This really is a critical juncture for the internet; the moment wherein the democratization of information has empowered those with the resources to overwhelm the signal with noise.
I wish I saw a way out.
I wish I saw a way out.
Simple. Because they're making money on the garbage. It's a misalignment of incentives. Until that is fixed, through reorganization or regulation, the problem will persist. They will only do enough to fight this -- both in terms of technology and public image -- so that it doesn't impact their bottom line(s).
Go look at a political subreddit, or some controversial tweet. There’s little conversation or context. Most users could be bots.
Google often has the advantage of having hard (url) or soft (product/key word mention) links that point to something extremely rare and “unimportant”. Everyone is bitching about politicians and policy in a way that’s not far from a Markov chain.
As someone said, we live in strange timeline where comedians are more trustworthy than politicians.
If bot/organized posts are properly classified as spam then surely the factual accuracy of someone's postings don't really matter anymore, as anything "inaccurate" falls into the realm of "opinion" or just human error. Presumably it's ok to be wrong.
So I don't see any problem with a person believing that e.g. Epstein was killed, and posting online about this belief. I don't see a problem with grassroots communities arising around this belief. It only seems to me to be an issue when such postings are sponsored/encouraged because of e.g. some political aim, and proper spam detection would mitigate this.
Paul Julius Reuter worked at a book-publishing firm in Berlin and was involved in distributing radical pamphlets at the beginning of the Revolutions in 1848.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuters#History
Besides, the problematic part with "news" involve "non-factual" news but rather political "news". Whether globalism is good or bad. What, if anything, to do about climate change. Nonsense like veganism, etc. There, by nature, can't be fact-checked because it is a value/contextual judgment rather than a factual one. Capitalism vs communism, nationalism vs globalism, immigration vs nativism, alt-right vs alt-left, traditional media vs social media, etc.
Nobody in charge needs to (or even can) decide if something like globalism or communism is good or bad, just that no obvious lies are spread while discussing it.
Never mind Google, most people are unable to recognize when they are behaving in a bot-like manner themselves...and if you point it out to them, in my experience 90%+ of the time they will become hostile and double down on their clearly not correct statements.
EDIT: Which is often reflected in willingness to entertain or debate ideas, as well as voting patterns. But alas, it seems I am done on HN for the day, due to "posting too fast".
It’s so gross.
The staggering amount of power we grant to the executive branch is one of several elephants in this particular room that no one really wants to talk about.
Happy to hear a good counter-argument, though...?
BTW, I agree with you that it is gross but thems the rules. So if we extend this logic we need to convince the corporation that it is not in there financial interest to continue with the status-quo.
No matter how "smart" they seem like they should be you'll get some of the worst, lowest quality opinions imaginable.
Most people do not know how to say "I'm not really sure about that". The absolute worst thing you can do south the average person is ask them to think about a new concept, and the internet is a medium which puts a box in front of you and says "have your say".
The spam blocking they do is designed to eliminate unwanted bulk mailings from automated systems, not some one off bit of content from an individual.
If it is reported by a recipient using the report button most email providers have then your email host gets a black mark in various databases. With repeat reports over time, more and more of thier legitimate customers stuff gets filtered.
That means your email host is incentivised to find and shut down spam accounts, ideally before they start sending mail. Register a bunch of accounts from one computer or from a proxy? Closed.
You could get around this with your own smtp server buuut... If you send a lot of reported emails your home isp will chuck you. They don't want thier ip block blacklisted. Your cloud smtp spam server will be pulled by amazon and they won't let someone who seems to be you create a new account.
So yes, you can send a few manually written emails and send them to a couple people at a time, but anything with wider reach will be shut down rapidly at various levels.
Meanwhile, you can script create thousands of twitter bot accounts with obvious bot names and... If they are looking for them, they aren't looking harder than they are being made to.
I guess this is a strong argument for federated Internet infrastructure. Everyone is incentivised to play nice because thier partners can cut them off.
I would be interested in an analysis of who funds those troll campaigns. I'd wager billionaires rank very far below governments, political parties and corporations.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-...
It means that disinformation is relatively less important to billionaires compared to others.
Not sure what the linked article has to do with it.
Edit: The reason why I'm even debating this not very important difference is that I feel that structural issues with our political and economic system are too often obscured and trivialised by blaming it all on powerful evil individuals.
For instance, billionaires want the companies they own shares in to make as much money as possible. CEOs who measure their success in increasing share prices are therefore incentivised to occasionally break the law.
Does that mean billionaires wanted or even told the CEO to break the law? Not necessarily. Does it mean CEOs wouldn't break the law if the shares were owned by a pension fund and not by billionaires? No.
So there are more complex structural issues that shouldn't get buried in too much finger pointing at rich individuals. Of course that doesn't mean there are no evil billionaires or that some of them wouldn't like to own a personal troll army. Who knows.
Naval Ravikant made a very good point on Joe Rogan where he said that as soon as social media platforms decided to censor content they started a war they can't win because they end up having to chose sides. He said their position should be (recalling from memory here) "we're a publishing platform not responsible for the content that's being published. If you have a warrant, we'll take it down, otherwise it's hands off". Censoring, demoting or stopping the spread, it's basically the same thing.
They absolutely are making money on the garbage as well, as you said.
Can't help but notice that this kind of argument never really worked for torrent platforms.
Google hasn't solved the spam problem for end users at all. Google has solved its liability to spam.
But how do you tell the difference between a political activist who just joined Twitter and a troll account? You seem to think this is a trivial problem so I am curious to see your answer.
Whereas social media doesn't really have a to: list. By design it's broadcast. That puts a major limitation on using as similar solution.
Solving comments isn't.
Also, google has the same incentives as facebook and twitter. I don't see why you are separating google from facebook and twitter.
One way the characters in the book got around the huge signal to noise problem was by using editors who were paid to filter it out. Different people could afford different qualities of editors and that had effects on society.
It's a pretty small part of the book, but it's very interesting.
An earlier comment I made about this very point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14554592
Stephenson has done a pretty amazing job at extrapolating the near future. I'm not sure if the idea of a crypto currency existed before he wrote Cryptonomicon, but that was 10 years before Bitcoin launched.
He expressed the idea of editors being a two-way service. They not only curated your feeds, but also monitored the data you make available to others.
Wealthy people could afford human editors to look after their personal 'brand', and ensure the quality of their consumed media, whereas poorer people had to make do with AI editors run by the likes of Google, or Facebook.
Its no wonder they dont want to ban political ads. They would have to remove their post reach boosting and super refined targeting and that's their entire business.
I heard in Google search, most of the people click ads because they dont know these are ads but this is hard to believe for me
The only plausible way out I see is first recognizing the degree to which what we consider "facts" and "factual" discourse and beliefs to actually be vague, often incorrect opinions and memes.
If one group of people of above average intelligence could learn and maintain a disciplined approach to reading and discussing issues and the news, carefully distinguishing between objective and comprehensive factual statements versus discussing things in lazy, non-comprehensive, meme and heuristic driven "facts", acknowledging the ever-present complexity, uncertainty, and nuance, might this group of people be able to finally recognize the degree to which we are mostly arguing about models and depictions of reality, rather than reality itself?
I think it is certainly possible, but it seems this idea invokes disgust in most people, of all political stripes.