Wouldn't a better solution be to identify the claims in the article and automatically alert the reader that one or more claims have been debunked? Then let the user decide?
They are in the business of feeding users advertisements and information, and hitherto that has benefited users with easier access to the world's full breadth of information and ideas. That era is drawing to a close.
Or it opens up room for a competitor to take (a part of) that market.
Not sure I'd get my news on Qatar from that source though.
RT/Sputnik etc are state sponsored channels. A public service outlet is critical of government, not its mouthpiece.
I think this should just be solved algorithmically. Google assigns importance to linked articles and if you assign massive negative importance to fake news outlets and articles then those who reference them or report the same things should drop in ranking.
Obviously you’ll need an army of people to decide what is fake news - but I think that’s unavoidable. I beyond the point where I think people can “see all the facts and decide for themselves what to believe in”. It’s unfortunate that we have to hope for some global megacorp to solve our news filtering so people don’t do stupid things.
I'd be the last person to defend RT, but the cost/benefit of blacklisting such a site belies atrocious foresight. Google is opening up a huge can of worms for what will be very little gain in terms of improving the signal-to-noise ratio of mass media consumption.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter are all doing a very poor job of countering the backlash on Capitol Hill. That's partly their own doing as they willfully perpetuated the myth of the magic of their technology. But rather than reign in the misperceptions they're doubling down to save face and making very concrete, very stupid promises.
Irrespective, I believe it would be harmful to penalise...
- Larry King: It's crazy - Ted Turner changed the world. He's a big fan of yours.
- Bill Clinton: Is he?
- Larry King: He would, uh, serve you - you know what I mean?
- Bill Clinton: You're kiddin?
- Larry King: Oh you'd be surprised - he's ready what's he got left in life to gain? I'd call him after you're elected. Think about it.
The reality is that nearly all media today is spiraling towards partisan and biased tabloidism, and so this action seems completely arbitrary. We can try to spin it as being "election interference" but let's imagine we played a similar game as we have with Russia, with the UK. And we qualify anybody who posted on issues even tangentially related to the US election from an England IP, with an England phone number, etc as an "English agent." How many would there be? Or even vice versa how many "American agents" are there that tried to "influence" Brexit?
Unless there's any form of consistency and objectivity in these actions, this looks more like a witch hunt than anything else.
It doesn't mean that it is all fake news -- actually, the most dangerous articles are somewhat true but intentionally misleading or sensationalizing some component of a true story that helps Russia's cause.
They were forced to register, AFAIK. I'm not sure how that proves anything. I mean, I know that RT is a propaganda outlet, but them complying with some law requiring registration is not proving anything - it's like saying "you paid taxes therefore you are a spy". Total non-sequitur.
> the most dangerous articles are somewhat true but intentionally misleading or sensationalizing some component
Which of course US press would never dream of doing. Have you watched any news recently?
Honestly, I'm pretty sure Google doesn't care what would be better for you. You're a product, not a customer. Now, who is a customer, then? Usually, answer seems pretty obvious, but you couldn't answer it regarding this particular case, could you? It might be government, it might be some other company, it might be Schmidt himself for whatever reason…
And it seems to me, the fact you are being sold without even being able to tell who likely buys you anymore is even more noteworthy than the notion itself.
We've entered some strange twilight zone where countries pushing their interests is somehow considered "wrong".
Yet Crocs still makes far more durable products than Google! ;)
It takes an incredible amount of chauvinism and arrogance to believe that the American people are too stupid to realize that perhaps a news source called "Russia Today" might publish articles that would reflect unflattering aspects of American society and unflattering stories about American politicians. If our domestic news outlets reported on these things there would have been no market share left to be grabbed by RT in the first place.
Schmidt seems to want to suppress such ideas, helping to suppress these unflattering stories so that the Al Frankens, Donald Trumps, and George HW Bushes of the world can stay in power.
As an aside, Schmidt is the ultimate establishment opportunist, so of course he would do this sort of thing. He cares only about making Eric Schmidt powerful.
> Wouldn't a better solution be to identify the claims in the article and automatically alert the reader that one or more claims have been debunked? Then let the user decide?
Of course that would be better. It would also be what a capable tech firm should do to help create an informed populace. But Schmidt doesn't want that, he simply wants to be viewed as one of the "good guys" by the partisans who are promoting the Russia story and trying to make political headway with it.
I have zero respect for Trump, but the Russia story is total bunk and RT has published more important stories about America's disadvantaged citizens and failing infrastructure than all of the major news outlets combined.
This also probably reveals that Google rankings can no longer be trusted simply to reveal pagerank results with corrections for spam and pagerank exploits.
Note to Google: We do not want you to be an information censor or a moderator of the ideas that we are exposed to. Please stop.
I think your general approach is reasonable and thoughtful, and so I want to be careful to reply in a way that comes across as respectful of your views. This may get a bit long, but I'm curious about your thoughts.
On the subject of the US media treating politicians with kid gloves, with a special case of NPR. We have a number of highly partisan "entertainment news" companies that constantly amplify the smallest and silliest aspects of the other party, because it entertains their readers/viewers/listeners.
But the question to ask is whether any of these "entertainment news" companies threaten the status quo in any way. In other words, does Fox news existence make it any less likely whatsoever that the Democratic party will hold power roughly half the time over the next century? The answer is, absolutely not. Correspondingly, does the existence of MSNBC or CNN make it any less likely that the GOP will not hold power for roughly half of the next century, or that there will be a significant redistribution of wealth and power in the US? Absolutely not.
The metaphor I'd use is that the status quo moves like a rapid train along an unwavering trajectory. The status quo means powerful people stay powerful. The vast majority of the partisan fray that we observe is absurd (sex scandals, secret muslimness, etc.) and distracts people from issues of substance. By distracting people from issues of substance it strengthens the interests that benefit from the status quo. A lot of people watch one or the other partisan "news entertainment" networks and consider themselves well-informed, and outraged (appropriately) about the right things.
NPR plays an interesting role. It offers a lot of serious, high quality content. I t even reports calmly about many of the scandals and situations that make other news outlets reveal their partisan stripes, but one thing remains constant. NPR does not question the legitimacy of US institutions whatsoever. During the time of the financial crisis it had extensive coverage of what the banks did, how greed and negligence contributed to the crisis, etc., but did not shine a critical eye on the role of regulators and poorly designed (and poorly enforced) regulation on the crisis. NPR can deliver in-depth coverage, but it always pulls back before questioning certain sacred cows.
When you think about it, NPR's behavior is functionally similar to the highly partisan "entertainment news" fray. It helps to focus attention on things other than fundamental problems with the status quo and its institutions.
To dig a bit deeper into this example, the proper response to the financial crisis would have been to fix the broken regulatory system that allowed the dangerous combination of inadequate underwriting requirements and regulatory capture that created the impression of some firms being "too big to fail". Either would have been easy to fix, but instead the "fix" was to simply socialize some of that risk by having Taxpayers buy some of the risky assets, artificially inflating prices and preventing market forces from correcting enough to cause more widespread firm failure.
Even if asset support was warranted as a stability measure, the core incentives enjoyed by banks, insurance companies, and iBanks have remained generally unchanged, and attention was focused on compensation plans rather than on broader firm and industry incentives to socialize risk, which is ultimately what had been going on. Further, accounting irregularities in the GSEs were largely ignored. This process reveals the extent of regulatory capture and looks a lot like corruption. At the very least, transparency is lacking, and news organizations have been silent about it, preferring to focus on sensational stories about executive pay, etc.
On the subject of RT's coverage of Ukraine, my point is just that one could not expect "Russia Today" to report in an unbiased way on the Ukraine, so I'd be skeptical of any of its coverage of Ukraine, no matter what it said. Russia has an incentive to convey misinformation about Ukraine that does not exist for other topics. On US stories, RT has an incentive to write true stories about unflattering things, since overplaying its hand would result in widespread skepticism.
On the subject of the Crowdstrike data, etc: I referenced the homeland security report because it is considered the official roll-up of all available information that leads many to believe a specific narrative about Russian meddling. The Homeland security report referenced the crowdstrike report as a significant basis for its finding, and alluded to additional evidence but did not provide any in the unclassified document (or in the classified one, as far as any of us know).
The linking to GRU seems tenuous at best, and while your statement that even experts make mistakes is true, and while Kaspersky uncovered bits of the Equation group, I think we need a model that reveals the probabilistic reasoning and assumed incentives of each of the parties involved in the narrative in order to get an accurate perspective on what happened. Without that, the narrative implies various intentions that may only be accidental, with the actors instead having much more selfish/local motivations.
In my opinion, the likely scenario is that there are a lot of unsophisticated people doing phishing all the time toward any address that will bite. I receive phishing messages periodically, and several years ago received notice from Google that my account is being attacked by a state actor (whereupon I turned on 2FA).
Chances are if you are phishing for Gmail accounts and you find one that has links to .gov addresses, there is someone in the Russia you can sell it to. Surely if some American teenager hacked a Russian citizen's email and found information relevant to intelligence work he/she would be able to find a buyer for it in the US.
When we read about "links" between entities, what does that mean? I know of cases where the FBI has made deals with "former" hackers, allowing them to avoid prison by helping with various investigations, etc. So does that mean that a hacking org that one of these hackers used to work for is "linked" with the FBI? Context matters. We are hearing one side of the story, but more importantly hearing only one side of a highly politicized story.
As for the Russia story in general, relating to the alleged intention of Russia to meddle in the US election, there are a lot of people who are hand waving and pointing to "links" that don't check out. Suppose Wikileaks received emails from some third party who was not Russia and who WL did not know to be Russia. And suppose Russia gave the emails to that third party. WL claiming not to have received emails from Russia is true, so WL's credibility is not on the line even if there is hard intel making Russia the source of the emails. But for some reason due to the political nature of this issue, partisans are making all sorts of claims about WL's motivations. There are similar claims about RT's motivations being thrown around, but very little actual data. Of course RT will publish stories that are broadly favorable to Russia and Russia's interest. I don't think anyone would expect otherwise. Of course WL would publish juicy information, no matter where it came from and no matter if it came from an adversary of the US or a partisan within the US. Nobody would expect otherwise.
All of the above is perhaps an aside. I guess what really matters is whether one thinks Google should be in the truth business. I guess with advertising as the main source of revenue, Google is ultimately in the influence business, since what advertiser would buy ads if they did not create influence. Since not all ads are conversion-oriented, much of Google's revenue must come from broader, branding campaigns which are meant to create mindshare for certain ideas over others among a target population.
So maybe all this amounts to is Google giving US Government some free brand marketing for it's American Exceptionalism campaign, which is itself much older than Google.
It can also be seen as a business move. The perceived failure of the news media to convince people to vote for one candidate has left a void in the market. So now Google, Facebook, Twitter and others are racing to fill that void. They are signaling that they are willing and able to better target and manipulate public opinion than anyone else.
Does Google and others believe that lizard people stories and pictures of Hillary boxing with Jesus made a difference in the election? https://assets.pcmag.com/media/images/561223-an-example-of-r... Probably not. But the adherence to the story and the faithful reiteration is a good backdrop to signal a more important message to those willing to read between the lines.
If you think that Schmidt and Google are the forces motivating viewpoint moderation and it's something they're foisting on the rest of the world, you clearly haven't paid even a second of attention to what's been going on.
Liberalism (in the classical sense) is _incredibly_ unpopular right now. There's been a constant drumbeat of articles (including all the ones that make it to HN's frontpage) about how modern-day content platform giants like FB and Google are being and make sure that legal but "bad" things like "fake news" need to be controlled and removed on their platforms. It hasn't been coming from inside these companies: it's been coming from journalists, politicians, and a host of other random (though sadly often influential) empty-headed loudmouths on Twitter.
> Note to Google: We do not want you to be an information censor or a moderator of the ideas that we are exposed to. Please stop.
Dude. Seriously. Read the news every once in a while. Half the country has been screaming at Google for not fulfilling _exactly_ this "responsibility". _You_ may not want them to be a viewpoint moderator/censor (and neither do I), but you're grossly misunderstanding the situation if you think this is a path that they're motivated to do by anything other than intense public and political pressure.
So Facebook had to figure out a way to seem relatively innocent. It had been the major vector by which 10 minute wordpress articles with Times New Roman font face hosted on $10 fake news domains got thousands of shares. So it tabulated the amount of ad spend that had occurred in Russian currency and admitted that $160K of ads had been purchased by Russian actors.
Twitter realized that rather than reveal that a massive percentage of its accounts are bots, it ought to follow Facebook's lead, so it did a similar thing, canceling a small percentage of the fake accounts.
Yes, Google may have felt some pressure, but Google has a much better alibi. Pagerank is based on linking behavior which is much slower than social media, and is not designed simply to promote virality.
Imagine if pagerank worked like Facebook's algorithm, search would be useless but people would stay highly engaged while trying to search amid distracting and emotionally potent items turning up that they weren't actually looking for.
You are making the defense of Schmidt that some people make about IBM's selling equipment to the German government pre WW2.
For a very recent example, consider the Damore memo as a recent example. Leaving aside what action you think should have been taken (_really_ not interested in that discussion right now), there was a marked shift in Google's reaction to the memo once it hit the idiots of the twitterati and blew up. PR matters to companies.
Does it, though?
The demonizing of Hillary Clinton, for example, originated with Newt Gingrich's 1994 Contract with America, which saw a resurgent GOP control both the House and Senate for the first time in over 40 years. That was a campaign which normalized calling Hillary Clinton a "bitch" after it came out that that's how Gingrich referred to her in private, and refused to walk it back, instead only lashing out at the leaker, Connie Chung. Ironically (given how events precipitated 15 years later where Democrats adopted the previously-conservative alternative) the main reason (but hardly the only reason) Hillary came to the foreground was because she was appointed to lead a task force to investigate healthcare reform in 1993.
Basically, the poisonous, vitriolic, conspiracist, and highly personal attacks of today can be directly and unequivocally traced back to our daemons from the 1990s, some of whom literally walk the halls of government today using the same playbook. Laying the blame on RT and other outlets simply obfuscates things. The Democrats are idiots for their ham-fisted use of the so-called fake news narrative. Not because it's completely wrong, per se, but because the emphasis is so misleading and counter-productive. And it's why so many Republicans are joining the Democrats in the assault on fake news, as they know they have absolutely nothing to lose and a lot to gain in terms of their own credibility, which will undoubtedly be used to perpetuate more poisonous narratives (i.e. Birther Movement, Benghazi, etc). These poisonous narratives are domestic, crafted and perpetuated by domestic, elected politicians. We might as well "de-rank" C-SPAN.
For all the techies on HN, we should be pushing back against this GOP and DNC attack on Silicon Valley. The Democrats idiotically created a scape-goat in Silicon Valley and the Republicans happily adopted the narrative. The only people stupider than the Democrats in doing this are Facebook, Google, and Twitter, who seem to have drunk their own kool-aid regarding their social impact and then decided to do a mea culpa. The whole thing is absurd from every conceivable angle.
RT is an island of sanity by comparison. At least their own journalists don't believe their propaganda. They aren't fooling themselves; not like all the players in the U.S.
It stops where we bloody well want it to. Fox News is not the only news org that puts out crap content on the regular, they're just one of the bigger ones. CNN has a similar problem in the other direction, both doing the same basic tactic; taking and leaving facts and figures that don't suit what they want to say.
The vast majority of news networks yes, have a bias, but also report more or less the facts with more or less a complete picture. There are only a few news orgs out there that report just plain, outright, easily disproven bullshit and at the front of them is Fox News, that, in perhaps an honest attempt to counter the bias of most mainstream media, -or- in a cynical cash grab picked up and stoked the fears of white middle America, choose the narrative you prefer. Outside of that, most are relatively fine.
And yes, get Fox News the hell off Google. I'm all for it. Let's get rid of CNN too for the same reasons, and make news agencies compete for ranking based on who gets the story RIGHT, not who gets it FIRST.
You know - that tedious, slow, boring, and often costly activity which proper journalists are supposed to undertake before publication.
The reputable polar opposites are Fox News and MSNBC with everyone else somewhere in the middle. You can legitimately tell that someone listens to conservative media if they consider CNN left wing.
This is the general problem. You've got good, honest people who already have biases and the echo chamber is so loud if you're not vociferously fighting side X you're obviously side Y.
I highly agree that most news nowadays has become clickbait focused in an effort to both drive revenue and stir up loyalty by making people pick sides.
https://beerbrarian.blogspot.com/2016/12/librarians-in-age-o...
CNN is left leaning but that is not the source of my gripe with them. I don't like the "hair is on fire" 24/7 style reporting they do, and I find that their quality work gets lost in a mess of exactly that kind of "everything is fucked and we're all going to die" style of reporting.
There are plenty of what people would call left leaning orgs out there that do excellent work. CNN is not among them IMHO.
Who is "we"? How exactly does "we" determine where it stops?
just my ¢2.