Thus, I reject this argument unless Google is willing to argue its search result ranking is no better than random chance and that results on the first page are equally as relevant and useful as those on the last.
IMO, how Google presents data to users is largely worthless in 2023 unless you are utilizing special operators like quotation marks and minuses. Even then, it's really how the user is choosing to filter through that data.
I don't have any such expectation. Why do you have such an expectation?
Google is not magic. It is impossible to divine objective reality from counting links.
> We expect them to, when googling stuff about someone, not rank a random tweet alongside a nyt article, right?
If a random everyday Joe had a New York Times article written about them, I'd expect that to rank at, or very near, the top.
However, most people not only don't have an NYT article written about them, most have almost nothing about them online other than some standard social media or random data brokers content. So it seems likely that some unique content about a random Joe should probably rank highly because there's no real competition. That doesn't imply its true.
This isn't the New York Times where there may be some link authority, or may Allah forgive me for even uttering these haram words, Buzzfeed News.
Where should that random trash-talking rank? Doesn't it seem more relevant than a lot of the random links about random people from random data brokers online? Should random unsourced trash talk about some random person rank closer to the first page or closer to the last page? To me, it seems notable and should be close to the top.
And I think one improvement (that will never happen) is that Google should be telling people some polite version of "Literally everything you read on the Internet should be considered bullshit until verified".
I know that "Bob says Joe is a pedophile" and "Joe says that he is not a pedophile". It is factually true for you to continue to say that "Bob says that Joe is a pedophile", but if that's ALL that your saying, then morally you're lying by omission.
It is of course an interesting question of how to boil this situation down to the reality of how a search engine works and displays results, but the general point stands that your presented situation isn't really representative of the ruling.
Oh, also in this specific case the claim wasn't that Joe is a pedophile, it's that Joe was a convicted pedophile, which if you want to poke at the morality of, would push Google into a even more precarious position, since that's harder fact. If Joe brings proof that he was never a convicted pedophile, then you repeating that "Bob says that Joe is a convicted pedophile" with no qualifiers is barely distinguishable from saying "Joe is a pedophile" from a moral standpoint.
"I know that guy Bob over there says Joe is a pedophile."
They won't.
I'm distressed further by other threads that begin to point this out being derailed with comments like "America should to keep to its own borders" and unrelated factoids about oil wars. This is not just an American precedent.
"The man, who is now in his early 70s, told the court that he believes potential clients have backed out of deals because they saw the post, adding that his career, which had previously been marked by success, began to spiral.
Two friends testified they refused to use their influence to help him find jobs because they worried the post would make those efforts fruitless.
His personal relationships also suffered, including those with his two sons, the ruling said.
One son testified that his girlfriend’s parents declined to meet his father because of the defamatory internet posts. The son said that after he experienced high-profile success, people would tell him they searched his name on Google and asked him about the post involving his father."
Using the word "care" here is a particularly interesting word choice to me. The real problem is not the fact that wrong statements exist online that's a problem, it's the fact that people care or believe them that's the real problem. So how do we get people to care less?
I look at your post, and see a goal-oriented rather than a system-oriented approach. You see an injustice happening, and want to put a law in place to stamp it out. That's all well and good, but what about looking at the problem on a systemic level? What if the very acts you want to put in place to help people (strong anti-defamation protection) makes the problem you want to work against even worse?
My theory that I've been running with for years is that the existence of strong anti-defamation laws psychologically makes people think something like this whenever they see something crazy online: "This wild claim probably has to be true because it's online or the person who posted it would have their pants sued off otherwise." The stronger the anti-defamation laws that exist, the worse this psychological problem of believing nonsense online gets. IMO, the mere existence of strong anti-defamation protection makes masses of people shut their brain off and believe almost anything dumb online.
Personally speaking, I strongly believe we should consider the opposite, systemic approach. Let's conduct a thought-experiment. How would truth and defamation work in a society with non-existent or very weak anti-defamation laws? Would wild claims be made online daily? Of course. But who would believe any wild nonsense they saw online without verifying it if anti-defamation laws were very weak, or didn't exist?