Google Is Asking for Your Help to Spot Fake News

Megalith

Megalith

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Google is introducing new feedback tools today that are designed to help the company weed out misleading or inaccurate content and improve the quality of their search engine’s results in general. The company was originally criticized for claiming that there is too much content to evaluate, but they have now made their first move, if only to shut complainants up. It seems like this could just be a new avenue for trolling Google’s moderators.

This will help teach Google's search algorithms to automatically weed out hoaxes, and in theory, keep them buried in search results. Google also says its search algorithms have now been trained to demote "low-quality" content based on signals like whether or not the information comes from an "authoritative" page. The user feedback tools will be available for featured snippets, the boxes that appear near the top of search results and attempt to answer your query without you having to click through to a web page. They'll also appear in the window that helps automatically complete what you're typing based on other searches.
 
so basically a like/dislike button that will be used whenever an article comes out saying something negative or revealing about a person that the user worships/supports.

Oh yea, that will not be misused at all.

People don't want truth, they want articles that support what they are arguing about.
 
All these fuckers want is their own brand of centrist approved opinions. No disenting/strong left or right. The You tube shit, now this shit
 
Malcador said:
huh? and what are "authoritative" pages??? what constitutes "high quality" content??? some very dangerous stuff coming from Cal.
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The fact that one of Google's "fact checkers" was Snopes tells you all you need to know. (assuming you know all the BS behind Snopes) Not to mention Politifact and of course FB will use Snopes too if I recall...yeah there's good reason for concern.
 
Maxx said:
The fact that one of Google's "fact checkers" was Snopes tells you all you need to know. (assuming you know all the BS behind Snopes) Not to mention Politifact and of course FB will use Snopes too if I recall...yeah there's good reason for concern.
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Rest assured there are no chemical weapons in Syria. That is a fact.
 
Does anyone else see the major issue with this? Think about it. People making recommendations on what is fake news means just about everything will be labeled fake news. There are many out there who will just mark stuff as fake news out of spite, and many more that will mark stuff as fake news just to increase the chaos factor.

Never ask the general population for anything. All you get is chaos.
 
dgingeri said:
Does anyone else see the major issue with this? Think about it. People making recommendations on what is fake news means just about everything will be labeled fake news. There are many out there who will just mark stuff as fake news out of spite, and many more that will mark stuff as fake news just to increase the chaos factor.

Never ask the general population for anything. All you get is chaos.
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You would think after naming the new flavor of mountain dew incident the internet would have learned that this stuff doesn't work.
 
shansoft said:
BreitBart, InfoWars... these are obvious fake news that some people still believe in...... o_O

Foxnews is also on par with CNN. These news should just be ignored.
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Well now that every "news" agency has been mentioned, what do you recommend. One can only absorb so much npr.
 
We need open public cameras everywhere so we can just watch what is happening for our selves ;)
 
This 'fake' news horsesh!t is getting out of hand.

Not to mention the originator of this trend, who is not the brightest bulb in the room, or most credible individual. Also, worthy of note is that this individual in question has been responsible for many genuine 'fake' news himself.

If you rant about partisan spin to a piece of news, then I'd say you might have a point. The majority of news outlets have been reporting things that clearly have been fabricated, and labelled it as such. I.E. the Pope's endorsement of Trump, the Pizza parlor pedophile ring.

Every time someone whines about fake news, what they really mean is a report of things that doesn't quite peg with their ideological POV.

Those morons who cannot be able to distinguish or label everyhing 'fake news' are rendered intellectually lazy by their unwillingness to rationalize.
 
Does this mean that all of OutBrain can fuck off and die?

That would be grrrrreat.
 
What's more troubling to me is some friends and coworkers, intelligent people, think this is a great idea. The brainwashing is real and deep.

This is an old trick, like all of the news articles that quote "experts" in the field say something is so, so it must be true. Take everything with a grain of salt, withhold judgement until you can verify something actually happened. Watch out for emotionally charged verbage. Critical reading, it's what they taught me in school back in the day...
 
Maxx said:
The fact that one of Google's "fact checkers" was Snopes tells you all you need to know. (assuming you know all the BS behind Snopes) Not to mention Politifact and of course FB will use Snopes too if I recall...yeah there's good reason for concern.
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Yeah, snopes is so blatantly biased, dumb move by the left using them as their authoritative "fact checker". If I were a propagandist, I would make it more subtle ;)
 
dgingeri said:
Does anyone else see the major issue with this? Think about it. People making recommendations on what is fake news means just about everything will be labeled fake news. There are many out there who will just mark stuff as fake news out of spite, and many more that will mark stuff as fake news just to increase the chaos factor.

Never ask the general population for anything. All you get is chaos.
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One would imagine that google is planning on more than just using basic first order input... Any decent machine learning algorithm is going to be able to pretty quickly sort out purely nefarious actors and either discard them or figure out how to use their input constructively. Its all part of the fifth wave of direct input. First wave is basic direct input aka early internet, it was small enough that just a simple table of what's available was enough to find what you needed. Then it became flooded with a layer of crap as more and more people joined in the second way. This led to the search engine, which is basically the third wave. Then you started to have even more complex layers of crap, some of it intentionally designed to be nothing but crap, this is your blatantly false news (aka Pizzagate and assorted other shit), this intentional crap is the 4th wave. The fifth wave is basically another layer on top of the existing infrastructure that sorts away intentional crap through various method of attestation.

Adding in that attestation is all google is trying to do and it is a worthwhile thing. Sure, it will take some time for everything to get trained and the system to stabilize, but it will result in better informational return. Its not like this wasn't exactly unforeseen, 9 years ago the novel Anathem by Neal Stephenson basically laid out how things would go with his example being the reticulum. Others have riffed on it before that as well, after all, this is just basic informational warfare where you try to kill comm channels by jamming them full of crap.
 
Unless you were there and saw it yourself dont believe it, and even then, you cant trust your own perceptions and memories.
 
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The entire situation is such a clusterfuck. You have different layers of fake news:

1. Obviously fake tabloid shit, you have to be stupid or needing some kind of medication to believe this (ex. aliens impregnated my dog)
2. Stuff that has no basis whatsoever, but is a popular narrative with an ideological base, so it gets spread rapidly.
3. Stuff that is fake, but has some doctored "evidence" supporting it that no one investigates properly without some sort of partisan agenda, so the general public honestly can't tell or not if it is fake unless they have access to better information.
4. Stuff that's true only in the absence of relevant information. In other words, reporting half the story to make your point, and completely supressing the other side of it which invalidates your narrative or complicates it to such a degree that it's far from a simple black and white thing.
5. Stuff that is fake, but has a strong incentive by either large corporations, the government, or some other power player for this narrative to be spun this way. This level is essentially sponsored propaganda. Sometimes it's so large it can even receive bipartisan support.

I suspect Google is talking about types #1 and #2 and NOT the rest.

I would love to see as much as possible fact-checked and verified, but I honestly do not know where to look now, I've seen almost every major news organization compromised. I pretty much have to judge anything controversial by looking at the two different sides and see who seems to have the preponderance of the evidence / most sound logic. It's a shitty system, but I don't know what else to do in light of all sides perpetuating bad information to various degrees on various topics. I would love to see journalists or news agencies held accountable when they report something that's clearly and verifiably false also. I imagine most arguments about various sources would be something like "Well my news source is only 65% fabricated, while YOURS is 83% fabricated!"
 
If i had time, i would watch Fox news and MSNBC and assume the truth is smack dab in the middle. However i like to be entertained, so i get my news from john oliver.
 
buttons said:
If i had time, i would watch Fox news and MSNBC and assume the truth is smack dab in the middle.
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See that's the problem, I consider those both corporate media sources. There's plenty of truth NEITHER network will touch, since it's not in the financial interests to do so. But hey, petty partisan stuff, they'll be happy to deliver that all year long.
 
Jim Kim said:
Well now that every "news" agency has been mentioned, what do you recommend. One can only absorb so much npr.
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Most all news had fake news elements mixed into it. Corporate news is no better, and in many ways is worse than state-sponsored news, and corporate news and state-sponsored news makes up the great majority of all news outlets. So, to get a descent picture of what's happening, you pretty much have to subject yourself to mostly-fake news, and read news from 5+ different sources, and then add all the information up. There is no one, two, or even three news sources that together give a reasonably semi-accurate picture, because each news source focuses on different aspects, while playing down, ignoring, or outright hiding other aspects.

Here are 4, from over 20 that I have bookmarked, and tend to look at more than other sources:

Antiwar
Consortium News
RT
Ars Technica

None of those sources are anywhere near complete on their own, and they all have personalities and stuff to watch out for, but I tend to visit those, and some others, with a higher frequency. I tend to avoid (though still read, albeit to a lesser degree) USA and UK MSM, because USA MSM is revoltingly insular against reality and is filled with personality cults, sensationalism, and deliberate propaganda, and I wouldn't ever trust UK news on geo-politics in general because they all just spout the Western / USA gov't cartoon narrative in hardlined lock-step.


aShrubbery! said:
This 'fake' news horsesh!t is getting out of hand.

Not to mention the originator of this trend, who is not the brightest bulb in the room, or most credible individual. Also, worthy of note is that this individual in question has been responsible for many genuine 'fake' news himself.
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From what I understand, the originator of the 'fake news' label was the Democrats and their MSM supporters in the recent USA federal election. Hillary Clinton got the ball rolling by asserting that information supposedly leaked by Russian sources was fake news that people had to be on guard against (though all that information ended up being true), and tried to use the threat of "fake news" to use Russia as a red herring to distract from information from the DNC leaks. But then the usage of the term backfired, and people, rightfully, threw it right back at her and the Democrats' mainstream news supporters, because the term just fit with them. Then, the Democrats and their MSM supporters started a plea that people would stop using the term "fake news", saying that it had gotten out of hand and was being misused, when it what their actual problem with it is that people were calling them the real fake news.
 
Monkey God said:
Unless you were there and saw it yourself dont believe it, and even then, you cant trust your own perceptions and memories.
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\\

That's why I like several hour long livestream recordings. Ferguson, Baltimore riots? There was so much shit that never got a peep from MSM.
 
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