Translation: Google, the closest thing to a public global utility on the internet, becomes an arbiter of what's "true" and what's "hate speech" -- according to the prevailing interests and standards of its owners and of its country.
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.
no reason my search algorithm can't be tunable..
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.
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?"
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.
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).
There are things that are obviously false, but probably harmless enough.