On Google Podcasts, a Buffet of Hate

I'm not at all surprised by this. Google is a catastrophe. As much flak as Facebook gets (and deserves), at least they do seem to have active moderators that try to ban things before Zuckerberg overrides them or whatever.

I recently asked my Google Home for news about something fairly innocuous, and the first result was propaganda from Sputnik[1].

It's not so much that Google indexes Sputnik. I'm not saying they should blacklist it from their databases.

The problem is that they give it enormous credibility by providing it as the first result for a major topic.

Google News has had major issues with this for years, and I think it has single-handedly elevated a lot of extremely disingenuous sources, like Epoch Times[2] (which they may have now actually blacklisted, I'm not sure).

I think this is just part of Google's belief that all human problems are actually engineering problems and that maintaining products is a shameful activity compared to building new ones.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_(news_agency)

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times