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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

Clearly the people running these sites are true scumbags. However, the article doesn't mention that the only reason these sites making false claims have any value is because google directs traffic to them! If somebody slanders me on a site nobody reads why would I care? I only care if Google slanders me through their search results. That's what you're paying for to get the slander removed: removal from search results.

And yet nobody talks about the responsibility search engines have to prune obvious scams, viruses, and the like from their index. Google is not a neutral actor in this, it's Google's algorithm that's getting exploited, so Google has both a moral responsibility and the actual capability to fix this. Legal action against these slander sites is important too, but more of a secondary concern.

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At the end it does say you can contact Google to have these kind of results removed, which seems to work well.

I don't disagree they should probably be more proactive, but it's tricky because "X is a horrible person" can be legitimate articles too; banning domains is a whack-a-mole, and of course you'll get complaints about "censorship".

It doesn't remove the images though

Google has a filter. Google filters for "quality", for relevance and quite a few things. The filter against spam. The filter against SEO tactics that were once common. etc.

Filtering against slander seems like reasonably simple and not one that different from what they already. They're already doing whack-a-mole against a whole variety of things.

But yeah, shitty websites suing their ways onto Google search results with "free speech" complaints may one thing that is making this hard but I don't know enough about that situation to say with any certainty.

> Filtering against slander seems like reasonably simple

It's not.

> not one that different from what they already.

True, and they're pretty bad at all those other things too.

Unfortunately the societal costs of false-positives and false-negatives are not the same as Google's cost of false-positives and false-negatives.

This may be controversial, but I don't agree. Any legitimate item can be used for bad things if someone wants.

At the risk of making a bad analogy, a car can be used by someone to go on a rampage and mow down hundreds of people. If that happened you can be sure that someone, somewhere would suggest that the auto manufacturers have a responsibility to stop this kind of thing from happening again by making a "kill switch" available to police that can be used to stop the vehicle remotely.

Another bad analogy would be using a hammer to kill someone.

Clearly there is a fuzzy line there somewhere. I am not saying that companies have no responsibility in keeping their products from being used in bad ways by bad people, but I do think it is important not to only look at the bad thing and say that companies need to stop that bad thing from happening at all costs.

I don't think Google is quite as neutral here. Google suggests adding "cheater" to the search of the victim's names and ranks those websites.

What if the manual of the hammer included a section "try hitting someone with it".

Now, Google's recommendation clearly came from seeing those words appear together, but to me Google is somewhere between completely neutral like grep, a hammer, or a car and fully editorialized like a blog or newspaper.

Why not apply this in the opposite direction? Google is allowingforvad things, and therefore shouldn't exist.

The potential for abuse is bad, but only when it's stopping this nonsense? To me, you're endorsing the bad behaviour

this will always remain an incredibly difficult problem to solve. the fact that people mention Google should fix it shows that we like to rely on 1 or 2 large companies who should solve this and it isn't even in our imagination that if the power of Google distributed over 30-50 companies might not create the same issue in the first place.

take this thought further (this is going to suck and most will hate this and I won't blame anyone who does because I've also not completely finished this idea in my own head) ... what if everyone got slandered somewhere online. Or in other words I can't change the way people treat me but I can influence my response to how I react. If everyone is slandered then nobody is slandered because the narrative becomes the Web is shit so you can't anyway trust what people write online.

A lot of the problems would go away if we'd come to the conclusion that what happens online really is just a fake world with people sharing unfinished thoughts (that constantly evolve) rather than everything we publish is like a public statement (because it sometimes even has our real name acting almost like a signature on a contract).

> this will always remain an incredibly difficult problem to solve.

Will it? Google prides itself on solving hard problems.

What if it only costs $10Bn a year to solve it?

You can always solve the current problem.

But this is an arms race with uncountable adversaries who profit from finding new ways to spread. Some will always succeed.

it's true once a business is set up to do this it will want to do things to perpetuate itself, but obviously it only got set up in the first place because it was obvious and easy to do and therefore really cheap, if it was far more difficult to do it would become expensive to do because difficult things must be managed with work which costs money.

In short I am not sure you are correct that there will be uncountable adversaries trying to do this.

"If everyone is slandered then nobody is slandered because the narrative becomes the Web is shit so you can't anyway trust what people write online."

Basically how everyone looks at news / journalism on tv and the net then?

Looking at the 'news feed' on yahoo is not much different than the old enquirer fake news tabloids of the grocery stores in times past.. yet people sometimes cling to "this is the way it is.. I saw it on the web" - even though I think deep down they know they only get half the story / not half the truth.. with any organization online.

So it's entertainment to shame the 'others' and some people take it pretty hard when the 'others' shame their allies.. yep, not hard to imagine at this point sadly.

I long for a browser extension that follows my choice of editors to remove all huffposts and many individual authors / 'journalists' / editors from portals / socials / etc - even then the truth will not be complete and much of what is not true will still entertain/influence/stir up anger, etc.

once we get more deepfakes across the net I think people will finally start to see it for what it is - all one big enquirer trying to get eyeballs and clicks and as just as trustworthy.

Although - some people have started to say things like 'if it wasn't true fbook would remove it - or put a notice on it - and they haven't so it' probably true' - similar with google I guess - ugh.

If google / fb continues to censor, fix and filter - it could have a similar opposite effect. Ok we need a button on google to show unfiltered.

More unfinished thoughts it seems.

-- The issue doesn't seem unsolvable at all. Google can investigate the network of slander websites and reputation management consultants the same way these news reporters did. Use some AI to find per quality site devoted to this stuff. Google already devotes a lot of resources to similar things. Google doesn't have to be certain a site is garbage to delisted it, just get enough red flags.

-- But oppositely, if you had 30 dispersed search sites, it seems likely this stuff would become utterly intractable, an endless game of whack-o-mole. And so it seems like your literally is primarily using kind of garbage reasoning just to take a shot at Google. Not that I like Google or whatever but it's an illustration of a common HN prejudice.

Seems like a search algorithm update is called for.

Very good point about Google. Will they care enough to ever leave their "neutrality" behind?

This reminds me of Yelp asking for tribute or protection payments lest they put all the worst reviews on top and bury the great reviews.

Do you think that Google has being a motherfucking sorcerer as a job qualification? Just sentiment analysis would not be sufficient and epistemological truth detection is beyond what is possible. "Have you resurrected Abraham Lincoln? No? You bastard!" No sane moral system declares not doing the impossible a sin.

Their interests are already aligned against it, no need for farcical allocation of responsibility.

I don't need my search results censored, I'll decide what I want to read.

Let me get this straight: someone posts slanderous lies about another individual in order to defame them and perhaps profit from the defamation; google is exploited to drive the slander to the top of the search results; and you think any attempt to remove the slander would constitute censorship and compromise the purity of the information you have access to? Really?

That is the definition of censorship and it does change the information available. Knowing that someone is being slandered can be informative.

You have to make a choice of what you prefer but the choice you're making is censoring slander or not.

The idea that Google should act as judge of what is slander and what is a true allegation of wrongdoing is what gets up the hackles of anyone who still thinks free speech has value. The parent comment said nothing about the slander being proven such in court, google is simply assumed to know what is slander and what is not.

Which of course it doesn't, a state-of-the-art AI's language comprehension is still extremely rudimentary and would be prone to being gamed by powerful malicious actors even if it were human level.

You are free to choose a search engine that ranks results closest to your values.

I'd rather push back against the idea that a search engine that only ever promised to report popularity be expected to now report accuracy or cease operating.

Exactly. A MSM outlet whose own content is dubious and is no stranger to exercising their own self-entitled "opinions". These opinions could be reasonably construed as slander in a world where an individual could stand up against them in court without going broke.

But let's play along and assume that everybody else's speech is the problem. Citizens don't need MSM fitted, woke muzzles.

The co-opting of internet providers to mete out draconian terms of service that strip the individual of their freedom to express ideas needs to be criminalized.

Your decision is not quite as neutral if all the options you see point in the same general direction.

There is no such thing as "natural" search results, the search results are the result of complex interacting algorithmic logic that Google implements to try to give you "good" results.

When Google for instance penalizes a site for being slow; or for being spammy; or being identified by the algorithm as likely to be disliked by most users, and not be what they are looking for; or for having spyware; or for seeming to use "black hat" SEO with irrelevant keywords...

...are these actions "censorship"? What kinds of shaping of google results are censorship and what kinds aren't?

The results are inherently shaped, they only exist because of algorithms that implement choices, there are no "natural" unshaped results.

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