As Google Fights Fake News, Voices on the Margins Raise Alarm

I think this tells us (a) results differ from person to person - we knew that, but it means we can't see what's being shown to others and how bad it might be; and (b) "socialist" is mostly used as a swear word these days.

I also could have my nuances with some things said there. But I don't think there is so big of an ideological breach among people if the debate is proposed from a pragmatic and resolutive standpoint. Wouldn't many of us agree that a government should control or manage some resources and give free land for innovation in others? Couldn't we debate about what would be the most efficient way to organize a public governing body, area by area, and how?

You could use the same argument on any extremist site.

Algorithm can parse content. It probably has list of bullshit related keywords. Just the title:

> Marxist analysis, international working class struggles & the fight for socialism

But why? None of those things are reasons to link to it for any particular terms, just reasons not to not link to it.

I think there is a causality error here. Traditionally things which meet those criteria have been ranked highly, but not because of those things. Rather, those things have been easy to detect and have correlated well with quality search rankings.

But that doesn't mean that they are (or should) be the only signals a ranking algorithm can use. I'd argue that a hypothetical AI search engine would do a lot more verification of content as part of the ranking process. It is absolutely true that this remains challenging at the moment (verifiable implies truth after all), but the point remains.

People have the cognitive attributes that they do. We think in narratives. Our political thinking mode is entirely dominated by identity, whether ideological, ethnic or whatever. We prefer confirmation. etc. etc. We just aren’t scientific thinking machines. That’s why scientific methods are designed as they are. They strictly avoid the way people normally come to conclusions, even (especially) intellectual heavyweights that have dedicated their lives to rationality. Take away the scientific checks (e.g., the double blindness of experiments), and even the most robust minds are feeble in this sense.

The actual mechanisms of culture are too complex to understand, but components of culture and group behaviour can be understood well enough to steer things into certain directions.

The underlying problem (IMO) is that FB, Google and others are the only ones in position to play a role they do not want to play. In the past we had “trusted” publications, who had editors and such. We had softer institutions like “journalism,” the culture and methods associated with the profession. These had power, cultural force. None of these were anywhere near perfect (or even decent), but they did have some ability to distinguish between “popular” and “good”.

They don’t as much anymore. Google & FB do. They don’t want the job. We don’t really want them to have the job. Something new needs to emerge, and I don’t think that something is a more robust human brain.

adjective: constituting or presenting a problem

Or are the "word-checkers" in on the big conspiracy too?

Readers who seek a factual account of an event.

Why is this so subjective, and why are people so riled up in these threads? News should be objectively true. If it isn't, it should be clearly flagged as opinion, or struck entirely as fiction, i.e. fake.

I guess in the long run they are better off with legitimate traffic, since scamy websites and shitty ads are the reason for why many people now install ad blockers. But it's actually rare to see a company thinking ahead of the next quarter.

For example: the US gov actively influences movies and TV scripts for propaganda purposes: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/exclusive-documents-...

Another: US Gov created an incredibly false narrative about Iraq to set the stage for the War on Terror. https://theintercept.com/2016/12/15/if-donald-trump-is-so-up...

DoD spent millions researching how to manipulate Twitter users: https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/08/darpa-social-n...

We need more decentralized power in media, not less.

People should study what happened in the Easter European countries from the Warsaw Pact, like Romania.

The interesting thing about our former communists and their security apparatus was that they did not need high tech gadgets, video cameras or online social networks to keep tabs on everybody, you simply need an army an informers. And in a society where people want to be more equal than others, you'll find plenty of people that want to be informers, on every street, in any apartment building, in any group, people that will betray their friends and colleagues for free.

Plenty of unrealistic things in the 1984 novel actually. "Newspeak" for example doesn't need to happen because of a government mandate to ban words. Oh no, there's no need for that. Language simply gets stupid over time, as the public discourse simply becomes "wooden language", from the French "langue de bois", as a natural consequence of having uneducated people in charge yielding unlimited power and controlling the media.

The threat is actually not Facebook or Google, but rather the people, which are guilty of normalizing behavior that should not be normalized ;-)

For Google to protect it's ranking algorithms, non-disclosure and the legal right to proprietary knowledge is the best defense. It's not obscure, it's private.