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Comment by RafelMri | Hacker News Reader

8 pointsRafelMri26 comments

I feel like there is a crusade on thought right now where some people don’t trust others to view and see certain (dis)information and find it unacceptable that there remains a portion of the population that has undesirable opinions. What remains unacceptable and undesirable vary from person to person… obviously.

Ethically I agree with this but I also think it’s really dangerous because it’s crossing the limit where a "neutral" (technically) search engine starts to make editorial choices.

I have nothing against editorial content but it comes with the legal (and moral) responsibility of what you show. So I’m not certain it’s worth the censoring. It’s not like censoring result will change anything on the people’s mind about the event. But maybe I’m wrong on this.

I mostly agree, though to me this highlights how much already a search engine decided what you can and cannot see. This is just a more controversial aspect of it.

Its not open, if you open the box of pandora just a little...

It is similar to the other person that did an 'rm -fr' in the software package, if the geolocation was Russia.

His name is Eric Ciaramella. Can you see what I did here?

The Big Brother^W Tech has already been weaponized, first in an internal American setting, now in a total (hopefully not thermonuclear) war. This won't stop until tactics on both sides are more or less indistinguishable.

Fact checkers have been proven wrong over and over again throughout the past few years. You need VERY intelligent people to check facts but there are too many corruptible, educated idiots posing as intelligent people... Also, there aren't enough truly smart people in positions of power to be able to select smart people to do fact-checking. The elites are just not smart enough. You can see how society is falling apart because of it.

Our problem is that reality is more like in Planet of the Apes than Idiocracy; the big angry monkey lord cannot surround himself with smart individuals because he himself is not smart enough to identify and select them (cannot separate idiots from geniuses). He will surround himself with idiots because he can't tell the difference; the idiots are more similar to himself so he will choose them because of his ego. It's also like in the film Amadeus; the king is not very talented in music so he is unable to understand that Mozart is a musical genius, instead, he repeatedly promotes Salieri who is closer to his own skill level.

In Idiocracy, the president is an idiot but he knows how to identify smart people by relying on an IQ test. It doesn't work like that in reality. IQ is not reliable for identifying critical thinking, also, almost nobody uses it for recruitment purposes anyway.

It's the job a search engine to filter the good from the bad. The poll question specifically asks about "disinformation". The definition of disinformation is that it is both incorrect and developed with the intent to deceive. Of course I don't want to see that in my search results for anything I search for. I don't want to see it about politics, or product reviews, medical issues, health and fitness, or financial information. Disinformation is bad and I don't want it.

Many people are talking about 'how do they determine the difference between information and disinformation'. That's a good question, though it isn't the one being asked in the poll. How do they down-rank other scammy content? Don't slipperly slope arguments apply there too?

The difference is the political nature of the process. When a search engine filters out faceboook.com from the results, I don't question the political motive of the company. When the same company decides for me that I don't need to see websites with information on politically polarized topics, I have a problem with it.

"websites with information on politically polarized topics" is not the equivalent of "websites with disinformation". The former is fine the latter is not. For example, if I'm searching about vaccine information, which can be a polarizing topic, I don't want to be shown articles about how the vaccine has nanochips so that Bill Gates and George Soros can track you. Because that's blatant disinformation that should be filtered out by a good search engine.

The problems of distinguishing real information from disinformation in real time is difficult, made even more difficult when the stakes are high, like an active war. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, or that because there is no perfect method that no method should be used. Disinformation should be fought not embraced.

Assuming it is actually possible to identify "disinformation", why not down-rank all disinformation?

As another commenter said it is not possible to reliably identify disinformation. They are not inspecting the content and applying some kind of advanced NLP to classify it, they are just tagging as disinformation anything coming from Russia-based sources.

Yes, that's my point. Either it's possible to detect, then there's no reason to target specifically Russian disinformation. Or it's not, and then it's just a matter of blocking all Russian information, not disinformation.

Because it isn't easily possible to identify all disinformation. Some of it is obvious - e.g. government-controlled Russian media, some of it much less so.

Does that apply to all state media, like the BBC, or only Russian?

What might be interesting is an opt-in system where the user can select 'trusted' news observers who place a Figure Of Merit in stories.

In an ideal world, one would get news sorted in a preferred way.

Whether or not the objective signal-to-noise ratio improves is a 'maybe'.

Skip the "Russian" bit, down rank _all_ sites associated with disinformation.

Can you expand on how you would define disinformation if it were your job to down rank sites associated with disinformation?

It's of course impossible to do that, which is why it's a bad idea to pretend you can.

It is a slippery slope and I honestly haven’t formed my opinions fully on this. I tend to believe that if there are state run actions like botting or state funded journalism, that private companies that want to uphold ‘free speech’ ideals can work to down-rank or counteract those actions.

If private citizens or journalists are repeating ‘disinformation’ I would think it should remain untouched.

How do you distinguish “private citizens” spreading propaganda because they believe it, “useful idiots” parroting it without any thought and outright state troll farms?

Not at all my area of expertise but I imagine troll farms can have some obvious behaviors (mass copypasta patterns across a shared pool of ips etc) that can be effectively prevented. Less obvious behaviors are also potentially less massive and less effective.

I've switched to Qwant over this. I wonder what other "disinformation" they may have been silently down-ranking now, and for how long...

They made their call earlier than Duck [0]. Both probably had to follow Microsoft policy who wrote this including mention of Bing, interestingly a day before EU sanctions [1].

[0] https://twitter.com/QwantCom/status/1498755728877801472 [1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2022/02/28/ukraine...

Obviously disagree considering a lot of "misinformation" become truth after few months during pandemic and I can see now during Ukraine war "misinformation" becoming truth after hours (Ghost of Kiew, Snake island zombie hero soldiers, Mariupol drama theater 1000 dead KIDS, etc.), so I don't want any filter from search engine, because already filtered MSM are failing me.

Also if you ban RT, then also DW should be banned, there is no difference between these two gov funded sites.

I've switched to Yandex over this (using it as a home page since it looks like the search extension was removed) and am looking at Alexandria. One thing I've noticed is that Yandex video search is actually pretty good.

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