repeatedly praised Putin, quoted Russian propaganda, disbelieved US intelligence about Russian hacking (it might have been an obese guy in a basement) and did nothing to disprove his links with Russia. This included being too scared to show his tax returns, which hasn't happened since Nixon.

At least when you elected Nixon, you didn't know he was a crook.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/...

Do you think that sneering at people who have an issue with PolitiFact is going to win them over to your side? Gonna be a long eight years if that's the case.

Putting aside sneering, though: let's assume for the sake of argument that PolitiFact really is neutral. And Google hires them to put a trustworthiness rating next to news search results. How many days pass before $YOUR_LEAST_FAVORITE_POLITICAL_FORCE realizes that PolitiFact is a single point of failure and starts scheming to influence it? Put it another way, they may be neutral today, but that's hardly a guarantee they'll be neutral tomorrow.

> they may be neutral today, but that's hardly a guarantee they'll be neutral tomorrow.

Doesn't work like that. Politifact takes a consensus of people who are experts in the topic, and its answers are subject both to peer review and to corrections from outside sources.

> Do you think that sneering at people who have an issue with PolitiFact is going to win them over to your side?

I'm damned sure that neither facts nor rational arguments are going to win them over, because they have been conned by a pathological liar. And as I pointed out above, he's a liar who has been supported by a lying alt-right media.

They live in the same sort of truth-free alternate reality as the whackjobs who believe in con-trails, think the moon landings were faked, believe Obama was born in Kenya, and don't believe in evolution.

As the judge in the Trump University fraud case pointed out: "victims of con artists often sing the praises of their victimizers until the moment they realize they have been fleeced".

> Politifact takes a consensus of people who are experts in the topic, and its answers are subject both to peer review and to corrections from outside sources.

And who decides which experts get to join the consensus, and which outside sources that proffer corrections should be listened to? You're dreaming if you think that a single-point-of-failure institution like this can ever be immune to the equivalent of regulatory capture.

> I'm damned sure that neither facts nor rational arguments are going to win them over, because they have been conned by a pathological liar. And as I pointed out above, he's a liar who has been supported by a lying alt-right media.

Yeah, see, that's the thing. We started at "We need a neutral, unbiased source of fact-checking!" and have reached the conclusion of "Because that'll help stick it to the people I hate!" In which case, one wonders how much "neutral, unbiased" was ever in the cards in the first place.

> And who decides which experts get to join the consensus, and which outside sources that proffer corrections should be listened to?

A lot of them are academics. They're not bozos dragged in off the streets. The approach isn't significantly different from how science works.

> In which case, one wonders how much "neutral, unbiased" was ever in the cards in the first place.

Spare me the bullshit. Facts are still facts. There's absolutely no rational way to pretend that Trump isn't a pathological liar.

    What can Google do to prevent this from happening?

Actually very little. A strong argument can be made that market forces dictate people want their false opinions confirmed, and if you fail to provide that they will stop using your service.

It is really no different then losing trust. If you assume a service as a bias, like say promoting an agenda you disagree with. You may start using that service less and less. Google combats this with individual search preferences. So it's search results rarely leave your internet safe space.

If you promote a honesty index you lose this safe guard. Suddenly search results will challenge people's opinions, and they may stop using the service.

If we're calling this "fake" news because the facts being reported are actually lies then you're implying that people want to be lied to. I happen to think there is some truth to that but I doubt people would be willing to explicitly say "I want to be lied to by the news" as would be required for anyone to really complain about Google leaving fake news sites out of search results.

> work with a dedicated team of editors, like politifact, to give websites an honestyrank

I'm sure that would work fine : https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/785299709342654465

I would say Google has quite a task on their hand, and that truth-in-news recognition is much further behind than even facial recognition, which does not work in the wild.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com