<story><title>Google promoted Texas gunman fake tweets</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41915065</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colemannugent</author><text>My summary of the article: An algorithm designed by Google engineers to promote upcoming stories does exactly what it was supposed to do, and people who don&amp;#x27;t understand why Google employees did not manually review just one out of one hundred thousand things that the search engine indexed that day are suprised.&lt;p&gt;Google Search is a content aggregator that show you what it thinks you are most likely to click on. It does not know about politics, it cannot fact check, it does not think care about effort journalism, the only thing that matters is what stories generate more ad revenue.&lt;p&gt;Of course, Google will try to police its results better after this incident, but they can&amp;#x27;t effectively do this without mass censorship. If you don&amp;#x27;t believe me, see the recent YouTube drama over monetization.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kadenshep</author><text>&amp;gt;Google will try to police its results better after this incident, but they can&amp;#x27;t effectively do this without mass censorship.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not mass censorship. It&amp;#x27;s editorialization. Something we&amp;#x27;ve lost an appreciation for in our fetishization of a dystopian future that&amp;#x27;s always just over the horizon.&lt;p&gt;Facebook tried doing this to combat &lt;i&gt;actual&lt;/i&gt; fake news (the one that ironically comes from the political segment in the U.S. most likely to cry wolf about it). This process was then characterized as facebook policing political content in a biased manner -- despite the fact that blatantly false content happened to continually come from sources with a conservative bent more often than not, which isn&amp;#x27;t Facebook&amp;#x27;s problem to deal with.&lt;p&gt;Point being, it&amp;#x27;s not censorship. And I wish any attempt to fight false information wasn&amp;#x27;t disingenuously painted as these organizations having some kind of political agenda or as &amp;quot;censorship&amp;quot;. We need content aggregators of every kind (facebook, google, reddit, and even HN) to be more editorial, especially and specifically when content is presented in a manner that might help how credible that content looks. This whole wish-washy &amp;quot;oh just let the people decide what they wanna see, it&amp;#x27;ll work out in the end&amp;quot; with a nice touch of &amp;quot;all opinions matter&amp;quot; clearly hasn&amp;#x27;t and isn&amp;#x27;t working.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google promoted Texas gunman fake tweets</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41915065</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colemannugent</author><text>My summary of the article: An algorithm designed by Google engineers to promote upcoming stories does exactly what it was supposed to do, and people who don&amp;#x27;t understand why Google employees did not manually review just one out of one hundred thousand things that the search engine indexed that day are suprised.&lt;p&gt;Google Search is a content aggregator that show you what it thinks you are most likely to click on. It does not know about politics, it cannot fact check, it does not think care about effort journalism, the only thing that matters is what stories generate more ad revenue.&lt;p&gt;Of course, Google will try to police its results better after this incident, but they can&amp;#x27;t effectively do this without mass censorship. If you don&amp;#x27;t believe me, see the recent YouTube drama over monetization.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrtksn</author><text>You forget the part where the aggregated content is displayed in a different context than the one it is created for.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s perceived as an factual answer to a question because it shows up when googled with keywords other than &amp;quot;Popular on Twitter&amp;quot; : &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;justinhendrix&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;927335154707828736&amp;#x2F;photo&amp;#x2F;1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;justinhendrix&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;927335154707828736&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;When you see these tweets on Twitter, you&amp;#x27;ll quickly identify them as fake due to the context. On Google on the other hand you will see the false statements but these false statements would not be corrected if these tweets were not the exact content you&amp;#x27;re looking for and you just consumed them and moved on to the content you were searching.</text></comment>