This is the proverbial "other shoe" and its not at all clear who actually is getting hurt.
So the back story is that it is trivial to set up a "fake news" site and slant the crap out of the news and outright lie about what is going on to attract that segment of the population that is more interested in having their views validated than they are in learning anything new. And if you do that and fill it with aggressive ads you can make enough money per month to buy beer easily and sometimes even fund a comfortable lifestyle in a country which has a low cost of living.
So Google is going to stop selling ads to those sites. (good move on their part although it does impact their bottom line slightly) and they are going to stop taking money from those sites which try to buy adwords and make their site appear in the search results for a popular keyword. Also good but somewhat problematic.
This is the problem. Google sells ads on bids, highest bidder gets the best ad spot. Search ads are their cash cow and lifeblood. Hackers and fake news sites compete with each other trying to buy the ads on searches that hapless people do trying to find information about current events. So Google profits both by selling adwords and by the competition all these bad actors are engaged in trying to buy that top slot. Stop selling them adwords or stop allowing them to bid, and Google takes a big hit in topline revenue. How much remains to be seen, but if its a problem I expect fake news to be a hot topic at Searchengineland.
I think Google risks taking a huge hit to its credibility if the most prominent result for a topic is an outright lie. I'd guess that the loss of credibility/constant PR problems would more than offset the revenue.
I think another factor here is likely that when traffic on a fake news site is high enough, it can actually get pushed to the top of Google's organic search results (as happened with completely false popular vote results recently). In that scenario, they've manipulated Google into feeding them massive ad revenue with false information. Given Google's (now dead, I suppose) original intent to classify the world's information and make it easy to find, it's a pretty sad outcome. Glad they're taking action.
You have to respect Google for taking the long view on this –– their revenue may decrease in the short term, but in the long term they will keep the trust of their users. And that is worth a lot more than a relatively few fake news sites.
Are they going to stop ads on the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the other mainstream media sites that suppressed bad news about Clinton, while pushing fake and manipulated news about Trump?
Since you asked..The New York Times completely made up the story about Trump mocking a disabled reporter, to distract from their reporting of his comments about seeing Muslims celebrating in New Jersey [1]. Freeze framed his arms and completely made up the story to match. That's just one of many, many deliberate misdirections and bogus factchecking fails by the MSM in this election. The New York Times even apologised to its readers for its biased coverage.
Trump mocked the reporter, but he didn't mock him for his disability. Trump uses the same mocking motions all the time [1], but The New York Times, decided to freeze the image and write a story to say he was specifically mocking the reporter's disability. Big difference. And it worked, because so many people believe it. But it was a lie plain and simple. That's why so few people trust the media any more.
Y'know what works better than a downvote, or a "refutation"? Actual video that shows that Trump has mocked multiple non-disabled people in exactly the same way. Which means that he did not specifically mock the reporter's disability, and that the NYT story and freeze frame was manufactured to lead gullible and easily-led people to believe that Trump is the kind of guy who mocks the disabled. What a monster! So watch the video and decide what you are going to believe -- your own lying eyes, or the narrative.
This is the comment I had to read in order to finally understand the point you were making. I saw the video of the alleged mocking you are now calling into question, and the one about seeing people in NJ celebrating months ago. For me, hearing him say stop-and-frisk was a good way to police was enough to end my interest.
Some things aren't worth the electrons it takes to refute. As it is, even a downvote generates a request/response, and even that is a questionable use of such minimal resources.
"Oh, come on" will never be a refutation of anything. That phrase, along with "oh, please," "you can't really expect me to believe," and "you can't really believe" doesn't have any place in a reasonable discussion.
Oh come on. I just watched the video again. He says "now the poor guy, you've got to see this guy" and then he starts flailing his hands around and imitating the reporter in a strange voice: "'uh uh uh I don't know what I said ah ah ah I don't remember' he goes like 'I don't remember maybe that's what I said'". I've watched plenty of Trump speeches and have not seen him use hand gestures like that, and I wouldn't associate that gesture with not remembering or hedging on something. I would definitely associate it with a disability like cerebral palsy.
It's definitely not just manufactured by taking a freeze frame. Look at the video.
Unless Ted Cruz is disabled in the same way as the reporter, this video makes a pretty good case for this just being a general Trump depiction of people who can't answer a question.
In the first video, Mr. Trump tucks in his chin, draws back his eyelids, and adopts a "retarded" tone of voice.
In the second video, Mr. Trump just moves his hands around a bit, as you say.
I had not seen the first video until now, and I am unfamiliar with the disabled reporter, but I concluded right away that he was embodying someone with a physical/mental disability -- something like Parkinson's or cerebral palsy.
If he was not, then Donald Trump has only himself to blame, for behaving in a misconstruable manner.
Except that the disabled reporter doesn't behave like Trump's mockery at all. He has no outward shaking or hand waving at all. [1] So the situation is actually worse: The Times not only falsely painted Trump as someone who mocks the disabled, they used a reporter's disability as a prop to attack Trump, AND they took advantage of a stereotype of disabled people to mislead their own readers. You can either accept the evidence that they lied and manipulated the reader, or continue to follow the narrative. Choose wisely.
Depends on your take. Was he re-enacting the disabled reporter? Obviously not. Was he ridiculing him in a mocking caricature? For the audience, who is mostly unexposed to the subject, it seems likely.
Such exaggerated mimicry is a regular occurrence in American secondary schools. I saw his exact performance targeted at the "special" kids, some of whom were quite normal, many times in my youth. If Mr. Trump was raised in America, he would know not to use those kinds of expressions.
> You can either accept the evidence that they lied and manipulated the reader, or continue to follow the narrative. Choose wisely.
No, those are not the only narratives. Here's a third: Donald Trump, regardless of his intentions, briefly acted the part of the fool. The media, acting in their own self-interests, covered the story -- with dramatic embellishment -- which had practically been handed to them. Either way, it's his own damn fault.
This is quite interesting. I actually thought that Trump mocked the disability of the reporter before, but looking at this video it seems like it was unintentional. I don't know why you are being downvoted this much, since it's a valid point.
Fake news is different than shit news. The only fake news from those two outlets is the news supplied by "anonymous administration officials." The hyperbole, loaded language, out of context quotes, and "objective" policy critiques by random think tank shills (usually from the Peterson Foundation) are not fake, they're shit.
Thank god we are finally focusing on this issue. I can not believe we allowed right wing propaganda sites to publish so much false information for so long.
Anyone who denies the existence of this is being dishonest. There is no way you can defend the journalist integrity of the 'breitbart' of the web. It takes 'yellow journalism' to a whole new level.
It has also become obvious to us that the average internet user, has no idea how to vet anything on the web. They lack the simplest ability to recognize the deceiving nature of the URL they are visiting. And we're not just talking about uneducated folks. I've seen plenty of college-educated people share fake news.
This is rotting our democracy.
I am at the point where I feel like technologists and journalists have to work together to establish some sort of browser based credentialing system that we give to content creators to signal that they are a legitimate news source. Like how we SSL validate sites. It maybe as useless as a "certified organic" sticker, but at least it'll be better than nothing.
Thank goodness we can hide away and silence dissenting and right wing voices. It's not like that was a big part of what caused Trump to be elected.
I really am glad that google, facebook & co curate what political things we get shown, that fixes democracy once and for all by making us better informed citizens. /s
EDIT: To those who do not get free speech at all: By silencing people who spread conspiracy theories, you provide them with the first fact that they might be on to something. Because if they weren't on to something, why couldn't you just provide simple facts to contradict and embarrass the conspiracy theorist?
You're being sarcastic, but I'm not sure if people weren't better informed in times where just a few organizations were gatekeepers to information.
It's undemocratic, I know. They still did a better job. Now, people support parties as if they were sports teams. Politics has become mass entertainment and the relationship between quality and success is so low, I'm unsure if we wouldn't be better of selecting congress in a lottery.
Even though I do believe that insane right wing propaganda going unchallenged is an actual problem, I agree with you that it's difficult not to view this with worried skepticism and the expectation of further backlash.
I tend to think there is no real solution to that sort of thing except being regularly exposed to opposing viewpoints. I definitely don't think a government or a private organization should take it upon themselves to decide what is crazy and what is okay.
If the only right-wing voices are lies, maybe they deserve to be silenced?
That's obviously not the case though. There are legitimate right-wing viewpoints, and more people should hear them, but let's not pretend outright lies deserve that same respect.
And as for dissenting voices, that's really not what this is about (at least in theory). I could buy the argument that it's a slippery slope, and that's absolutely something we need to be vigilant about, but Google has reason to value the continued legitimacy of their search results.
It's a complicated issue, but I shed no tears for suppressed lies.
There's plenty of propaganda on both sides. Quite a bit more on the right wing side most likely because it was, until recently, coming from a losing position.
Parent shouldn't have been focusing on "right wing" but neither should you. It's an overarching problem.
I wish there were a way to do this, but even as (what sometimes seems to be) the last defender of traditional newspapers, your proposal makes me uneasy. It just sounds a bit to centralized & authoritarian.
I'm also starting to be skeptical if it could have any impact: all these fact-checking projects have exposed lies for years now, mostly quite competency and convincing. But people just don't care.
Here's an idea I was thinking about: I want to use an ad-blocker for certain really annoying ads, but I do not want to cut off the lifeblood of quality journalism. I'd wish for a blocker that's more permissive, considering both the quality of the ad and the website. (similar to adblock plus, but without the blackmailing).
>to signal that they are a legitimate news source.
Oh good, we can kill off all of the cable news companies. Journalism could do with some of that 2007 disruptive energy from tech companies.
I, at least, can trust Google not to auto-play video/audio and for that, they can be my single source of news from the outside world. Hail Google (and The Intercept).
But seriously, this is going to take time before whatever authority on this subject becomes trusted enough to not abuse these powers. It is "Google" but someone inside of Google is going to decide it, and we deserve to know who unless they are just going to snipe one or two sites per year.
You won't find that info in NYT, WaPo or CNN. You won't find there information about 'Rape Melania' being one of the most trending topics on Twitter in the US either.
Your comment history is filled with nonsense such as "germany doesn't have free speech", "CO2 is not a real pollutant", "coal is safe", "climate science isn't real" and my favourite: There's a conspiracy on HN to downvote you specifically.
I'm not sure how qualified you are in journalistic integrity. You might well be the most qualified on this site to talk about fake news sites though.
And the sentence you yourself quoted is quite obviously missing an "of", given the poster's consistent view points on the issue.
FWIW, I have had (and still have) an open dialogue with any trump supporter that wants it; one of them I even met up with directly from here. Reasonable discussion is fun and productive.
But for similar reasons as why you don't negotiate with terrorists, I'm not going to bother arguing climate science with someone who believes it was designed as a conspiracy to make you vote Hillary or something.
Edit: Besides, inopinatus already expressed what my thoughts were on the "assassination" issue.
It's a shame that you didn't acquaint with them before calling my words 'nonsense'.
> CO2 is not a real pollutant
From Wikipedia: "CO2 is an asphyxiant gas and not classified as toxic or harmful in accordance with Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals standards."
Now it is more a religion than science. Just look on your own emotional reaction to someone who questioned it: you have compared 'an infidel' to a terrorist...
> and my favourite: There's a conspiracy on HN to downvote you specifically.
I most cases I was complaining about submissions of other users which I noticed were disappearing from lists, despite being highly upvoted. So where did you get this 'downvote you specifically' from?
You're likely being downvoted for crude misattribution and faux outrage.
That travel columnist - she writes mostly about train journeys - is a freelancer that is equally syndicated in the Daily Telegraph, which is Britain's most conservative broadsheet, as she is in the left-leaning Guardian.
It took me less than sixty seconds to establish this.
HN's reader population has a pretty good BS radar, and fake outrage based on manipulated facts ranks sky-high on that scale.
It makes it trivial remark from a British national of no apparent affiliation, and therefore entirely uninteresting, except for the faux outrage being displayed as a result.
I'm afraid the article you linked to contains substantial remarks from significant people. As a result it merely reinforces just how inconsequential the tweet is that was originally referenced.
In practice there is both conservative and liberal biased media available. This is why using the term "MSM" pejoratively has become (rather like that ugly acronym "SJW", or ugly nicknames like "drumpf"), the marker of someone who has decided to take sides and now wishes to complain bitterly about the other one.
> I can not believe we allowed right wing propaganda sites to publish so much false information for so long.
Isn't it their right to publish whatever they want? I have certainly been led to believe that's their right. And I support it.
> I am at the point where I feel like technologists and journalists have to work together to establish some sort of browser based credentialing system that we give to content creators to signal that they are a legitimate news source.
We can get permission to write "the news". That'll work well.
How about we worry less about guaranteeing that the source has the right signal, and instead teach our friends and neighbors (IRL, mayhaps?) how to correctly tune in to the sophisticated, cosmopolitan collective consciousness by sifting through the bullshit. I'd imagine that'd be good for anybody participating in such a discussion.
I fully agree with your last paragraph. In "sensible" online communities, we flag, we hellban and we hide too much nowadays, creating filter bubbles for ourselves, and, more dangerously for those who fall for nonsense, and we allow falsehood to fester. Sure, many claims are absurd, but they need to be debunked, decisively and effectively.
I don't hold a candle for Hillary, but when a person I was speaking to insisted that Trump didn't release his tax returns, and neither did Hillary, I knew he was wrong (she had, in fact released her tax returns) but I didn't have the energy to debunk it.
Henceforth, although I won't engage with trolls, I will try to refute blatant falsehoods gleaned from the internet, especially when perpetuated by people I know IRL. People, especially those who are naive and don't understand how easy it is to publish and perpetuate fake stuff online, have the right to make decisions based on facts, and to understand how much junk there is on the internet.
I get a little uncomfortable that a private company with as much power as Google is in the position to try to determine what is a legitimate news source and what is a fake news site.
This issue goes well beyond left vs. right. Leftist fake news may not currently be as prevalent, but the number of anti-vaxxers and vehemently anti-science screeds against "chemicals" shows that there's more than enough fake news blame to go around.
You are right that it is rotting our democracy. Information has become disinformation. People are moving to a "gut" only method of deciding what information to believe.
I don't know if Google is the one to determine this by withdrawing funding from fake-news. I don't know if anyone trusts government enough anymore for them to take on the problem. How do you determine a legitimate journalist?
Thank you for making a more balanced statement than I made. I only mentioned "right wing" because I didn't want to be coy about who I thought was the main offender. Obviously you are correct that it happens else where as well. And your thing about the anti-science folks is spot on. I can't research anything for my baby without hitting some ridiculous "voodoo" type sites.
I was not clear in my OP, but I am not suggesting Google filters that information, because I too think that's wrong.
I am suggesting "certification", which is like labeling what has been approved. You are still free to visit what you want, but you can choose to trust a certification if you want.
> Thank god we are finally focusing on this issue. I can not believe we allowed right wing propaganda sites to publish so much false information for so long.
This goes way beyond right wing propaganda, or left wing propaganda, or any other political position.
I'm finding it increasingly hard to get reasonable information from the web on a variety of non-political topics, too. Diet, nutrition, fitness, health...a cesspool of questionable advice on sites that look like they should know what they are talking about. Do-it-yourself home improvement projects...plenty of sites with contradictory advice, and no apparent way for the non-expert to tell which are giving good advice.
It has also become obvious to us that the average internet user, has no idea how to vet anything on the web.
As someone who's basically grown up with the Internet, from the early pre-web days, this turns out to have been a real surprise. I realized early on that my exposure to the early Internet played a huge role in my developing a nose for falsehoods, bullshit, fallacies, etc. I had thus naively assumed that as it became more common for young people to have this kind of exposure, that this "sense" would become more common. Sadly, this appears to have not been the case even a little bit, at-scale anyways.
Perhaps the Chinese model would be instructive. The government tirelessly scrubs the Internet clean of false or misleading information, all in the interests of their citizens, who honestly cannot be relied on to distinguish truth and falsehood by themselves. Surely with the American system of government such diligence is even more necessary, yes?
> I can not believe we allowed right wing propaganda sites to publish so much false information for so long.
The largest skew of our information within the US is state narrated pro-state skew - not 'left-wing' or 'right-wing' news.
And honestly it's sickening to see such an increase in what's truly rotting our democracy: people stating, in an uncontroversial tone, how we need to shut down free speech for the security of our country.
This tacit allowance on the affront to free speech was and is seen in the rise of authoritarian states around the world.
It's scary to hear such views even on Hacker News.
I think this is one of the good ideas that pave the way to hell. What is fake and what is truth? How is Google going to decide? Couple examples: 1/ Is global warming a huge conspiracy? The president of USA certainly says so. 2/ News: CIA plotted with terrorist to traffic drugs to US - that must be a hoax, right? 3/ News: The US govt secretly spread syphilis among black population - this infowars shit must be surely hoax. 4/ How about US pretending being attacked to start a war? I am talking about Gulf of Tonkin, not 9/11. 5/ The government is reading all your emails and listening to all your phonecalls - bat shit crazy, right?
What I am trying to say is that once such mechanism is in place it can go on a slippery slope from there on. Next thing they will decide to filter fake news search results and that very minute they will be subpoenaed to hide something in the name of state security.
I know there are people who will dismiss it as bias, but you can actually assign a quality score to publications quite easily. NYT/Wall Street Journal/The Atlantic/Guardian/Washington Post/The New Yorker vs. breitbart/HuffPost/....
Note that all those stories you're referencing were all broken by the papers I listed. The breitbarts of the world usually just repackage what actual news organizations publish with ideological slant.
>repackage what actual news organizations publish with ideological slant.
Which is what The Economist does - it's been doing so since 1843. Current circulation is over one million, and it's widely respected, though not by all...
There's a bit of a difference in that the actual facts in the Economist are probably trustworthy, but I agree that they argue from a certain (free-market worshipping) point-of-view.
It's obviously a scale, and opinions will vary widely. It's not even a problem for journalism to have an opinion (I'd actually argue it's impossible). What readers should demand is a good-faith effort to argue the best version of the opposition's case.
At this point, the problem with the US right isn't actually ideology. You can believe that coal is the future, and I'll vote against you, but I'm not looking at CDC statistics to find out when I can expect you to die. It's the complete disregard for the system that's alarming. All over the country, there are polling places, often staffed by the older generation, people from both parties and independents, and the ones I've met always gave me the feeling that they'd defend the integrity of the vote no matter what. I wish I could say the same about the people being elected.
Yes, I thought about adding those, then forgot. They're obviously quality news sources. I know there's a lot of criticism of newspapers using agencies, but not for a lack of quality. (And criticizing their use is also a bit questionable – it's kinda like criticizing programmers for using libraries, and nobody has an idea for a business model that works without them)
tbh, I don't think it's Breitbart/HuffPo's that this is trying to disassociate it from
It's the likes of sites so disreputable they have to pretend to be Breitbart, like the Breitbartt.co site which was one of the sources for Denzel Washington's huge, if true (not true) endorsement of Donald Trump that was among Facebook's top trending stories recently.
The cynic in me suspects this is at least as much about pointing an accusing finger at social media platforms for not getting their house in order as getting Adsense off sites which tend to opt for far more in-your-face and dubious ad networks anyway.
Wasn't it NYT/Guardian/SPIEGEL that released simultaneously? Also note that he chose to work with these organizations, even though he could have easily posted it online/given it to wikileaks.
The Atlantic doesn't deserve to be nearly that high; they're a Vox-tier (sub-HuffPo) advertorial garbage house monentizing out the last gasp of their dead brand's reputation.
To complicate your linear model of news quality, the National Enquirer routinely publishes batshit nonsense ("Rafael Cruz murdered JFK" and "Scalia was assassinated by a hooker", recently) and has also broken several major real stories nobody else would touch.
The Graunaid is even harder to fit on your line; decent-quality and mostly worth reading agitprop from an unapologetically specific slant that rejects objective truth as some sort of bourgeoisie conspiracy. The only thing worse than ignoring them is believing them uncritically.
Bias itself is a bad model; everyone's slanted, not everyone is worth reading.
> What I am trying to say is that once such mechanism is in place it can go on a slippery slope from there on. Next thing they will decide to filter fake news search results and that very minute they will be subpoenaed to hide something in the name of state security.
This thread makes me deeply nervous thinking about tech giants turning into the Ministry Of Truth.
EDIT: As tech professions, do we not appreciate the scale, reach, and leverage technology provides? If we do recognize that, we must realize that with great power comes great responsibility.
That already happened. According to a 2014 survey [1], about 64% of American adults "use" facebook and about 30% of the American adult population get their news from Facebook. Think about that for a moment. Facebook really has an incredible reach.
They're not taking a stand on which news stories are true and which are false. They're targeting sites that exist only to spread false information and make no attempt to be truthful in any story. These aren't news sites that occasionally write sketchy stories. These sites generate exclusively fake "news" content and fraudulently try to pass it off as the real thing.
Maybe someday we'll reach the slippery slope, and it will be harder to tell the real news sites from the fake ones. But at the moment, there are certain sites around the net that are obvious frauds, and it is good that Google is taking steps to reduce their influence.
Are we talking about infowars here? Zero Hedge? The Occupy Wall Street blog? RT and SANA? The National Enquirer? Or are we talking about The Onion?
Do you think that Google will withdraw ads from sites that have partisan takes on news? Do you think that Google with withdraw ads from sites that pull their information from foreign narrative?
Google is an information monopoly that partners with the US military. It already skews its information to the benefit of the United States, where it can. It has every right to do this, as it is a private organization. But this does illustrate the danger of abuse of monopoly power.
Without real insight into the operation Google has yet again passed extremely dangerous authoritarian policies without any transparency.
To that question: can you please give examples of what you think they are going to decide count as fake news websites? Please share a few links. Presumably there are so many this is a such a huge problem it needs Google to attempt to defund it.
Some sites which are contain nothing but blatantly false fake news:
christ wire dot org
daily currant dot com (claims to be a "parody" site, but does not attempt to be funny)
If you use facebook, you have probably seen these and similar sites pop up, shared by people who think they reflect real news. They exist to confuse people and score clicks in the confusion.
I regret using Facebook for many reasons. Really poorly informed politicking and sharing of tabloids unfortunately hasn't been invented or exacerbated by Facebook.
The most onerous and pernicious trading of misinformation I've seen on Facebook has been impressions originating from 'credible' sources: that Putin and Trump are best friends (Hillary Clinton and the DNC), that Saddam Hussein had some connection to 9/11 and also had nuclear weapons (George Bush, the White House Press Secretary and the US mainstream media), that there is no global assassination program, deal with Iran, that the US coalition wasn't supporting ISIS (the Obama Administration), Clinton had a 100% chance of winning this election (every reputable news source), that the South China Sea is about Chinese "aggression" (Obama Administration), there was nothing illegal and nothing interesting in Secretary of State emails and similarly in the DNC leaks (State Department and Clinton Campaign), there was no mass surveillance even indicated by the Snowden Documents (effectively all mainstream American media), the (first) fake US invasion of Fallujah (US military and New York Times), that nothing was happening in Ferguson after the State of Emergency (Federal Aviation), that China's economy was about to fall instead of giving the real news about their entering the special economic basket (HBR, The Economist, BBG + NPR), fake news about the assassination of Qaddafi [and his rape, and the US involvement in continued intentional regime change] (CNN, mainstream news reporting), the whitewashing of the genocide in Bahrain (CNN international), etc.
In higher level education in the United States, they tell history studies students to completely forget everything from their K-12 education, and they start over.
The reason for this is that K-12 history education looks nothing like actual recorded history, and is subject to the need for the state to educate a positive portrait of itself in order to build support among its population base.
The problem with this pernicious bubble of mis- and dis-information affecting even high levels of otherwise erudite conversation is that because it's trusted-by-default source, questioning it (as it is actually prudent to do) is considered 'disruptive' and 'irresponsible' while assuming and parroting establishment narrative as somehow factual, unstrategic or unbiased is considered 'polite' while it at the same time justifies enormous human cost and tragedy.
This pernicious bubble is a much larger problem than silly National Inquirer articles, as it has much greater negative effects and is much, much more populous.
Just want to point out that that definition could reasonably be said to include The Onion. Being a parody site indicates intent to amuse of course, rather than to misinform. But discerning intent programmatically may be even harder than identifying truth.
I'm seeing more websites (that are loaded with ads from different ad networks) posting older legitimate news stories, but as if they were new breaking news stories.
Sorry, but I never got the news that it is now considered a good idea in our Western societies to censor information you do not like for political reasons.
I'm probably a racist homophobe bigot for writing these words and should be put in a correction camp, sorry.
Surely Trump will make our media and government more transparent. That'll show those on the other side of the dichotomy! Now let's start making generalizations about them too!
I hear this often from engineering friends - if you cannot be unbiased, the problem is unsolvable. This gets applied to things like moral dilemmas in law or, like you do here, to news reporting.
Meanwhile, the actual professions of journalism and law have hundreds of years of thought put into how to approach this problem. The courts navigate and make judgement calls every day on provably subjective topics. There's a reason the first thing they teach you in J-school is that there's no such thing as "unbiased".
Hence, I entirely disagree with you, and instead think it's awful that we've allowed the nations largest media institution to pretend to be an "unbiased platform" for this long.
These are spam sites. They're automatically generated, sometimes even using spun text from stories from other spam sites. They are populated with nonsense: one which a friend unwittingly shared with me on Facebook had in its archives:
* A story that the Pope had endorsed Trump
* A story that the Pope had praised Russia's handling of the Ukraine
* A story that the Pope was involved in demonic blood sacrifice rituals.
(always look at the archives! They're great!)
The only thing that makes them interesting is that their goal isn't necessarily to generate money. Presumably, Google will just apply the same approaches it uses to detecting remunerative webspace to political webspam.
I don't like The Daily Caller or Breitbart, but there is no confusing fakenews sites with real ones. I don't think the suggestion here is that Google is going to audit stories on Breitbart.
I'm mostly on the buy side so I'm not sure how much of the dogwhistle comes through, but here's a random article about how Vox is basically a platform for brands to sell products as news:
This is good but I think there's an elephant in the room Google isn't addressing...and I don't know why.
Content origin/ownership.
Say I devote three weeks to researching a topic and then publish a detailed article on my website. A website with more traffic can swipe the entire thing, word for word, even the images, post it on their site and generate traffic on stolen content.
Google desperately needs a way for content authors to be able to register their work and penalize content thieves. This is probably impossible to make work retroactively but that's not a problem.
When it comes to news websites, the same applies. Why do we have the same story from 1,000 different sites? Whoever originates the story should "own it" and get the search traffic. Other sites are just copying. So, if CNN and FOX are just regurgitating stories from Associated Press, why are they even relevant?
I think sensible content ownership controls could clean-up a bunch of the internet and direct traffic to deserving sites. There's almost no incentive to create original content unless you already have so much traffic that you are going to capitalize on it.
I have hundreds of original articles I would like to publish on our sites and don't because I know what will happen. So, we publish articles with much less depth, because it costs money to sit down and devote hours to writing a well-researched piece.
>I have hundreds of original articles I would like to publish on our sites and don't
Wait, you have already sunk the costs to produce this content, but will not because others might profit from it? This doesn't make much sense at all unless I'm missing something here. You might have generated some revenue, but now it's $0?
The content was written and delivered to our customers directly through email. It was not inexpensive to develop and that's why I hesitate to put it online for it to be stolen. We have healthy email lists of our customers and are happy to deliver good content directly into their mailboxes.
Strange to see how Google, a company that once refused to do business in China in order to not have to engage in censorship, now openly seeks to implement censorship in the West.
And a bunch of "liberals" on a hacker news who in all other cases would rail against censorship on the Internet happily supporting censorship on the Internet.
I'm astonished that someone like Sergey Brin would even allow this to happen, considering that his family immigrated from a country that censored information it did not like for the exact same reasons in order to impoverish and control its population.
This is it for me, I'm moving away from all Google services.
This is _exactly_ how the Sowjets justified their own censorship.
It's all falsehoods by ideological degenerates or by Western saboteurs and other collaborators with the enemy and therefore must be censored in order to protect society.
Imagine the difference if it had been titled: "Google has agreed that it will stop serving ads to Chinese sites which are unfriendly to President Li's conception of Chinese culture and values."
Google is a private company that can choose how to make money. If it chooses to not show advertising on any particular category of site, that's a commercial decision. If its shareholders or customers are upset they can unseat the board or find another provider respectively (as you wish to do). A competitor may even see a commercial opportunity and make a business model based off carrying ads on fake news sites-Google doesn't do ads on porn sites, and yet those sites seem to be doing OK on ad revenue.
>"Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher's content, or the primary purpose of the web property,"
That sounds terrible. Does that mean if I'm ICANN registered with my host's "don't spam me bro" protections, that my blogs can be ad supported?
117 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadSo the back story is that it is trivial to set up a "fake news" site and slant the crap out of the news and outright lie about what is going on to attract that segment of the population that is more interested in having their views validated than they are in learning anything new. And if you do that and fill it with aggressive ads you can make enough money per month to buy beer easily and sometimes even fund a comfortable lifestyle in a country which has a low cost of living.
So Google is going to stop selling ads to those sites. (good move on their part although it does impact their bottom line slightly) and they are going to stop taking money from those sites which try to buy adwords and make their site appear in the search results for a popular keyword. Also good but somewhat problematic.
This is the problem. Google sells ads on bids, highest bidder gets the best ad spot. Search ads are their cash cow and lifeblood. Hackers and fake news sites compete with each other trying to buy the ads on searches that hapless people do trying to find information about current events. So Google profits both by selling adwords and by the competition all these bad actors are engaged in trying to buy that top slot. Stop selling them adwords or stop allowing them to bid, and Google takes a big hit in topline revenue. How much remains to be seen, but if its a problem I expect fake news to be a hot topic at Searchengineland.
Link please.
Because remember folks, not even your President-elect factchecks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9IEIP3k_8c
[1]https://medium.com/@sparkzilla/trump-and-the-battle-of-the-t...
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiUizn19p7o
There is video (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34930042) and it was very widely reported by both conservative and liberal media.
It's definitely not just manufactured by taking a freeze frame. Look at the video.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/08/...
In the second video, Mr. Trump just moves his hands around a bit, as you say.
I had not seen the first video until now, and I am unfamiliar with the disabled reporter, but I concluded right away that he was embodying someone with a physical/mental disability -- something like Parkinson's or cerebral palsy.
If he was not, then Donald Trump has only himself to blame, for behaving in a misconstruable manner.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baUuXQ443fA
Such exaggerated mimicry is a regular occurrence in American secondary schools. I saw his exact performance targeted at the "special" kids, some of whom were quite normal, many times in my youth. If Mr. Trump was raised in America, he would know not to use those kinds of expressions.
> You can either accept the evidence that they lied and manipulated the reader, or continue to follow the narrative. Choose wisely.
No, those are not the only narratives. Here's a third: Donald Trump, regardless of his intentions, briefly acted the part of the fool. The media, acting in their own self-interests, covered the story -- with dramatic embellishment -- which had practically been handed to them. Either way, it's his own damn fault.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-...
Anyone who denies the existence of this is being dishonest. There is no way you can defend the journalist integrity of the 'breitbart' of the web. It takes 'yellow journalism' to a whole new level.
It has also become obvious to us that the average internet user, has no idea how to vet anything on the web. They lack the simplest ability to recognize the deceiving nature of the URL they are visiting. And we're not just talking about uneducated folks. I've seen plenty of college-educated people share fake news.
This is rotting our democracy.
I am at the point where I feel like technologists and journalists have to work together to establish some sort of browser based credentialing system that we give to content creators to signal that they are a legitimate news source. Like how we SSL validate sites. It maybe as useless as a "certified organic" sticker, but at least it'll be better than nothing.
I really am glad that google, facebook & co curate what political things we get shown, that fixes democracy once and for all by making us better informed citizens. /s
EDIT: To those who do not get free speech at all: By silencing people who spread conspiracy theories, you provide them with the first fact that they might be on to something. Because if they weren't on to something, why couldn't you just provide simple facts to contradict and embarrass the conspiracy theorist?
It's undemocratic, I know. They still did a better job. Now, people support parties as if they were sports teams. Politics has become mass entertainment and the relationship between quality and success is so low, I'm unsure if we wouldn't be better of selecting congress in a lottery.
I tend to think there is no real solution to that sort of thing except being regularly exposed to opposing viewpoints. I definitely don't think a government or a private organization should take it upon themselves to decide what is crazy and what is okay.
If the only right-wing voices are lies, maybe they deserve to be silenced?
That's obviously not the case though. There are legitimate right-wing viewpoints, and more people should hear them, but let's not pretend outright lies deserve that same respect.
And as for dissenting voices, that's really not what this is about (at least in theory). I could buy the argument that it's a slippery slope, and that's absolutely something we need to be vigilant about, but Google has reason to value the continued legitimacy of their search results.
It's a complicated issue, but I shed no tears for suppressed lies.
Parent shouldn't have been focusing on "right wing" but neither should you. It's an overarching problem.
I'm also starting to be skeptical if it could have any impact: all these fact-checking projects have exposed lies for years now, mostly quite competency and convincing. But people just don't care.
Here's an idea I was thinking about: I want to use an ad-blocker for certain really annoying ads, but I do not want to cut off the lifeblood of quality journalism. I'd wish for a blocker that's more permissive, considering both the quality of the ad and the website. (similar to adblock plus, but without the blackmailing).
It is kinda hopeless when things are constantly debunked and people still believe it.
I guess I don't really know what a solution would look like then. But I definitely think there has to be a solution.
Oh good, we can kill off all of the cable news companies. Journalism could do with some of that 2007 disruptive energy from tech companies.
I, at least, can trust Google not to auto-play video/audio and for that, they can be my single source of news from the outside world. Hail Google (and The Intercept).
But seriously, this is going to take time before whatever authority on this subject becomes trusted enough to not abuse these powers. It is "Google" but someone inside of Google is going to decide it, and we deserve to know who unless they are just going to snipe one or two sites per year.
So far, Breitbart is the only one US big news website which published information that a Guardian columnist called for the assassination of Trump.
https://archive.is/iJYaJ#78%
https://www.google.pl/search?q=Rajesh+guardian+assassinate+t...
You won't find that info in NYT, WaPo or CNN. You won't find there information about 'Rape Melania' being one of the most trending topics on Twitter in the US either.
https://twitter.com/BobbyDellBSC/status/797865706897313792/p...
So it can be said exactly the same about them what you said about Breitbart: There is no way you can defend the journalist integrity of the MSM.
I'm not sure how qualified you are in journalistic integrity. You might well be the most qualified on this site to talk about fake news sites though.
Seriously.
You have misquoted him: "CO2 is not a real pollutant" --> "[...]It's high time to start fighting with real pollutants instead CO2"
here's the one about Coal safety... i guess? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12927586
but whatever it is, you're not arguing your point. you're attacking the person who's trying to share their views with you.
please take your responsibility to maintain an open dialogue seriously.
"The only thing which can't be controlled is CO2. But this is not a pollutant." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12927586
"Maybe this will help to shift the focus to real pollutants, which actually harm human health, instead of CO2." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12915575
And the sentence you yourself quoted is quite obviously missing an "of", given the poster's consistent view points on the issue.
FWIW, I have had (and still have) an open dialogue with any trump supporter that wants it; one of them I even met up with directly from here. Reasonable discussion is fun and productive.
But for similar reasons as why you don't negotiate with terrorists, I'm not going to bother arguing climate science with someone who believes it was designed as a conspiracy to make you vote Hillary or something.
Edit: Besides, inopinatus already expressed what my thoughts were on the "assassination" issue.
Those who replied in that thread provided plenty enough examples confirming that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12953645
It's a shame that you didn't acquaint with them before calling my words 'nonsense'.
> CO2 is not a real pollutant
From Wikipedia: "CO2 is an asphyxiant gas and not classified as toxic or harmful in accordance with Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals standards."
> coal is safe
If burned in modern plants, it is safe.
https://friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FoS_BurningQue...
> climate science isn't real
Now it is more a religion than science. Just look on your own emotional reaction to someone who questioned it: you have compared 'an infidel' to a terrorist...
> and my favourite: There's a conspiracy on HN to downvote you specifically.
I most cases I was complaining about submissions of other users which I noticed were disappearing from lists, despite being highly upvoted. So where did you get this 'downvote you specifically' from?
How can you possibly argue against these two?
It took me less than sixty seconds to establish this.
HN's reader population has a pretty good BS radar, and fake outrage based on manipulated facts ranks sky-high on that scale.
But what difference does it make?
Does it make her tweet fake?
Similar situations happened against Obama and they were reported by MSM: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-demonizing-of-ba...
Do you really not see the lack of symmetry in media attitude?
In practice there is both conservative and liberal biased media available. This is why using the term "MSM" pejoratively has become (rather like that ugly acronym "SJW", or ugly nicknames like "drumpf"), the marker of someone who has decided to take sides and now wishes to complain bitterly about the other one.
Isn't it their right to publish whatever they want? I have certainly been led to believe that's their right. And I support it.
> I am at the point where I feel like technologists and journalists have to work together to establish some sort of browser based credentialing system that we give to content creators to signal that they are a legitimate news source.
We can get permission to write "the news". That'll work well.
How about we worry less about guaranteeing that the source has the right signal, and instead teach our friends and neighbors (IRL, mayhaps?) how to correctly tune in to the sophisticated, cosmopolitan collective consciousness by sifting through the bullshit. I'd imagine that'd be good for anybody participating in such a discussion.
I don't hold a candle for Hillary, but when a person I was speaking to insisted that Trump didn't release his tax returns, and neither did Hillary, I knew he was wrong (she had, in fact released her tax returns) but I didn't have the energy to debunk it.
Henceforth, although I won't engage with trolls, I will try to refute blatant falsehoods gleaned from the internet, especially when perpetuated by people I know IRL. People, especially those who are naive and don't understand how easy it is to publish and perpetuate fake stuff online, have the right to make decisions based on facts, and to understand how much junk there is on the internet.
This issue goes well beyond left vs. right. Leftist fake news may not currently be as prevalent, but the number of anti-vaxxers and vehemently anti-science screeds against "chemicals" shows that there's more than enough fake news blame to go around.
You are right that it is rotting our democracy. Information has become disinformation. People are moving to a "gut" only method of deciding what information to believe.
I don't know if Google is the one to determine this by withdrawing funding from fake-news. I don't know if anyone trusts government enough anymore for them to take on the problem. How do you determine a legitimate journalist?
I was not clear in my OP, but I am not suggesting Google filters that information, because I too think that's wrong.
I am suggesting "certification", which is like labeling what has been approved. You are still free to visit what you want, but you can choose to trust a certification if you want.
This goes way beyond right wing propaganda, or left wing propaganda, or any other political position.
I'm finding it increasingly hard to get reasonable information from the web on a variety of non-political topics, too. Diet, nutrition, fitness, health...a cesspool of questionable advice on sites that look like they should know what they are talking about. Do-it-yourself home improvement projects...plenty of sites with contradictory advice, and no apparent way for the non-expert to tell which are giving good advice.
As someone who's basically grown up with the Internet, from the early pre-web days, this turns out to have been a real surprise. I realized early on that my exposure to the early Internet played a huge role in my developing a nose for falsehoods, bullshit, fallacies, etc. I had thus naively assumed that as it became more common for young people to have this kind of exposure, that this "sense" would become more common. Sadly, this appears to have not been the case even a little bit, at-scale anyways.
> I can not believe we allowed right wing propaganda sites to publish so much false information for so long.
Who is "we"?
And honestly it's sickening to see such an increase in what's truly rotting our democracy: people stating, in an uncontroversial tone, how we need to shut down free speech for the security of our country.
This tacit allowance on the affront to free speech was and is seen in the rise of authoritarian states around the world.
It's scary to hear such views even on Hacker News.
What I am trying to say is that once such mechanism is in place it can go on a slippery slope from there on. Next thing they will decide to filter fake news search results and that very minute they will be subpoenaed to hide something in the name of state security.
Note that all those stories you're referencing were all broken by the papers I listed. The breitbarts of the world usually just repackage what actual news organizations publish with ideological slant.
Which is what The Economist does - it's been doing so since 1843. Current circulation is over one million, and it's widely respected, though not by all...
It's obviously a scale, and opinions will vary widely. It's not even a problem for journalism to have an opinion (I'd actually argue it's impossible). What readers should demand is a good-faith effort to argue the best version of the opposition's case.
At this point, the problem with the US right isn't actually ideology. You can believe that coal is the future, and I'll vote against you, but I'm not looking at CDC statistics to find out when I can expect you to die. It's the complete disregard for the system that's alarming. All over the country, there are polling places, often staffed by the older generation, people from both parties and independents, and the ones I've met always gave me the feeling that they'd defend the integrity of the vote no matter what. I wish I could say the same about the people being elected.
It's the likes of sites so disreputable they have to pretend to be Breitbart, like the Breitbartt.co site which was one of the sources for Denzel Washington's huge, if true (not true) endorsement of Donald Trump that was among Facebook's top trending stories recently.
The cynic in me suspects this is at least as much about pointing an accusing finger at social media platforms for not getting their house in order as getting Adsense off sites which tend to opt for far more in-your-face and dubious ad networks anyway.
To complicate your linear model of news quality, the National Enquirer routinely publishes batshit nonsense ("Rafael Cruz murdered JFK" and "Scalia was assassinated by a hooker", recently) and has also broken several major real stories nobody else would touch.
The Graunaid is even harder to fit on your line; decent-quality and mostly worth reading agitprop from an unapologetically specific slant that rejects objective truth as some sort of bourgeoisie conspiracy. The only thing worse than ignoring them is believing them uncritically.
Bias itself is a bad model; everyone's slanted, not everyone is worth reading.
This thread makes me deeply nervous thinking about tech giants turning into the Ministry Of Truth.
EDIT: As tech professions, do we not appreciate the scale, reach, and leverage technology provides? If we do recognize that, we must realize that with great power comes great responsibility.
That already happened. According to a 2014 survey [1], about 64% of American adults "use" facebook and about 30% of the American adult population get their news from Facebook. Think about that for a moment. Facebook really has an incredible reach.
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-social-m...
Clickfarm like other 9 out of 10 news websites
Well, I wish Googlers luck. Clickfarmers, botters, and runners of industrialised clickbait networks will always be a step ahead of them.
Whitehat anti-botting people are a mirror image of people who develop and sell "anti-virus" software.
Not only they have a profit motive to do their shıtty job poorly, they are simply not in the same class intellectually
Maybe someday we'll reach the slippery slope, and it will be harder to tell the real news sites from the fake ones. But at the moment, there are certain sites around the net that are obvious frauds, and it is good that Google is taking steps to reduce their influence.
Are we talking about infowars here? Zero Hedge? The Occupy Wall Street blog? RT and SANA? The National Enquirer? Or are we talking about The Onion?
Do you think that Google will withdraw ads from sites that have partisan takes on news? Do you think that Google with withdraw ads from sites that pull their information from foreign narrative?
Google is an information monopoly that partners with the US military. It already skews its information to the benefit of the United States, where it can. It has every right to do this, as it is a private organization. But this does illustrate the danger of abuse of monopoly power.
Without real insight into the operation Google has yet again passed extremely dangerous authoritarian policies without any transparency.
To that question: can you please give examples of what you think they are going to decide count as fake news websites? Please share a few links. Presumably there are so many this is a such a huge problem it needs Google to attempt to defund it.
If you use facebook, you have probably seen these and similar sites pop up, shared by people who think they reflect real news. They exist to confuse people and score clicks in the confusion.
It absolutely is parody.
I regret using Facebook for many reasons. Really poorly informed politicking and sharing of tabloids unfortunately hasn't been invented or exacerbated by Facebook.
The most onerous and pernicious trading of misinformation I've seen on Facebook has been impressions originating from 'credible' sources: that Putin and Trump are best friends (Hillary Clinton and the DNC), that Saddam Hussein had some connection to 9/11 and also had nuclear weapons (George Bush, the White House Press Secretary and the US mainstream media), that there is no global assassination program, deal with Iran, that the US coalition wasn't supporting ISIS (the Obama Administration), Clinton had a 100% chance of winning this election (every reputable news source), that the South China Sea is about Chinese "aggression" (Obama Administration), there was nothing illegal and nothing interesting in Secretary of State emails and similarly in the DNC leaks (State Department and Clinton Campaign), there was no mass surveillance even indicated by the Snowden Documents (effectively all mainstream American media), the (first) fake US invasion of Fallujah (US military and New York Times), that nothing was happening in Ferguson after the State of Emergency (Federal Aviation), that China's economy was about to fall instead of giving the real news about their entering the special economic basket (HBR, The Economist, BBG + NPR), fake news about the assassination of Qaddafi [and his rape, and the US involvement in continued intentional regime change] (CNN, mainstream news reporting), the whitewashing of the genocide in Bahrain (CNN international), etc.
In higher level education in the United States, they tell history studies students to completely forget everything from their K-12 education, and they start over.
The reason for this is that K-12 history education looks nothing like actual recorded history, and is subject to the need for the state to educate a positive portrait of itself in order to build support among its population base.
The problem with this pernicious bubble of mis- and dis-information affecting even high levels of otherwise erudite conversation is that because it's trusted-by-default source, questioning it (as it is actually prudent to do) is considered 'disruptive' and 'irresponsible' while assuming and parroting establishment narrative as somehow factual, unstrategic or unbiased is considered 'polite' while it at the same time justifies enormous human cost and tragedy.
This pernicious bubble is a much larger problem than silly National Inquirer articles, as it has much greater negative effects and is much, much more populous.
I worry that'll be harder to curb.
I'm probably a racist homophobe bigot for writing these words and should be put in a correction camp, sorry.
Meanwhile, the actual professions of journalism and law have hundreds of years of thought put into how to approach this problem. The courts navigate and make judgement calls every day on provably subjective topics. There's a reason the first thing they teach you in J-school is that there's no such thing as "unbiased".
Hence, I entirely disagree with you, and instead think it's awful that we've allowed the nations largest media institution to pretend to be an "unbiased platform" for this long.
* A story that the Pope had endorsed Trump
* A story that the Pope had praised Russia's handling of the Ukraine
* A story that the Pope was involved in demonic blood sacrifice rituals.
(always look at the archives! They're great!)
The only thing that makes them interesting is that their goal isn't necessarily to generate money. Presumably, Google will just apply the same approaches it uses to detecting remunerative webspace to political webspam.
I don't like The Daily Caller or Breitbart, but there is no confusing fakenews sites with real ones. I don't think the suggestion here is that Google is going to audit stories on Breitbart.
http://digiday.com/publishers/flush-cash-vox-media-seeks-tec...
Obviously they can't be too blatant about it but Vox promoting any position you pay them to is literally their business model.
I assume they don't tell their writers this but the softball neoliberalism that they pitch by default is brand-safe enough that nobody'd notice.
Content origin/ownership.
Say I devote three weeks to researching a topic and then publish a detailed article on my website. A website with more traffic can swipe the entire thing, word for word, even the images, post it on their site and generate traffic on stolen content.
Google desperately needs a way for content authors to be able to register their work and penalize content thieves. This is probably impossible to make work retroactively but that's not a problem.
When it comes to news websites, the same applies. Why do we have the same story from 1,000 different sites? Whoever originates the story should "own it" and get the search traffic. Other sites are just copying. So, if CNN and FOX are just regurgitating stories from Associated Press, why are they even relevant?
I think sensible content ownership controls could clean-up a bunch of the internet and direct traffic to deserving sites. There's almost no incentive to create original content unless you already have so much traffic that you are going to capitalize on it.
I have hundreds of original articles I would like to publish on our sites and don't because I know what will happen. So, we publish articles with much less depth, because it costs money to sit down and devote hours to writing a well-researched piece.
Wait, you have already sunk the costs to produce this content, but will not because others might profit from it? This doesn't make much sense at all unless I'm missing something here. You might have generated some revenue, but now it's $0?
And a bunch of "liberals" on a hacker news who in all other cases would rail against censorship on the Internet happily supporting censorship on the Internet.
I'm astonished that someone like Sergey Brin would even allow this to happen, considering that his family immigrated from a country that censored information it did not like for the exact same reasons in order to impoverish and control its population.
This is it for me, I'm moving away from all Google services.
It's all falsehoods by ideological degenerates or by Western saboteurs and other collaborators with the enemy and therefore must be censored in order to protect society.
There are just too many people who can't seem to accept democracy or liberty if it doesn't go their way.
That sounds terrible. Does that mean if I'm ICANN registered with my host's "don't spam me bro" protections, that my blogs can be ad supported?