Will they also be teaching how to spot media manipulation by omission? Comparing the attention given to the killing of Trayvon Martin[1], vs. almost completely ignoring the rape of over 1400 girls by organized British-Pakistani men in Rotherham[2], this seems to be even more dire than completely fabricated fake news: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=trayvon,...
Edit: Criticism has been raised that it's not fair to compare the two events, since one is of US scope, and the other isn't. Ignoring for the moment that the google trends counts global search, here's a comparison of the trends of the two topics, Trayvon and the Rotherham scandal, solely for Great Britain:
I added a few keywords to the scandal, otherwise the trend is dominated by I think football news. Even within the UK, the local story about the organized rape of 1400 girls trended far less than the killing of Trayvon.
It's the same story from the MSM every time. Don't risk being perceived as racist at any cost, because racism is soooo uncool.
Even if that cost is the rape and torture of 1400 little girls.
And people wonder why the right is on the rise across the world.
Why exactly did you choose two arbitrary news stories, to prove what? Some news stories resonate more than others?
Trayvon Martin Case was more about the bigger topic of racial profiling than about the case itself, an already highly politicized social issue in the US which condensed on that case.
The Rotherham scandal was to all current knowledge an event of singular magnitude of local non-US scope, with no bigger topic to resonate against other than xenophobia.
'Resonate'. That's a nice way of putting some stories are more reported than others.
> The Rotherham scandal was to all current knowledge a singular event of local non-US scope, with no bigger topic to resonate against other than xenophobia.
I didn't limit Google trends to the US, so I don't see why non-US scope is relevant. But are you're saying that the Rotherham scandal was reported on less because it resonates with xenophobia? That journalists suppress stories if they promote the wrong ideology?
Also, 'singular event'? Forgetting for the moment that it was at least 1400 events over a period of 16 years, did you bother to scroll to the bottom of the Rotherham scandal wikipedia page, and click on the link that leads to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexual_abuses_perpetra... ?
Just because you news events don't happen to get picked up according exactly to your priorities doesn't mean there is a hidden agenda.
There tons of stories that are underreported in my opinion, yet if you ever came anywhere near a copy desk you might know that in non-authoritarian countries there simply to much chaos there to pull of a coordinated effort of that magnitude.
> But are you're saying that the Rotherham scandal was reported on less because it resonates with xenophobia? That journalists suppress stories if they promote the wrong ideology?
No, we're saying that the suppression of the Rotherham scandal which was extensively reported on by the British media exists only in the imagination of the far right and people that don't understand how Google Trends works, as you conveniently demonstrated by earlier linking to an Wikipedia article explaining that it was investigative journalism by the Times - about as mainstream as UK news journalism gets - that ultimately lead to a public enquiry.
I'm not convinced that drawing attention to the fact other sex scandals happened in the UK under completely different circumstances and were generally less reported on than the Rotherham ones and didn't necessarily get multiple BBC Panorama specials devoted to them like the Rotherham ones really helps your case.
No far right conspiracy theory is required to explain why internet search data dominated by Americans and consumers of US media shows higher spikes for a high-profile murder case in their own country than a sex abuse scandal in the UK which unfolded over a long period of time.
See also the comparatively tiny size of the spike for the highest profile sex abuser in the UK ever, thought to be responsible for hundreds of cases of child abuse by himself and a major celebrity in his own right
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=trayvon,...
If you check the dates, the interest in Savile corresponds not to his death, but to the release of the sexual abuse documentary about him.
But I'm sure the motivated reader can find some reason why Google trends is wrong and the media is unbiased - after all, they did report on it, they just maybe neglected to promote it as much as when the rapist was a white male.
Shock horror: name of famous person who became one of most notorious criminals in history receives more Google searches than any specific search string related to the city a group of not-independently-famous people committed similar crimes in. Still, if you wanted to do an actual apples to apples comparison between equivalent search strings like "rotherham abuse" and "jimmy savile abuse", suddenly it actually looks - to somebody completely ignorant of the UK media - like it's paying rather less attention to Sir Jimmy's vices. Maybe I could make some conspiracy theory about it being down to his whiteness.
Or not, because anyone with a passing familiarity with the UK media knows that both Jimmy Savile and the Rotherham abuses were covered in a huge amount of detail and had public enquiries as a result of public outrage following the media coverage.
And anybody with the faintest degree of intellectual honesty knows that comparing dissimilar search strings on Google Trends, which tells you absolutely nothing about media bias, does not refute that
There's only one entity that's wilfully distorting reality here in order to pursue a racial agenda, and that's you.
> Shock horror: name of famous person who became one of most notorious criminals in history receives more Google searches than any specific search string related to the city a group of not-independently-famous people committed similar crimes in.
'became one of most notorious criminals in history' - ignoring that notoriety is the result of media attention, given his number of victims, I suppose it was deserved. Lets look at Stuart Hall then - he also became one of the most notorious criminals in history: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=s... (yes, the spike in interest coincides with his arrest)
And it 'only' took him ~21 victims, 60 times fewer than just one of the organized rape gangs!
> equivalent search strings like "rotherham abuse" and "jimmy savile abuse"
Are they equivalent? Put in 'Rotherham', and you get mostly constant noise, indicating general news about the city overshadows news about the scandal itself. Put in 'jimmy savile' or 'stuart hall', and you get obvious peaks when the scandals hit the news, and mostly no activity otherwise. Peaks higher than the difference between the average interest in Rotherham, and the increase around the time of the scandal.
> There's only one entity that's wilfully distorting reality here in order to pursue a racial agenda, and that's you.
"Because most of the perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage, several council staff described themselves as being nervous about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others, the report noted, "remembered clear direction from their managers" not to make such identification."
Put "Rotherham" into Google News around the time of the Panorama programmes or the trials or the investigation
and you got wall-to-wall coverage of the Rotherham sex abuse scandal, via the British mainstream media. So no, people searching for it didn't need to append additional terms.
Put Rotherham into Google Trends and you get an enormous spike around the time the report into the Rotherham abuse was released. The claim that it's "constant noise" is a lie, period as is your ridiculous earlier attempt to suggest the news coverage was more to do with the lower tier football team. Rotherham might have been spread out over a longer period and thus less easily isolated from other news coverage but it made a lot more front pages than Stuart Hall and saw a a lot more articles over a much longer period.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=GB&q=rotherham
Of all the intellectually dishonest arguments I've seen in favour of people's racial prejudices, I've yet to come across anything dumber than your continued insistence that news media you evidently don't read of a country you've probably never visited "suppressed" stuff that was splashed all over its front pages and the subject of multiple television specials, despite all the British people correcting you on this.
The spikes for Savile and Hall are both bigger (above the background noise) than for Rotherham. I also applaud you for ignoring the bit of my post on how council staff literally suppressed information to not be racist.
Of course media manipulation doesn't end there - lets compare the Holocaust to the Holodomor:
Both deliberate genocides of a majority upon an ethnic minority, both murdering a comparable amount of people, yet the Holodomor is practically ignored. But I'm sure you'll find some reason Ukrainian lives are less worth remembering than Jewish lives.
> They didn't suppress it, they just didn't make as big of a media circus out of it as of other stories.
Except for it being on the front pages for days, unlike the vast majority of paedophiles who weren't celebrities in their own right (and Stuart Hall, for that matter). I know there were a number of failings related to council staff being overly conscious of accusations of racism (not to mention the actual far-right groups targeting the town), I read it in the wall to wall media coverage you deny exists. But yeah, you keep trying to tell me how stuff's reported on channels I watch and in media I read from deliberate misinterpretation of Google fucking trends.
Obviously that wasn't a stupid enough position for you to argue so you're now pretending that media narratives around the Holocaust versus the Holodomor[1] are driven by Jewish conspiracies rather than because a World War against a glamorous symbol-of-evil leader that ended in the liberation of death camps understandably would get more attention than poorly-understood atrocities committed within the Soviet Union even without the former's geopolitical consequences, a large diaspora and dedicated remembrance organizations based in English-speaking Western countries. Of course, the genocide of the Congoese by the Belgians gets even less attention, but that won't fit your media manipulation highlights oppression of selected minorities by Caucasians and suppresses the reverse bullshit narrative
Fuck off to back to Stormfront you pathetic little troll.
[1]a word which, incidentally, wasn't even used to refer to the events until decades later and didn't make Ukranian dictionaries until this century
Trayvon Martin's case didn't get much press either until the family managed to get a good lawyer working (pro-bono) on their case, who then got a publicist helping them as well.
Look at the sources for the Rotherham Wikipedia article. How are you going to honestly say that the media is omitting the story? It's more likely that you didn't see it in your own filter bubble[0] and I'd also guess you're from the USA, which obviously has more incentive to front-page domestic news (but I highly doubt you'd find omission of it on any major news site).
That is definitely horrible, and I think it should have been given more attention.
However, the main difference I see, as to news coverage, is the first example happened in the USA.
If the latter had happened in the USA, it would have received astounding coverage. Even if you believe that liberal media would have been quiet, Fox would have had a field day.
That they didn't is evidence of the locality argument.
Most of the underdeveloped world can't and don't get on twitter and make a noise about things they are seeing on YouTube that they might find offensive. The reactions and consequences only once in a while get into the press. I am quite sure there is serious social damage happening on a scale much larger than anyone will admit, as most of these people have no access to help or advice of any form.
You mean anyone whom you have interacted with can. If you visit India, I can introduce you to people who spend many hours a day on YouTube without knowing how to read. It's not complicated to imagine if you have been around kids. Kids these days do all kinds of things with devices before they have learnt to read or write. The big difference here being there is no parental figure keeping an eye on the kids and what they are consuming.
Most of the under-developed world on a daily basis walks by people dying of hunger and curable diseases. You really think offensive YouTube content is causing serious social damage?
Yes. Misguided ignorant people are surrounded by misguided ignorant people. If they are supplied bad info on youtube or on a social network, there is no corrective mechanism. It's not complicated to understand. You don't have to believe me the consequences will just keep piling up.
> Misguided ignorant people are surrounded by misguided ignorant people. If they are supplied bad info on youtube or on a social network, there is no corrective mechanism.
Let's say I don't dispute your first claim (though that also has no basis). How many mass atrocities or deaths have historically been tied to info on youtube or social networks? (please provide citations) - I'm willing to bet BTC that US drone strikes have killed significantly more (but it's okay we have a corrective mechanism!). Further what about the all the mass atrocities prior to social media, what was the corrective action there?
Would you have someone watch and advice these people? The People's Party? The Ministry of Truth? Google Department of Facts? The US Government? The very same government that e.g. tacitly supported genocide in Indonesia? [0]
Actually a great amount (if not the majority) of crimes against humanity have been carried out precisely by organizations and people with the kind of corrective ideology you are on here evangelizing.
I'm really quite surprised to be having this discussion honestly, I don't know if it's some mental culture of the Silicon Valley bubble or complete lack of historical knowledge or what...
Without even knowing that or expressing any kind of curiosity about it, just look at the assumptions you are making about me. Social media is just conditioning us to keep reacting to one another and it doesn't have to be this way.
Huh? The workshops are about promoting awareness of the issue and the article says they'll "teach teens how to deal with offensive speech, flag inappropriate content, and moderate comments". The European Commission issue was specifically about "illegal content".
I think GP might mean that as offense is completely subjective, it's better to let people define "hate speech" etc for themselves rather than having an agenda being pushed by a government or corporate entity.
That's your interpretation of what the workshop actually is. Read what I quoted again, it focuses on the technical side of things: how to flag, how to moderate comments, and how to deal with hate speech. Talking about an issues doesn't immediately mean you're pushing an agenda. The only one assuming people can't think for themselves is you.
Quite the opposite he is proposing people decide for themselves absent any "workshops". You are the one who thinks that people will benefit from Googles instruction on how to decide what is hate speech, frankly I think anyone should be able to say anything. If you decide that its hateful content then you can stop reading it at that point.
Considering the target groups is the last group I would want identifying hate speech or fake news. considering how many stories we have now about how college campuses are not friendly towards free speech or any speech contrary to that professed by the loudest and at times most violent people?
top if off with a very clique oriented age group where personal beliefs are subsumed to the group identify because belonging is more important than thinking... no thank you.
if anything we should be making sure they feel safe to decide and safe to listen too any view.
Do you think it's more difficult for a person to comprehend that the "workshops" are just as much an opinion as the "hate speech" they're trying to target?
Indeed, the art of badly written headlines apparently takes up a whole chapter in the Ars Technica style guide. This should have been: "Google pushes fake news and hate-speech workshops (and YouTube) on UK teens". In addition, even the most basic grammar checking tool should have picked this up: "The ads was later removed."
In most publications editors select headlines for all stories in an issue. The writer does not have a say in what is printed as the title of their own article.
Translation: Google, the closest thing to a public global utility on the internet, becomes an arbiter of what's "true" and what's "hate speech" -- according to the prevailing interests and standards of its owners and of its country.
Hate-speech can be tricky. There are edge cases where what is "true" can be hard to determine. But in a large proportion of cases veracity is easy to determine.
Are you suggesting that we just throw up out hands and say "there's really no point trying to determine what is a fact, these days?"
With the 1st amendment, the government can never censor (with a few exceptions)... however companies can censor whatever they want for whatever reason they want, perhaps ironically, as an expression of freedom of speech.
I'm aware. My point was that the founders of the US Government chose to uphold the principle of free speech. The founders of companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter chose not to.
I see. Your point is that the principle of free speech is something different than the 1st amendment and the authors of the amendment messed up and allowed a loophole.
I think that if a company has enough of a monopoly on information that they become a de-facto governing agency, that they should be forced to uphold the principles of the 1st amendment.
Facebook should be classified as something like a common carrier.
I understand now, and it's hard not to agree with that perspective.
On the other hand, because of the fundamental relationship of the free press and health of democracy, shouldn't there be some kind of criteria for validity the same way that health claims in advertising do, for example? I understand that some things are subjective and impossible to apply criteria to, but what about cases where people are knowingly publishing demonstrable falsehoods to mislead masses of people. Seems like a major problem.
Btw, im not sure what my opinion is on this.... Im just "devil advocating", I guess.
EDIT:/foundational/fundamental Im having a hard time with words today. :/
I honestly don't know. I think in general though, we should try to make information be as available as possible. Most of the justification for regulations about communications content comes from a time when most people had only three television channels, and a few newspapers.
Also, China has used exactly the same justification for censoring their information. And they're not wrong. People do knowingly spread misinformation and harm others.
I think that it's a really tempting problem to want to solve. If we could just find some heuristic to know for certain that something was "fake", we'd have it all figured out.
Not in a lot of places, e.g., Canada and Germany, to name two off the top of my head...
(And for the record, I'd happily vote to place additional restrictions on hate speech in the U.S., following the models presented by those two countries. I'm simply not afraid of the slippery slope arguments that people bring up; I think they're fallacious.)
Yeah, what issue could there be from additional restrictions on "hate speech" in a country with litigation happy fundamentalist christians on one side and "freedom fighters" on the other each considering their own BS ideas of hate speech. With a history of red scare and McCarthyism and other such niceties to top.
He's saying it's dangerous as fuck to let anyone determine what is appropriate to say and what is not appropriate to say.
When you're talking about infrastructure fundamental to everyone's life determining what can be communicated you're talking about building 95% of the infrastructure of tyranny in one fell swoop.
Do you think the government or the officers of Alphabet will always be Good people that you agree with? History is rife with examples of awful people taking over once-benevolent powerful institutions.
>Are you suggesting that we just throw up out hands and say "there's really no point trying to determine what is a fact, these days?"
I'm saying it's not Google's job to determine what is a fact.
Was a reporter denying WMDs in 2003 a fact or "false news"?
Was Garry Web [1] a writer of facts or a fake news spreader?
The answers were much less clear at the time, and the established press and media/internet overlords would have labeled both fake news and be done with it...
I don't know why this seems to be so hard for people to understand. We already have, very effective I might add, laws that tackle grey areas. The entire notion of "due diligence" in business is this exactly. As a business you have to prove that you did all that a "reasonable" (deliberately vague to allow the term to grow as technology does) entity would to follow the law.
Suddenly the idea of "fake news" isn't so murky. A reporter doing his/her due diligence in 2003 could have concluded there were wmds in Iraq, a reporter in 2017 that says the same is a hawker of fake news. It's not a hard bar to apply, especially to the most grievous offenders today (the Breitbarts and Huffington posts of the world for example).
There's no overlord trying to hide the conspiracies of the world, it's just bringing a much needed regulation to the news, as essential component to the modern democracy.
> There's no overlord trying to hide the conspiracies of the world, it's just bringing a much needed regulation to the news, as essential component to the modern democracy.
Who defines 'reasonable' when 'news' is inherently opinionated?
The one with the deepest pockets for legal protection?
Who says that only 'businesses' are and should be the ones reporting news?
And who regulates the regulators?
Seriously.. EFF v ATT, for starters, along with any of the entirely half baked 1-sided, spin-laden 'real news' that is coming out of just about any major entity these days..
>A reporter doing his/her due diligence in 2003 could have concluded there were wmds in Iraq
That's what I'm afraid of. Google doing the same kind of BS "due diligence" and then forbidding counter opinions (the equivalent of "no WMDs" in 2003) as fake news.
>There's no overlord trying to hide the conspiracies of the world
No, just many private interests that treat each other well...
Baseless claims, even if they somehow turn out to be right, are still baseless and add little but information to a discussion. This insistence that every thing is abstract and thus all "opinions" are equally valid is how we got in this mess to begin with. No matter how many neonazis shout it, there's no evidence to suggest their claims of racial superiority, no matter how many times it got repeated on fucking national tv there is no evidence Planned Parenthood harvest the organs of fetuses, every image macro doesn't have to necessarily match the caption no matter what Tumblr might claim, and not matter how much money Exon spends there's mountains of data suggesting anthropomorphic climate change.
If you opinion is so unsupported that it fails basic due diligence, it shouldn't be appearing with equal weight to the supported thought. And we should continue to hold aggregators responsible for letting that shit filter to the top. Googling "food that cures cancer" should result in "No food cures cancer go talk to your oncologist" not "list of top ten super foods" from blogspam site number N; Googling "did the Holocaust happen" should result in "yes" not a link to stormfront.
I agree there certainly is a grey area when deciding on public "fact" in developing issues or contriversal subjects; but there are plenty of things far and away from that grey area and to pretend they aren't is worse than censorship. By treating valid information with the same weight as invalid information you've removed people's ability to find the facts even more effectively than if you tried to censor them (given how terrible attempts at censorship have been in the past, I wouldn't be surprised to see tyrants move to this form of information suppression).
Do you really think that, say "flat earth" people, who do little harm, should be removed from the Internet? What about people who believe in Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster? Or UFOlogists?
There are things that are obviously false, but probably harmless enough.
I think you meant this to be negative, but it still sounds like a good thing to me as long as "an arbiter" doesn't become "the arbiter". It's not really possible for them not to be an arbiter unless they start delivering unordered results to queries, so they might as well pay attention to how they're arbitrating.
>as long as "an arbiter" doesn't become "the arbiter"
Well, it being "the closest thing to a public utility" as I wrote, means for billions of people it will be THE arbiter -- or at least an arbiter they'd have to deal with.
So if they made the entire search algorithm customizable and 98% of users kept the defaults, would you be satisfied? Regardless of how realistic that idea is, Google would still be an arbiter of truth. There is no way around it.
As I said, it's not good if they're "the truth squad", but it's unavoidable for them to be "a truth squad". I think Google Search is a net benefit to society even if it's run by an advertising company, and its entire purpose is to filter information. It cannot function without being a truth squad.
>I think Google Search is a net benefit to society even if it's run by an advertising company, and its entire purpose is to filter information.
Whenever you type a search query, the first thing Google does is ask to track your location. When they finally display the results, greater than 50% of the page is "for sale", so to speak. That, I would argue, is not the sign of a company who is interested in giving you accurate results. They are more interested in pushing products, to get you to buy something. That would make sense for a company like Amazon, but with Amazon, there is no pretense.
On top of that, their primary means of filtering information is using signals influenced heavily by either paid actors or lay persons clicking on results. If Google themselves conducted an objective inquiry, they would have to shed tons of advertisers because a lot of advertising is inherently deceptive.
>I think Google Search is a net benefit to society even if it's run by an advertising company
I think the opposite. Its hard to click on any Google result and not find a website that is plastered with Google ads. That certainly is not entirely Google's fault (although I sometimes wonder if they rank pages with Google ads higher than non-Google ads) but they've shown to the industry that you can make billions of dollars by pimping out user data to advertisers. People get up in arms when the Uber app tracks your location after you close it, meanwhile the majority of android phones are tracking every aspect of your life.
FWIW: I have many positive things to say about Google too, but I don't believe in fake neutrality where you're forced to say something nice when you criticize something.
You're arguing that Google should be a better arbiter, and I agree. What I disagreed with is the idea that they shouldn't be an arbiter at all, because I don't think that's possible.
Not really. I don't want a better fox guarding the hen-house. I don't want it to be a fox in the first place. Heck even Wikipedia with all of its flaws would be a better arbiter.
Google wants to put the responsibility of evaluating an advertisement onto its users, if they are so concerned about erroneous search results, they should first put a fact-check box next to their ads. Adopting a hands-off strategy when it comes to their revenue and a hands-on strategy when it comes to their perceived ideology is hypocritical at best.
No, not google. This is about Google outsourcing that responsability to teenagers. This class shouldnt be aimed at kids but at the many more adults who actively encourage and moderate such speech today. I dont like efforts to solve adult problems by "educating" kids. Educate the adults.
Educate both, perhaps? Someday those kids will be adults and have kids of their own, with hopefully more inclusive and accepting views. Perhaps it will even encourage them to challenge the ideas, words, and views their parents present.
Or is it because the school allows us to force kids to listen to things that adults would walk away from? These classes are never aimed at university students or other young people, just the captive audience of a gradeschool classroom. I question the effectiveness of any scheme that can only fly in such controlled environments.
The alternative is to let no-nazis, white supremacists publish articles unfettered about the evils and inferiorities of Blacks and Jews so they can win supporters. To let people publish rape fantasies about women and children. To post terrorist recruitment videos. And to have impressionable teens and children exposed to that garbage.
This sort of unfettered free speech that people want is libertarian idealism. This was never what the founding fathers intended when they described free speech.
When people advocate for that kind of free speech, I always think "why, for what purpose." If it's worry that Google might block stories based on it's interest, they already have that power now - they can put search penalties on or even kick out (as they did in the case of 8chan) sites entirely from their results.
If they act irresponsibly with regard to that, people can choose alternative web searches.
So why protest them actually trying, and in this case doing literally the least they can do, to stop the spread of hate speech.
> The alternative is to let no-nazis, white supremacists publish articles unfettered about the evils and inferiorities of Blacks and Jews so they can win supporters
Then let them. If you try and censor their views then you give them credibility and people think "well there must be something to this ideology if the establishment doesn't want me to access this information". Better to let them spout their nonsense for everyone to see, and then contrast it with a more logical position.
Of course blocking neo nazi trash doesn't "give them credibility"--that is a total non-sequitor.
I mean, are you saying that, if you personally knew neo-nazi stuff was suddenly being filtered out, you'd start to wonder if they were onto something good?
>Of course blocking neo nazi trash doesn't "give them credibility"--that is a total non-sequitor.
Yeah, because fringe groups never got any gravitas from being persecuted (or perceived as persecuted).
In fact that's exactly what gave Hitler early publicity: his imprisonment after his failed coup -- which let him write a popular then book to detail his persecutions from the state and his "enemies".
Not more than they would if they weren't persecuted. I am certain neo-nazis would much prefer to spread their hate as publicly as possible through Sunday morning cartoons and flyers and ads, and the fact that we as a society have restricted them from doing so has weakened, not strengthened them.
Maybe some people find a morbid attracting to them as a result of them being forbidden just for this reason. But for the large majority, this has not happened.
> I mean, are you saying that, if you personally knew neo-nazi stuff was suddenly being filtered out, you'd start to wonder if they were onto something good?
Absolutely I would. Even if I would not have looked at it before. If the powers that be were trying to keep information from me, I would very much like to know why.
Are you saying that if chunks of the internet were purged, and public figures were blacklisted, you would just be ok with that? If anything, I would go out of my way to seek out what is being kept from me.
What if your blog were blacklisted, because you were accused of being a "Nazi". Do you just think that people would listen to you if you swore that there had been a mistake? Why?
>What if your blog were blacklisted, because you were accused of being a "Nazi"
Why is the assumption always made that censorship will be applied in this crazy random arbitrary fashion. Is there any evidence that censorship always happens that way and isnt properly targeted to actual hate speech.
This may affect legitimate speech isnt a very powerful argument because legitimate speech can be differentiated from hate speech. I can tell the difference between a neo-nazi and someone who is merely critical of Israels policies and I feel sorry for those who cant differentiate.
As for public figures, if there are public figures who are actively spreading hate speech, yes censor them too. I would not shed a tear if Don Black and stormfront were censored from the web. In fact I think it would make the world a better place to be rid of giving their toxic views a public platform.
>* The alternative is to let no-nazis, white supremacists publish articles unfettered about the evils and inferiorities of Blacks and Jews so they can win supporters. To let people publish rape fantasies about women and children. To post terrorist recruitment videos. And to have impressionable teens and children exposed to that garbage.*
So the alternative is free speech? And we should "think of the children"?
It's almost childish the way certain people seem to think the words "free speech" constitute an argument in themselves. Videos of child rape "free speech", watching people be tortured for fun "free speech." Showing minors porn "free speech. ISIS recruitment videos aimed at teenagers "free speech."
Merely attaching the words free speech to something doesn't automatically make it okay.
It's almost childish how people use the same tired arguments about fringe activities that maybe 0.001% of the population enjoys (like minor porn) and which are violations of the law in their own right to do anyway, as examples of why we should censor speech and videos.
There's a law to take down child porn already -- we're not discussing that, and we don't need an extra law with vague and unrelated powers to censor stuff, to tackle that.
>It's almost childish how people use the same tired arguments about fringe activities
Fringe activities exactly what we are talking about censoring. Google is not talking about censoring eveyrday speech, they're talking about targeting and getting rid of the fringe activities like hate speech.
Nobody is advocating preventing ordinary discourse like criticizing Trump or being pro Trump etc. They are talking about getting rid of speech like neo nazi speech, terrorist recruitment speech, child endangerment/exploitation speech.
Social networks should also tackle how their recommendation algorithm might be influencing the "information bubble" of citizens (or at least be gamed in order to do so).
For example in France, during an election campaign, official media must strive to share equally the "speaking time" between candidates. And while social networks, with subsidiaries in France, have a more and more prominent role in the information bubble of citizens, they currently ignore this regulation in their automated recommendations.
I experienced it myself some days ago, while looking for some videos about French candidates on youtube, I was persistently recommended some videos for a specific candidate by youtube's recommendation algorithm.
I was apparently not the only one to notice that, as some people even conducted automated tests [1] :
"Mélenchon, Le Pen and Asselineau make up nearly 60 percent of the candidates that are mentioned in the titles of the most recommended videos. It is particularly surprising for Asselineau to be recommended so much because he received less than 1 percent of voter preferences in the latest polls.
Perhaps predictably, each of these three candidates is the top recommended candidate when searching for their name. However, we have found that starting from a search of any other candidate, these three candidates are still the most recommended"
Theses 3 candidates are highly active on social networks, but also pro-frexit and often categorized as populist.
A little uncomfortable about the coupling of hate speech and fake news. Hate speech, while odious, is an unfortunate side-effect of free speech. And so we already have a mechanism for regulating it: social norms. Even at its worst, hate speech is the temporary symptom of some other, more insidious wrong - and the temporary injury each instance of hate speech produces just does not justify eating at a core value of liberal democracy.
Fiction that purports to be news poses a far greater threat to democratic institutions, especially when it is targeted (and therefore invisible to the normal editorial controls). A mis- or dis- informed populace empowers people that worsen the core systemic problems that hate speech is a symptom of. But in this case, too, there is also an historic, market-based mechanism for combating it: editors. But unlike with hate speech, where Internet communities can enforce norms that determine inclusion, the Internet has no built-in editorial controls.
Note this is in the UK, where there are fewer legal protections for free speech.
But, yes, I think it's a huge political mistake to tie these concepts in this way (or even to use the term "fake news" at all, at this point). Regardless of the motives or actual content of the workshops, imagine how someone on the right will (not entirely unjustifiably) view a headline like this.
Indeed, coupling the two makes fake news seem like deciding what is and isn't a fact is somehow political on serves some ideological agenda. But it isn't, or shouldn't be.
I don't understand the line you're drawing. Isn't fake news also an unfortunate side-effect of free speech? Aren't education and public reputation existing mechanisms for regulating it?
Your argument that fake news is more dangerous makes sense, but it's not hard to argue the other way. Hate speech causes suicides, while fake news only causes temporary misinformation. Hate speech makes people withdraw from society and public life, driving them out of democratic institutions. Fake news usually just lets people hear what they want to hear, confirming beliefs they already had. The "victims" of fake news are actively seeking it out, while the victims of hate speech are being attacked.
Maybe that's not completely convincing, but hopefully you see what I mean. We already have lots of controls on free speech, are there any intrinsic reasons you think hate speech and fake news are categorically different?
I'm simply saying that while both are cases of free speech, fake news is allowed to spread out of control on the Internet due to a lack of editorial controls while hate speech is largely constrained by community norms.
Quid est veritas? Not sure how I feel about large corporate entities taking the lead on what is and what is not true or acceptable speech. The internet and mass media has oversaturated us with information. Rather than make us smarter, it seems to have filled our minds with garbage. I don't know what the answer is (I suspect the first step is unplugging the machine and opening a book), but for some reason - and I can't quite put my finger on it - it seems unwise to hand the responsibility of educating the masses on absolute truth to organizations with shareholders. Especially Silicon Valley organizations that tend to be comprised of employees with activist mindsets and a monolithic left-wing ideology. Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?
This is more scary than the so called fake news itself. An advertising company should be looked upon with the highest level of skepticism, much like a politician.
Especially when that company controls not only the ads that make news websites sustainable, but also what headlines people see, and where, when they search news-related topics.
My 2 cents: drop the term "fake news" entirely and switch to a less vague euphemism like "hoax mills" or something. Switching the mental frame to some clearly shady, unknown "news" website/company that pumps out nothing but hoax or highly exaggerated stories will make discussions about how to deal with it less contentious. "Stop the proliferation and revenue sources of hoax mills" reads way better than "tackle fake news".
This is a place Google rightly can and should responsibly step in (just like how they try to keep blatant scams and malware/phishing sites from first page search results). People just need to all be on the same page about what, specifically, Google is trying to stop.
113 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] thread[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trayvon_Martin
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
Edit: Criticism has been raised that it's not fair to compare the two events, since one is of US scope, and the other isn't. Ignoring for the moment that the google trends counts global search, here's a comparison of the trends of the two topics, Trayvon and the Rotherham scandal, solely for Great Britain:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=t...
I added a few keywords to the scandal, otherwise the trend is dominated by I think football news. Even within the UK, the local story about the organized rape of 1400 girls trended far less than the killing of Trayvon.
[0] https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/1407/independent...
It's the same story from the MSM every time. Don't risk being perceived as racist at any cost, because racism is soooo uncool. Even if that cost is the rape and torture of 1400 little girls.
And people wonder why the right is on the rise across the world.
Trayvon Martin Case was more about the bigger topic of racial profiling than about the case itself, an already highly politicized social issue in the US which condensed on that case.
The Rotherham scandal was to all current knowledge an event of singular magnitude of local non-US scope, with no bigger topic to resonate against other than xenophobia.
'Resonate'. That's a nice way of putting some stories are more reported than others.
> The Rotherham scandal was to all current knowledge a singular event of local non-US scope, with no bigger topic to resonate against other than xenophobia.
I didn't limit Google trends to the US, so I don't see why non-US scope is relevant. But are you're saying that the Rotherham scandal was reported on less because it resonates with xenophobia? That journalists suppress stories if they promote the wrong ideology?
Also, 'singular event'? Forgetting for the moment that it was at least 1400 events over a period of 16 years, did you bother to scroll to the bottom of the Rotherham scandal wikipedia page, and click on the link that leads to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexual_abuses_perpetra... ?
There tons of stories that are underreported in my opinion, yet if you ever came anywhere near a copy desk you might know that in non-authoritarian countries there simply to much chaos there to pull of a coordinated effort of that magnitude.
http://m.dailykos.com/story/2015/12/28/1464146/-6-Corporatio...
http://www.politico.com/story/2009/03/journolist-inside-the-...
Journolist showed that journalists do in fact discuss what narrative to push.
No, we're saying that the suppression of the Rotherham scandal which was extensively reported on by the British media exists only in the imagination of the far right and people that don't understand how Google Trends works, as you conveniently demonstrated by earlier linking to an Wikipedia article explaining that it was investigative journalism by the Times - about as mainstream as UK news journalism gets - that ultimately lead to a public enquiry.
I'm not convinced that drawing attention to the fact other sex scandals happened in the UK under completely different circumstances and were generally less reported on than the Rotherham ones and didn't necessarily get multiple BBC Panorama specials devoted to them like the Rotherham ones really helps your case.
See also the comparatively tiny size of the spike for the highest profile sex abuser in the UK ever, thought to be responsible for hundreds of cases of child abuse by himself and a major celebrity in his own right https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=trayvon,...
The disparity is even bigger when looking at the global attention: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=jimmy%20savile,%2...
If you check the dates, the interest in Savile corresponds not to his death, but to the release of the sexual abuse documentary about him.
But I'm sure the motivated reader can find some reason why Google trends is wrong and the media is unbiased - after all, they did report on it, they just maybe neglected to promote it as much as when the rapist was a white male.
Or not, because anyone with a passing familiarity with the UK media knows that both Jimmy Savile and the Rotherham abuses were covered in a huge amount of detail and had public enquiries as a result of public outrage following the media coverage.
And anybody with the faintest degree of intellectual honesty knows that comparing dissimilar search strings on Google Trends, which tells you absolutely nothing about media bias, does not refute that
There's only one entity that's wilfully distorting reality here in order to pursue a racial agenda, and that's you.
'became one of most notorious criminals in history' - ignoring that notoriety is the result of media attention, given his number of victims, I suppose it was deserved. Lets look at Stuart Hall then - he also became one of the most notorious criminals in history: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=s... (yes, the spike in interest coincides with his arrest)
And it 'only' took him ~21 victims, 60 times fewer than just one of the organized rape gangs!
> equivalent search strings like "rotherham abuse" and "jimmy savile abuse"
Are they equivalent? Put in 'Rotherham', and you get mostly constant noise, indicating general news about the city overshadows news about the scandal itself. Put in 'jimmy savile' or 'stuart hall', and you get obvious peaks when the scandals hit the news, and mostly no activity otherwise. Peaks higher than the difference between the average interest in Rotherham, and the increase around the time of the scandal.
> There's only one entity that's wilfully distorting reality here in order to pursue a racial agenda, and that's you.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit... :
"Because most of the perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage, several council staff described themselves as being nervous about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others, the report noted, "remembered clear direction from their managers" not to make such identification."
Put Rotherham into Google Trends and you get an enormous spike around the time the report into the Rotherham abuse was released. The claim that it's "constant noise" is a lie, period as is your ridiculous earlier attempt to suggest the news coverage was more to do with the lower tier football team. Rotherham might have been spread out over a longer period and thus less easily isolated from other news coverage but it made a lot more front pages than Stuart Hall and saw a a lot more articles over a much longer period. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=GB&q=rotherham
I mean, do you honestly believe you're going to convince people that news editors "suppressed" this story (or indeed, downplayed the ethnicity of the perpetrators)... https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=rotherham+abuse+scandal+ne...
Of all the intellectually dishonest arguments I've seen in favour of people's racial prejudices, I've yet to come across anything dumber than your continued insistence that news media you evidently don't read of a country you've probably never visited "suppressed" stuff that was splashed all over its front pages and the subject of multiple television specials, despite all the British people correcting you on this.
> https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=GB&q=rotherham
Good job omitting comparison from that link. Why don't we add it back in, shall we?
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=GB&q=rotherham,... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=rotherham,jimmy%2...
The spikes for Savile and Hall are both bigger (above the background noise) than for Rotherham. I also applaud you for ignoring the bit of my post on how council staff literally suppressed information to not be racist.
Of course media manipulation doesn't end there - lets compare the Holocaust to the Holodomor:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=holocaus...
Both deliberate genocides of a majority upon an ethnic minority, both murdering a comparable amount of people, yet the Holodomor is practically ignored. But I'm sure you'll find some reason Ukrainian lives are less worth remembering than Jewish lives.
Except for it being on the front pages for days, unlike the vast majority of paedophiles who weren't celebrities in their own right (and Stuart Hall, for that matter). I know there were a number of failings related to council staff being overly conscious of accusations of racism (not to mention the actual far-right groups targeting the town), I read it in the wall to wall media coverage you deny exists. But yeah, you keep trying to tell me how stuff's reported on channels I watch and in media I read from deliberate misinterpretation of Google fucking trends.
Obviously that wasn't a stupid enough position for you to argue so you're now pretending that media narratives around the Holocaust versus the Holodomor[1] are driven by Jewish conspiracies rather than because a World War against a glamorous symbol-of-evil leader that ended in the liberation of death camps understandably would get more attention than poorly-understood atrocities committed within the Soviet Union even without the former's geopolitical consequences, a large diaspora and dedicated remembrance organizations based in English-speaking Western countries. Of course, the genocide of the Congoese by the Belgians gets even less attention, but that won't fit your media manipulation highlights oppression of selected minorities by Caucasians and suppresses the reverse bullshit narrative
Fuck off to back to Stormfront you pathetic little troll.
[1]a word which, incidentally, wasn't even used to refer to the events until decades later and didn't make Ukranian dictionaries until this century
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
However, the main difference I see, as to news coverage, is the first example happened in the USA.
If the latter had happened in the USA, it would have received astounding coverage. Even if you believe that liberal media would have been quiet, Fox would have had a field day.
That they didn't is evidence of the locality argument.
Let's say I don't dispute your first claim (though that also has no basis). How many mass atrocities or deaths have historically been tied to info on youtube or social networks? (please provide citations) - I'm willing to bet BTC that US drone strikes have killed significantly more (but it's okay we have a corrective mechanism!). Further what about the all the mass atrocities prior to social media, what was the corrective action there?
Would you have someone watch and advice these people? The People's Party? The Ministry of Truth? Google Department of Facts? The US Government? The very same government that e.g. tacitly supported genocide in Indonesia? [0]
Actually a great amount (if not the majority) of crimes against humanity have been carried out precisely by organizations and people with the kind of corrective ideology you are on here evangelizing.
I'm really quite surprised to be having this discussion honestly, I don't know if it's some mental culture of the Silicon Valley bubble or complete lack of historical knowledge or what...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19...
Without even knowing that or expressing any kind of curiosity about it, just look at the assumptions you are making about me. Social media is just conditioning us to keep reacting to one another and it doesn't have to be this way.
I haven't made too many comments on HN cause this is the kind of reaction I get all the time. If you are interested here's my fix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125904
top if off with a very clique oriented age group where personal beliefs are subsumed to the group identify because belonging is more important than thinking... no thank you.
if anything we should be making sure they feel safe to decide and safe to listen too any view.
Are you suggesting that we just throw up out hands and say "there's really no point trying to determine what is a fact, these days?"
It seems pretty clear to me. Hate speech is free speech.
Facebook should be classified as something like a common carrier.
On the other hand, because of the fundamental relationship of the free press and health of democracy, shouldn't there be some kind of criteria for validity the same way that health claims in advertising do, for example? I understand that some things are subjective and impossible to apply criteria to, but what about cases where people are knowingly publishing demonstrable falsehoods to mislead masses of people. Seems like a major problem. Btw, im not sure what my opinion is on this.... Im just "devil advocating", I guess.
EDIT:/foundational/fundamental Im having a hard time with words today. :/
Also, China has used exactly the same justification for censoring their information. And they're not wrong. People do knowingly spread misinformation and harm others.
I think that it's a really tempting problem to want to solve. If we could just find some heuristic to know for certain that something was "fake", we'd have it all figured out.
Companies above a certain size, should be forced to be open platforms for everybody and everything (as long as its within the law).
Same concept as with net neutrality.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
(And for the record, I'd happily vote to place additional restrictions on hate speech in the U.S., following the models presented by those two countries. I'm simply not afraid of the slippery slope arguments that people bring up; I think they're fallacious.)
He's saying it's dangerous as fuck to let anyone determine what is appropriate to say and what is not appropriate to say.
When you're talking about infrastructure fundamental to everyone's life determining what can be communicated you're talking about building 95% of the infrastructure of tyranny in one fell swoop.
Do you think the government or the officers of Alphabet will always be Good people that you agree with? History is rife with examples of awful people taking over once-benevolent powerful institutions.
From Eric directly being involved in the clinton campaign. https://qz.com/823922/eric-schmidt-played-a-crucial-role-in-... http://www.googletransparencyproject.org/articles/googles-su...
And now google donating money to Trump. http://dailycaller.com/2017/04/21/google-donated-285000-to-t...
Plus we know the amount of pressure PRISM and the other intelligence agencies can put on Silicon Valley companies.
I'm saying it's not Google's job to determine what is a fact.
Was a reporter denying WMDs in 2003 a fact or "false news"?
Was Garry Web [1] a writer of facts or a fake news spreader?
The answers were much less clear at the time, and the established press and media/internet overlords would have labeled both fake news and be done with it...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb
Suddenly the idea of "fake news" isn't so murky. A reporter doing his/her due diligence in 2003 could have concluded there were wmds in Iraq, a reporter in 2017 that says the same is a hawker of fake news. It's not a hard bar to apply, especially to the most grievous offenders today (the Breitbarts and Huffington posts of the world for example).
There's no overlord trying to hide the conspiracies of the world, it's just bringing a much needed regulation to the news, as essential component to the modern democracy.
Who defines 'reasonable' when 'news' is inherently opinionated? The one with the deepest pockets for legal protection?
Who says that only 'businesses' are and should be the ones reporting news?
And who regulates the regulators?
Seriously.. EFF v ATT, for starters, along with any of the entirely half baked 1-sided, spin-laden 'real news' that is coming out of just about any major entity these days..
That's what I'm afraid of. Google doing the same kind of BS "due diligence" and then forbidding counter opinions (the equivalent of "no WMDs" in 2003) as fake news.
>There's no overlord trying to hide the conspiracies of the world
No, just many private interests that treat each other well...
If you opinion is so unsupported that it fails basic due diligence, it shouldn't be appearing with equal weight to the supported thought. And we should continue to hold aggregators responsible for letting that shit filter to the top. Googling "food that cures cancer" should result in "No food cures cancer go talk to your oncologist" not "list of top ten super foods" from blogspam site number N; Googling "did the Holocaust happen" should result in "yes" not a link to stormfront.
I agree there certainly is a grey area when deciding on public "fact" in developing issues or contriversal subjects; but there are plenty of things far and away from that grey area and to pretend they aren't is worse than censorship. By treating valid information with the same weight as invalid information you've removed people's ability to find the facts even more effectively than if you tried to censor them (given how terrible attempts at censorship have been in the past, I wouldn't be surprised to see tyrants move to this form of information suppression).
There are things that are obviously false, but probably harmless enough.
Hooray for automation.
Well, it being "the closest thing to a public utility" as I wrote, means for billions of people it will be THE arbiter -- or at least an arbiter they'd have to deal with.
no reason my search algorithm can't be tunable..
Whenever you type a search query, the first thing Google does is ask to track your location. When they finally display the results, greater than 50% of the page is "for sale", so to speak. That, I would argue, is not the sign of a company who is interested in giving you accurate results. They are more interested in pushing products, to get you to buy something. That would make sense for a company like Amazon, but with Amazon, there is no pretense.
On top of that, their primary means of filtering information is using signals influenced heavily by either paid actors or lay persons clicking on results. If Google themselves conducted an objective inquiry, they would have to shed tons of advertisers because a lot of advertising is inherently deceptive.
>I think Google Search is a net benefit to society even if it's run by an advertising company
I think the opposite. Its hard to click on any Google result and not find a website that is plastered with Google ads. That certainly is not entirely Google's fault (although I sometimes wonder if they rank pages with Google ads higher than non-Google ads) but they've shown to the industry that you can make billions of dollars by pimping out user data to advertisers. People get up in arms when the Uber app tracks your location after you close it, meanwhile the majority of android phones are tracking every aspect of your life.
FWIW: I have many positive things to say about Google too, but I don't believe in fake neutrality where you're forced to say something nice when you criticize something.
Google wants to put the responsibility of evaluating an advertisement onto its users, if they are so concerned about erroneous search results, they should first put a fact-check box next to their ads. Adopting a hands-off strategy when it comes to their revenue and a hands-on strategy when it comes to their perceived ideology is hypocritical at best.
This sort of unfettered free speech that people want is libertarian idealism. This was never what the founding fathers intended when they described free speech.
When people advocate for that kind of free speech, I always think "why, for what purpose." If it's worry that Google might block stories based on it's interest, they already have that power now - they can put search penalties on or even kick out (as they did in the case of 8chan) sites entirely from their results.
If they act irresponsibly with regard to that, people can choose alternative web searches.
So why protest them actually trying, and in this case doing literally the least they can do, to stop the spread of hate speech.
Then let them. If you try and censor their views then you give them credibility and people think "well there must be something to this ideology if the establishment doesn't want me to access this information". Better to let them spout their nonsense for everyone to see, and then contrast it with a more logical position.
I mean, are you saying that, if you personally knew neo-nazi stuff was suddenly being filtered out, you'd start to wonder if they were onto something good?
Yeah, because fringe groups never got any gravitas from being persecuted (or perceived as persecuted).
In fact that's exactly what gave Hitler early publicity: his imprisonment after his failed coup -- which let him write a popular then book to detail his persecutions from the state and his "enemies".
Maybe some people find a morbid attracting to them as a result of them being forbidden just for this reason. But for the large majority, this has not happened.
Absolutely I would. Even if I would not have looked at it before. If the powers that be were trying to keep information from me, I would very much like to know why.
Are you saying that if chunks of the internet were purged, and public figures were blacklisted, you would just be ok with that? If anything, I would go out of my way to seek out what is being kept from me.
What if your blog were blacklisted, because you were accused of being a "Nazi". Do you just think that people would listen to you if you swore that there had been a mistake? Why?
Why is the assumption always made that censorship will be applied in this crazy random arbitrary fashion. Is there any evidence that censorship always happens that way and isnt properly targeted to actual hate speech.
This may affect legitimate speech isnt a very powerful argument because legitimate speech can be differentiated from hate speech. I can tell the difference between a neo-nazi and someone who is merely critical of Israels policies and I feel sorry for those who cant differentiate.
As for public figures, if there are public figures who are actively spreading hate speech, yes censor them too. I would not shed a tear if Don Black and stormfront were censored from the web. In fact I think it would make the world a better place to be rid of giving their toxic views a public platform.
So the alternative is free speech? And we should "think of the children"?
Merely attaching the words free speech to something doesn't automatically make it okay.
There's a law to take down child porn already -- we're not discussing that, and we don't need an extra law with vague and unrelated powers to censor stuff, to tackle that.
Fringe activities exactly what we are talking about censoring. Google is not talking about censoring eveyrday speech, they're talking about targeting and getting rid of the fringe activities like hate speech.
Nobody is advocating preventing ordinary discourse like criticizing Trump or being pro Trump etc. They are talking about getting rid of speech like neo nazi speech, terrorist recruitment speech, child endangerment/exploitation speech.
For example in France, during an election campaign, official media must strive to share equally the "speaking time" between candidates. And while social networks, with subsidiaries in France, have a more and more prominent role in the information bubble of citizens, they currently ignore this regulation in their automated recommendations.
I experienced it myself some days ago, while looking for some videos about French candidates on youtube, I was persistently recommended some videos for a specific candidate by youtube's recommendation algorithm.
I was apparently not the only one to notice that, as some people even conducted automated tests [1] :
"Mélenchon, Le Pen and Asselineau make up nearly 60 percent of the candidates that are mentioned in the titles of the most recommended videos. It is particularly surprising for Asselineau to be recommended so much because he received less than 1 percent of voter preferences in the latest polls.
Perhaps predictably, each of these three candidates is the top recommended candidate when searching for their name. However, we have found that starting from a search of any other candidate, these three candidates are still the most recommended"
Theses 3 candidates are highly active on social networks, but also pro-frexit and often categorized as populist.
[1] http://algotransparency.org/en/presse.html
what about the news that the majority would rather was fake?
you're all idiots.
Fiction that purports to be news poses a far greater threat to democratic institutions, especially when it is targeted (and therefore invisible to the normal editorial controls). A mis- or dis- informed populace empowers people that worsen the core systemic problems that hate speech is a symptom of. But in this case, too, there is also an historic, market-based mechanism for combating it: editors. But unlike with hate speech, where Internet communities can enforce norms that determine inclusion, the Internet has no built-in editorial controls.
But, yes, I think it's a huge political mistake to tie these concepts in this way (or even to use the term "fake news" at all, at this point). Regardless of the motives or actual content of the workshops, imagine how someone on the right will (not entirely unjustifiably) view a headline like this.
Your argument that fake news is more dangerous makes sense, but it's not hard to argue the other way. Hate speech causes suicides, while fake news only causes temporary misinformation. Hate speech makes people withdraw from society and public life, driving them out of democratic institutions. Fake news usually just lets people hear what they want to hear, confirming beliefs they already had. The "victims" of fake news are actively seeking it out, while the victims of hate speech are being attacked.
Maybe that's not completely convincing, but hopefully you see what I mean. We already have lots of controls on free speech, are there any intrinsic reasons you think hate speech and fake news are categorically different?
My 2 cents: drop the term "fake news" entirely and switch to a less vague euphemism like "hoax mills" or something. Switching the mental frame to some clearly shady, unknown "news" website/company that pumps out nothing but hoax or highly exaggerated stories will make discussions about how to deal with it less contentious. "Stop the proliferation and revenue sources of hoax mills" reads way better than "tackle fake news".
This is a place Google rightly can and should responsibly step in (just like how they try to keep blatant scams and malware/phishing sites from first page search results). People just need to all be on the same page about what, specifically, Google is trying to stop.