This headline was somewhat misleading for me. I interpreted it as some kind of potentially undesirable filter on an existing feature, but it's just an additional command.
The feature is essentially "Hey Google, tell me something good" and Assistant reads out a positive news story. I asked twice and it told me a story about Parkinson's research and how Utah reduced chronic homelessness. It seems like a feature of questionable usefulness but neat nonetheless.
Different economics for adding this as an action to Assistant. I'm sure Google will be able to tell from adoption numbers whether this isn't worth maintaining.
> The stories are selected and summarized by the nonpartisan nonprofit Solutions Journalism Network, an organization that helps train journalists to better cover how people are responding to problems and how those actions can have positive results.
How can that organization be nonpartisan when one of the founder is: "Courtney E. Martin is an American feminist, author, speaker, and social and political activist" [1] Like I said I have zero faith in Google presenting me not biased, self-interested news.
I find it very unsettling that search engines seem to be filtering information based on its knowledge of the user. I understand the article describes a different feature that does basically some kind of mood analysis that does not require the knowledge of the user and, at least currently, must be explicitly invoked by the user.
I have noticed that at some point search engines like Google or Youtube started only showing me results that match my political views. It was actually quite difficult to find any opposing view points.
Now, I think this leads to radicalization as people are further "strengthened" in their opinions seeing that "the Internet agrees" with them.
But that has political consequences, so in a way it’s a political agenda. Like, if you drive 120mph on city streets, you have a collision agenda, whether that was your intent or not.
I agree that there are consequences. Whether it rises to the level of negligence as in your example is debatable. And I think that debate is going on as more and more people are talking about and becoming aware of the societal impact of social media.
It may not be political agenda but it has consequences. If left only sees left opinions and right only sees right opinions, how people are to agree on anything if they are never exposed to arguments from other side?
As bad as people are at being unbiased, this is only making things worse, on gigantic scale.
That dude, literally that dude, showed up in my recommendations pretty regularly until I explicitly blocked him. Now I get fellow chuds like Sargon of Akkad and the like; I have to "nope" at least one fascist or at the minimum white-supremacist channel out of my recommendations a week.
Hi, I know you're probably just being facetious, but I think it's important to be clear that most Right channels on Youtube aren't fascist or white-supremacist. Calling anyone with a right leaning viewpoint a fascist ultimately dilutes the meaning of the word until people are okay with it. We've already seen this happen with racist, where even normal people nowadays will joke that they're probably being 'racist' by it's modern overblown definition.
(And to the--edit: before looking at his comments, I said "well-meaning" here, I retract that--hellbanned poster who replied to me: I am not being facetious, I am being descriptive. Homeboys thinking Nazis had some good points are very comfortably called fascist, thanksforplaying.)
Wow. Now they're proud of putting people into information bubbles. This company is showing more and more how disconnected they are from reality and why people are starting not to trust them anymore.
It's not clear to me how this new option is putting people in an "information bubble" any more than a person deciding to buy a copy of "Chicken Soup For the Soul" instead of "Mindhunter." Can you clarify?
Google is deciding that they can know what good news is. Facebook/Google have never tried to put people in information bubbles they just create the systems that enable people to do it to themselves. Everything is avoidable online, but we keep making it harder and harder for people to remain unbiased and share common truths.
Let me tell you a story of one of the largest news portals in Brazil, ig.com.br.
At the time, it was run by a very clever guy who came from the advertising world. He came up with an idea, the "Good News Day". It was to be tied to some ad campaign I don't quite remember now, but it was a day when the news portal could only publish good news.
The editorial staff protested, of course. It's their job to offer news as factually correct and unbiased as humanly possible and they were very unhappy with the idea. In the end, however they relented.
It was about 4AM when a mayoral candidate from a city near São Paulo, was murdered, seemingly for political reasons. Under protests, they held the release.
By 10 AM a plane hit the World Trade Center.
At that point they just published everything and completely ignored the directive. Nothing similar was ever issued again.
To this day, the people who were there regard such initiatives as extremely dangerous.
> So people in Brazil won't know about 9/11(maybe the biggest news event in recent history), for a day. how is it dangerous ?
Well, how many people in Brazil had relatives in NYC? Proportionally speaking not many, I'm sure. But some. And their news provider would have overwhelmingly let them down that day. If you move the same principle to an NYC news provider it would be a catastrophic service failure.
Yes, but I'm talking about this as a general principle (as is the person I replied to I assume, given that he said "people in Brazil won't know about 9/11", not "people in Brazil will need to find an alternative news source to find out about 9/11".
I hate to be the Debbie Downer of spacetime and causality observation, but if I were in Brazil and had relatives in NYC, there's absolutely nothing that knowing about the 9/11 attacks occurring sooner could have done for me other than given me additional hours to wait anxiously for news from my loved ones.
Phone lines were jammed into the city (including cellular, because the circuits were saturated), and nobody was flying in or out of NYC. So unless someone in Brazil is secretly Clark Kent, there's 100% nothing they could've done to help or hinder the fate of the 9/11 victims in the hours after the attacks.
There's a balance. Many things in the news are depressing and completely irrelevant to 99.9% of people's lives. That kind of news isn't really necessary.
For example, it is not at all relevant to me to know about when a mother murders her two children, but it definitely has a negative impact on my psyche.
While this is a very interesting story in more than one way, and I'm not big on news shaping by editor to tell an overall story rather than give facts, here is how your story doesn't relate to the google feature discussed here: the good news feature doesn't replace the user news, but is specifically requested by the user on each run, by asking specifically for the good news list.
So if someone checked their news on it on that terrible day, they would see both event. If they felt very depressed about it and needed to cheer themselves up, they could ask for a good news of the day; something that they certainly couldn't find on regular news system of the time since the WTC is all they talked about for days.
I agree it shouldn't be controversial, but you seem to also think there shouldn't be an article at all? I think it's newsworthy - it's not major news, but it's a useful thing to know for at least some people.
I haven't found feature discovery to be one of the assistant's strong points, so little articles like this help with that.
Great story, however, I am afraid, not at all relevant to this product. This Google Assistant feature is supposed to surface "solutions journalism" pieces where the article not only talks about the problems but also potential solutions that are being tested or successfully applied elsewhere.
So the stories are "good" not in the sense of not covering disturbing events but they are "good" in the sense that they offer solutions or ways out of problems. It is not about "what" is covered but more about "how" it is covered.
I’d actually really like a news media that focused on positive stuff, but also brought the important bad stuff. But 90% of what’s on the 24/7 news sources is currently stuff I didn’t really need to know, so it might as well be less tragic.
While your point is true; that filtering news can be dangerous, it's a bit disingenuous for this post. The option to filter to only positive news is a good option.
Users are usually presented news as if it's "unfiltered", but editors chose the stories. It's the illusion of reality when it's actually a constructed narrative. Giving users the option to change the narrative gives perspective on how those narratives are structured.
Back in the nineties, a journalism professor told our class about an experiment where a local American newspaper tried to publish some minimum percentage of "good news," and their readership tanked.
I cannot find a reference to this story, but a Russian paper tried a similar thing about ten years ago with similar results.
This is absolutely terrible idea. Studies should be conducted regarding curation of content. As we learned recently, what you read briefly online can change the entire world.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadThe feature is essentially "Hey Google, tell me something good" and Assistant reads out a positive news story. I asked twice and it told me a story about Parkinson's research and how Utah reduced chronic homelessness. It seems like a feature of questionable usefulness but neat nonetheless.
https://qz.com/307214/heres-what-happened-when-a-news-site-o...
> The stories are selected and summarized by the nonpartisan nonprofit Solutions Journalism Network, an organization that helps train journalists to better cover how people are responding to problems and how those actions can have positive results.
Google is not choosing the stories.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtney_E._Martin
This is not targeted at any particular side; I see all sides use the term this way.
I have noticed that at some point search engines like Google or Youtube started only showing me results that match my political views. It was actually quite difficult to find any opposing view points.
Now, I think this leads to radicalization as people are further "strengthened" in their opinions seeing that "the Internet agrees" with them.
As bad as people are at being unbiased, this is only making things worse, on gigantic scale.
They involve guys like the one who's a subject of this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahuj1B0ow4U
That dude, literally that dude, showed up in my recommendations pretty regularly until I explicitly blocked him. Now I get fellow chuds like Sargon of Akkad and the like; I have to "nope" at least one fascist or at the minimum white-supremacist channel out of my recommendations a week.
"To activate the feature, Assistant users in the U.S. can say, “Hey Google, tell me something good” to kick off the daily briefing of happy stories."
This is NOT a filter Google puts on your news intake. It IS a gimmick that people can activate like asking it to tell you a joke.
I would LOVE a feature to disable these types of headlines, this certainly IS NOT it.
At the time, it was run by a very clever guy who came from the advertising world. He came up with an idea, the "Good News Day". It was to be tied to some ad campaign I don't quite remember now, but it was a day when the news portal could only publish good news.
The editorial staff protested, of course. It's their job to offer news as factually correct and unbiased as humanly possible and they were very unhappy with the idea. In the end, however they relented.
It was about 4AM when a mayoral candidate from a city near São Paulo, was murdered, seemingly for political reasons. Under protests, they held the release.
By 10 AM a plane hit the World Trade Center.
At that point they just published everything and completely ignored the directive. Nothing similar was ever issued again.
To this day, the people who were there regard such initiatives as extremely dangerous.
And i say that as an Israeli, we don't lack drama in our news.I don't listen to the news, and i don't feel i'm risking myself.
Well, how many people in Brazil had relatives in NYC? Proportionally speaking not many, I'm sure. But some. And their news provider would have overwhelmingly let them down that day. If you move the same principle to an NYC news provider it would be a catastrophic service failure.
Phone lines were jammed into the city (including cellular, because the circuits were saturated), and nobody was flying in or out of NYC. So unless someone in Brazil is secretly Clark Kent, there's 100% nothing they could've done to help or hinder the fate of the 9/11 victims in the hours after the attacks.
For example, it is not at all relevant to me to know about when a mother murders her two children, but it definitely has a negative impact on my psyche.
So if someone checked their news on it on that terrible day, they would see both event. If they felt very depressed about it and needed to cheer themselves up, they could ask for a good news of the day; something that they certainly couldn't find on regular news system of the time since the WTC is all they talked about for days.
I haven't found feature discovery to be one of the assistant's strong points, so little articles like this help with that.
So the stories are "good" not in the sense of not covering disturbing events but they are "good" in the sense that they offer solutions or ways out of problems. It is not about "what" is covered but more about "how" it is covered.
Users are usually presented news as if it's "unfiltered", but editors chose the stories. It's the illusion of reality when it's actually a constructed narrative. Giving users the option to change the narrative gives perspective on how those narratives are structured.
I cannot find a reference to this story, but a Russian paper tried a similar thing about ten years ago with similar results.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8702807