YouTube Flagged Notre Dame Fire as Misinformation, Attached Article About 9/11
buzzfeednews.com
buzzfeednews.com
So the fact check technology became the conspiracy theory generator?
So, you're saying that it is generating conspiracy theories?
IE: Tons of online trolls trying to stir up false racist and xenophobic outrage on social media for this event, thus the YouTube algos picked up on some of this and linked the associated article.
But I can't -- really can't -- imagine how any Islamic fundamentalist group could claim responsibility for this. What would be the point?
So if anyone does claim responsibility, it's ~100% sure that they're just trying to incite Islamophobia.
Edit: OK, not ~100% sure. But it's either that, or they're crazy. And yes, I suppose that it's arguable that all terrorists are crazy. I still maintain that it's an obvious possibility, however. Not at all likely, but still obvious.
But then, the Taliban did destroy monumental statues of Buddha in Afghanistan. Which were about twice as old as Notre Dame. So maybe I am deluding myself :(
And OK, I take it back. Nothing is "too shocking" to be all that unlikely.
But still, wouldn't you think that a terrorist attack on Notre Dame would involve something more like a hijacked gasoline tanker than a fire that perhaps started in the attic?
But it survived. And to be burned out by some idiot with an agenda would be so sad and pointless. Indeed, whatever cause the idiot was supporting.
But of course, it'd also be sad if it was totally an "accident". An electrical fire. Someone who left a heater running. Or didn't fully extinguish a cigarette.
Anyway, I'd be very suspicious if someone claimed responsibility. If for no other reason, because if it had been a terrorist attack, we would know by now. A key point in terrorist attacks is having them be obvious. Not looking like accidents.
The team that built this should be dissolved. This was a bad call on the engineering side, the product side, and the management side. Nothing about this was a success.
Mistakes will happen, the team will learn from them, and their product will improve.
Even if it set out to achieve its original goals flawlessly, it fails to actually solve the problem Google faces in the first place (being a platform for misinformation). If you got all the way to a conspiracy theory video, is Encyclopedia Britannica really going to change your mind? And being a not-flawless computer system, it will _always_ have false positives, which means as long as it exists it will flag events like this as misinformation. The latter, in my opinion, is inexcusable. Any engineer building any sort of classification system knows that there will be false positives, and nobody at Google thought that this would be problematic and stopped the system from being built.