Google announces workshops to tackle the spread of hate speech and fake news
arstechnica.co.uk
arstechnica.co.uk
Fiction that purports to be news poses a far greater threat to democratic institutions, especially when it is targeted (and therefore invisible to the normal editorial controls). A mis- or dis- informed populace empowers people that worsen the core systemic problems that hate speech is a symptom of. But in this case, too, there is also an historic, market-based mechanism for combating it: editors. But unlike with hate speech, where Internet communities can enforce norms that determine inclusion, the Internet has no built-in editorial controls.
Your argument that fake news is more dangerous makes sense, but it's not hard to argue the other way. Hate speech causes suicides, while fake news only causes temporary misinformation. Hate speech makes people withdraw from society and public life, driving them out of democratic institutions. Fake news usually just lets people hear what they want to hear, confirming beliefs they already had. The "victims" of fake news are actively seeking it out, while the victims of hate speech are being attacked.
Maybe that's not completely convincing, but hopefully you see what I mean. We already have lots of controls on free speech, are there any intrinsic reasons you think hate speech and fake news are categorically different?
But, yes, I think it's a huge political mistake to tie these concepts in this way (or even to use the term "fake news" at all, at this point). Regardless of the motives or actual content of the workshops, imagine how someone on the right will (not entirely unjustifiably) view a headline like this.
Hooray for automation.
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.
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.
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.
no reason my search algorithm can't be tunable..
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...
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.
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..
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...
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).
It seems pretty clear to me. Hate speech is free speech.
Facebook should be classified as something like a common carrier.
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. :/
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
There are things that are obviously false, but probably harmless enough.
top if off with a very clique oriented age group where personal beliefs are subsumed to the group identify because belonging is more important than thinking... no thank you.
if anything we should be making sure they feel safe to decide and safe to listen too any view.
For example in France, during an election campaign, official media must strive to share equally the "speaking time" between candidates. And while social networks, with subsidiaries in France, have a more and more prominent role in the information bubble of citizens, they currently ignore this regulation in their automated recommendations.
I experienced it myself some days ago, while looking for some videos about French candidates on youtube, I was persistently recommended some videos for a specific candidate by youtube's recommendation algorithm.
I was apparently not the only one to notice that, as some people even conducted automated tests [1] :
"Mélenchon, Le Pen and Asselineau make up nearly 60 percent of the candidates that are mentioned in the titles of the most recommended videos. It is particularly surprising for Asselineau to be recommended so much because he received less than 1 percent of voter preferences in the latest polls.
Perhaps predictably, each of these three candidates is the top recommended candidate when searching for their name. However, we have found that starting from a search of any other candidate, these three candidates are still the most recommended"
Theses 3 candidates are highly active on social networks, but also pro-frexit and often categorized as populist.
My 2 cents: drop the term "fake news" entirely and switch to a less vague euphemism like "hoax mills" or something. Switching the mental frame to some clearly shady, unknown "news" website/company that pumps out nothing but hoax or highly exaggerated stories will make discussions about how to deal with it less contentious. "Stop the proliferation and revenue sources of hoax mills" reads way better than "tackle fake news".
This is a place Google rightly can and should responsibly step in (just like how they try to keep blatant scams and malware/phishing sites from first page search results). People just need to all be on the same page about what, specifically, Google is trying to stop.
Let's say I don't dispute your first claim (though that also has no basis). How many mass atrocities or deaths have historically been tied to info on youtube or social networks? (please provide citations) - I'm willing to bet BTC that US drone strikes have killed significantly more (but it's okay we have a corrective mechanism!). Further what about the all the mass atrocities prior to social media, what was the corrective action there?
Would you have someone watch and advice these people? The People's Party? The Ministry of Truth? Google Department of Facts? The US Government? The very same government that e.g. tacitly supported genocide in Indonesia? [0]
Actually a great amount (if not the majority) of crimes against humanity have been carried out precisely by organizations and people with the kind of corrective ideology you are on here evangelizing.
I'm really quite surprised to be having this discussion honestly, I don't know if it's some mental culture of the Silicon Valley bubble or complete lack of historical knowledge or what...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19...
Without even knowing that or expressing any kind of curiosity about it, just look at the assumptions you are making about me. Social media is just conditioning us to keep reacting to one another and it doesn't have to be this way.
I haven't made too many comments on HN cause this is the kind of reaction I get all the time. If you are interested here's my fix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125904
However, the main difference I see, as to news coverage, is the first example happened in the USA.
If the latter had happened in the USA, it would have received astounding coverage. Even if you believe that liberal media would have been quiet, Fox would have had a field day.
That they didn't is evidence of the locality argument.