Google Assistant’s latest feature: “Tell me something good”
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
At the time, it was run by a very clever guy who came from the advertising world. He came up with an idea, the "Good News Day". It was to be tied to some ad campaign I don't quite remember now, but it was a day when the news portal could only publish good news.
The editorial staff protested, of course. It's their job to offer news as factually correct and unbiased as humanly possible and they were very unhappy with the idea. In the end, however they relented.
It was about 4AM when a mayoral candidate from a city near São Paulo, was murdered, seemingly for political reasons. Under protests, they held the release.
By 10 AM a plane hit the World Trade Center.
At that point they just published everything and completely ignored the directive. Nothing similar was ever issued again.
To this day, the people who were there regard such initiatives as extremely dangerous.
And i say that as an Israeli, we don't lack drama in our news.I don't listen to the news, and i don't feel i'm risking myself.
Well, how many people in Brazil had relatives in NYC? Proportionally speaking not many, I'm sure. But some. And their news provider would have overwhelmingly let them down that day. If you move the same principle to an NYC news provider it would be a catastrophic service failure.
Phone lines were jammed into the city (including cellular, because the circuits were saturated), and nobody was flying in or out of NYC. So unless someone in Brazil is secretly Clark Kent, there's 100% nothing they could've done to help or hinder the fate of the 9/11 victims in the hours after the attacks.
For example, it is not at all relevant to me to know about when a mother murders her two children, but it definitely has a negative impact on my psyche.
So if someone checked their news on it on that terrible day, they would see both event. If they felt very depressed about it and needed to cheer themselves up, they could ask for a good news of the day; something that they certainly couldn't find on regular news system of the time since the WTC is all they talked about for days.
I haven't found feature discovery to be one of the assistant's strong points, so little articles like this help with that.
So the stories are "good" not in the sense of not covering disturbing events but they are "good" in the sense that they offer solutions or ways out of problems. It is not about "what" is covered but more about "how" it is covered.
Users are usually presented news as if it's "unfiltered", but editors chose the stories. It's the illusion of reality when it's actually a constructed narrative. Giving users the option to change the narrative gives perspective on how those narratives are structured.
I cannot find a reference to this story, but a Russian paper tried a similar thing about ten years ago with similar results.
The feature is essentially "Hey Google, tell me something good" and Assistant reads out a positive news story. I asked twice and it told me a story about Parkinson's research and how Utah reduced chronic homelessness. It seems like a feature of questionable usefulness but neat nonetheless.
"To activate the feature, Assistant users in the U.S. can say, “Hey Google, tell me something good” to kick off the daily briefing of happy stories."
This is NOT a filter Google puts on your news intake. It IS a gimmick that people can activate like asking it to tell you a joke.
I would LOVE a feature to disable these types of headlines, this certainly IS NOT it.
https://qz.com/307214/heres-what-happened-when-a-news-site-o...
> The stories are selected and summarized by the nonpartisan nonprofit Solutions Journalism Network, an organization that helps train journalists to better cover how people are responding to problems and how those actions can have positive results.
Google is not choosing the stories.
This is not targeted at any particular side; I see all sides use the term this way.
I have noticed that at some point search engines like Google or Youtube started only showing me results that match my political views. It was actually quite difficult to find any opposing view points.
Now, I think this leads to radicalization as people are further "strengthened" in their opinions seeing that "the Internet agrees" with them.
As bad as people are at being unbiased, this is only making things worse, on gigantic scale.
They involve guys like the one who's a subject of this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahuj1B0ow4U
That dude, literally that dude, showed up in my recommendations pretty regularly until I explicitly blocked him. Now I get fellow chuds like Sargon of Akkad and the like; I have to "nope" at least one fascist or at the minimum white-supremacist channel out of my recommendations a week.