I must be doing something right (by my standards) or wrong (by Google's standards) as I never see this carousel of crap and hopefully, I never will. It's hard enough to avoid all the BS the web tosses at users as it is. For them to continue this trend of tossing crap is unconscionable. Their defense of it, even more so.
Google, Twitter gleefully spew Texas shooter fake news into netizens' eyes
Following the murder-suicide of 26 people in church on Sunday by Texas gunman Devin Kelley, ad giant Google managed to shoot itself in the foot by promoting fake news about the 26-year-old. As countless internet users noticed Monday morning, a search for the gunman's name on Google brought up a special "carousel" of tweets …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 7th November 2017 10:32 GMT John Robson
Google, Twitter, Trump....
We need to go back to a time when people took thirty seconds to check their sources. Have some news organisations who are more interested in accurate reporting than in being first to publish...
(Heck even a news organisation that rates their own articles as 'rush job', 'cursory sanity check', 'got told twice', 'actually asked someone', 'have a trusted source', 'verified by talking to someone directly involved')
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Tuesday 7th November 2017 20:35 GMT bombastic bob
"The solution is more guns."
As demonstrated by the man from across the street, who grabbed his ASSAULT RIFLE and put it to good use, no doubt saving lives in the process. I only wish that some 'cowboy' had been attending church that day, with pistols on his hips. Maybe then even MORE people would've been spared.
also heard today that the mass murderer had escaped from a mental institution for criminally insane people in 2012, after beating his wife (radio report). The list of "wrong things" with this "worm feeder" just goes on and on. But I'd rather he had lived and been arrested. Going through court (and then prison) would be more difficult to deal with than offing himself (the coward's way out). And being in Texas, they probably would've executed him, after a nice long trial (and some time on death row) in which he gets to reflect on how he ended up there..
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Sunday 12th November 2017 13:58 GMT TheVogon
"As demonstrated by the man from across the street, who grabbed his ASSAULT RIFLE and put it to good use, no doubt saving lives in the process."
No, the massacre was over by then - the guy was trying to escape - and killed himself anyway so it saved no one. It just created a cross fire that could easily have hit a bystander. The primary thing that would likely have prevented this would have been less easy access to firearms.
nb - at least 2 US based studies have also shown that having a firearm in your household INCREASES the risk of death by firearms to everyone in it!
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Tuesday 7th November 2017 20:39 GMT bombastic bob
Re: Optional
"So should everyone else."
Agreed. but probably not for the same reasons you were thinking of.
[there have been a large number of them that have been 'later proven right' after being blasted by the lame-stream media. Had THEY done some 'fact checking' they wouldn't have been able to drag out the fake news over what they simply disagreed with]
Of course, the occasional 'covfefe' tweet makes for a nice laugh. Best not to 'nod off' while typing and accidentally hit 'send'. When you consider how tiny the edit text is for 'El Reg', 1/2 the size of the rest of the text on the web page, I make typing mistakes a LOT, and have to post-edit everything.
So yeah, I can identify with the 'covfefe' thing. It's kinda funy, too.
(spelling error deliberate to make a point)
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Tuesday 7th November 2017 14:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
I'll have to ask my father-in-law....
.... who once lent us a VHS tape labelled "Dinosaurs", with a program matching the tile, when my kids were small. At the end though, was the remaining portion of the "Playboy Channel" program he had taped over and forgotten about That became "Daddy's Dinosaur tape". I still have it, if only I had a VHS machine on which to play it.
AC to protect the innocent.
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Monday 6th November 2017 23:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The weak of mind believe this stuff
More likely Alex Jones STARTED it, rather than parroted it.
The problem here is that people who like the mislead the public have caught on that if they tweet lies that are what a lot of people want to hear, there will be enough retweets that it will:
1) be assumed to be fact by millions because they will have "seen it from multiple sources" so when the mainstream media reports differently it is seen as "fake news"
2) Fakes out and overwhelms google and twitter's algorithms, so manual intervention is required to remove the bullshit.
Every time there's a mass shooting the alt right fringe figures like Jones push memes that the shooter was a liberal to push their meme that liberals are evil incarnate. He was given a dishonorable discharge from the Navy for hitting his wife and cracking the skull of his 11 month old daughter, and attacked the church because that's where his in-laws went and he apparently had it in for his mother-in-law. His politics are irrelevant, this was personal.
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Tuesday 7th November 2017 22:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The weak of mind believe this stuff
How is getting a minor and irrelevant detail accidentally wrong "fake news"? Fake news is all about deliberate lying to push a viewpoint - like right wing fringe figures falsely claiming the shooter was a Bernie supporter in order to push the 'liberal nutjob' meme.
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Monday 6th November 2017 22:12 GMT Palpy
In the town where I live --
-- we have a large university with a good journalism program. Students learn, among other things, that journalists must verify their articles, justify their sources -- and, if sources are anonymous, use multiple checks on material -- and clearly identify which articles are factual and which are meant as opinion pieces.
And professional journalists often get fired if they fabricate information or sources.
Not so with Alex Jones. Or Bill O'Reilly -- it took exposure as a sexual predator to get him fired. These guys are fabulists, not journalists. As the Book says, the truth is not in them.
So when someone writes that they "don't trust the mainstream media" I think, If you don't get information from evidence-based journalism, where DO you get information about the wider world? Unsubstantiated, unsourced rumors and bloggers' bullshit? Evidence-free tweets and fake Facebook junk dreamed up by teenagers in Macedonia and Ukraine? Alt-news sites that claim there is oil on the moon and Sharia'ah law in Chicago?
It's bemusing. And, apparently, there are enough fact-free voters in the US to influence elections -- a development which bodes ill for rational governance. Or even a modicum of rationality in national decision-making. Beer, however, seems to be getting better and better.
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Monday 6th November 2017 22:30 GMT Lysenko
Re: In the town where I live --
DevOps journalism doesn't need any QA or verification staging. The priority is to shove crap through the continuous delivery pipeline as fast as possible in case you get beaten to the punch by the competition. It doesn't matter if your product is rubbish, you just need to make sure the sprint gets signed off on schedule. "Mean time to remediate" is the metric de jour remember. "QA", "verification" and "ship to a quality standard, not to a schedule" are so 20th century.
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Monday 6th November 2017 23:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: In the town where I live --
That's why bloggers and talk show hosts shouldn't be equated with journalists, because they aren't interested in facts, only in getting people to believe what they want. Depending on the blogger / show sometimes it might be the truth, or a slanted version of the truth, sometimes it is lies fabricated from whole cloth. Too many people only want to hear things that confirm what they already believe.
If they think liberals are evil, a false story about the mass shooter that tells them that is welcome. If it turned out the mass shooter was a Trump volunteer and went to his rallies, that would not be what they want to hear. So why not get the lie out now that "he's a liberal" in case it turns out otherwise and that gets reported in the press - then those who have already been told he's a liberal would see the claim he was a Trump supporter as "fake news". That would confirm what they've already been told - that the mainstream media owned by liberals and lies about everything. It becomes a self-perpetuating circle.
Though as I said above, this shooter's motivation was entirely personal, and his politics - whatever they were - are irrelevant since they weren't a motivation for his actions at least based on what I've read about so it far.
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Tuesday 7th November 2017 00:59 GMT Alistair
Re: In the town where I live --
There are enough fact free folks all over the world to have precipitated several measles outbreaks in the last 4 years because "vaccines cause.......<insert dog whistle of choice>"
While the garbage floats to the top (see Caribbean plastic slick) has been around as a physics principle since time immemorial, and thus the Google algorithm suffering from this principle, what society (at least most of the G40 societies) had was a reasonable level of bullshit detection. Sadly, that tool seems to be in *very* short supply lately. For several years. Perhaps a decade or two. Sadly, this affect is spreading to some small corners of the Reg Commentariat.
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Tuesday 7th November 2017 02:50 GMT Palpy
Re: Measles and vaccines...
... Ooo, you ought to hear my Darling Better Half on that one! She teaches health and phys ed at university, and by the Eggs of the Elder Ones, you best have done research before you argue vaccines and herd immunity with her. I get my shots (I would anyway, but she makes sure).
It's peculiar. I inveigh against non-evidential thinking, but I know I don't avoid it completely myself. Few can, I think. But those who suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect do not even know that they lack knowledge, while I'm damned sure I am ignorant about many things. And therefore I had best check sources and research before I go swallowing large gobs of opinion which may have sharp fishhooks in them.
I don't know... my Dad's generation seemed to have this more under control. Or maybe it was just him. And his brothers. Not sure. Every generation, as they age toward senescence, bemoan the generation that replaces them. O tempora o mores, and all that.
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Tuesday 7th November 2017 05:34 GMT Eddy Ito
Re: Measles and vaccines...
Funny thing about "Dad's generation", at least in the US, the reason they had a better grip on things was likely because they didn't have to deal with their nerves being rubbed raw with various forms of nonsense like goop glop, breatharianism, and the death of the melting pot. Besides, everyone was too busy chasing commies and practicing the duck and cover.
Maybe less acute minds need to have something to focus on in order to avoid going down the cow patty path of mental masturbation that leads to a hypersensitivity to rational thought that causes orgasmic outbursts claiming the moral high ground based on being offended by the possibility of being wrong.
Hmm, that was a bit longer than planned.
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Tuesday 7th November 2017 07:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Measles and vaccines...
Your Dad's generation had MSM to filter out the crap. Now it's practically all bullshit all the time.
Yes, pretty much this. Back in the day Alex Jones would have a newsletter you had to subscribe to, so he would only have 3000 mouth breathers digesting his daily bullshit. Now he reaches millions, and the less crazy but still well into the realm of alternative facts sites like Breitbart have provided an outlet for conservatives who felt Fox News was too mainstream (though since Trump's nomination it has abandoned all illusions of being a news outlet and is now basically the US equivalent of state run media for Trump)
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Tuesday 7th November 2017 07:02 GMT Lysenko
Re: Measles and vaccines...
didn't have to deal with their nerves being rubbed raw with various forms of nonsense like goop glop, breatharianism
You seem to be forgetting the history of Snake Oil and this famous aphorism, not to mention all manner of religiously framed imbecility.
Ubiquitous bovine byproduct isn't new, it is the militantly anti-intellectual assumption that "expert" is a synonym for "liar" that has changed. The old patent medicine peddlers used fake qualifications and educational histories to fool the rubes whereas their modern counterparts succeed with the exact opposite strategy. Even if you were touting something as ludicrous as homeopathy you needed to claim to had studied at a monastery in Tibet: now you just need to cite a three year posting history on mumsnet.
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Tuesday 7th November 2017 13:58 GMT strum
Dad's generation
There was just as much crap/fake news around in the old days - but it was 'a bloke I met in the pub' or 'a chick I met at a Grateful Dead gig'. You heard it once and it was gone (except for Marianne Faithful and the Mars bar - which lasted for decades).
Today's fake news is relentless, hammering into our brains on an hourly basis. And it's intended to mislead (whereas old-time gossip was only intended to be interesting).
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Wednesday 8th November 2017 18:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Dad's generation
The news was accurate - they reported what McCarthy said. Now McCarthy could be wrong or lying, just like Trump could be wrong or lying when he says "no Russian collusion".
Where the news helps the process of separating fact from fiction is when they do investigate reporting - let's see if we can find any evidence of all these communists in the state department, or of Russian collusion.
Nixon would have finished his second term if it wasn't for Woodward and Bernstein. Usually they don't have quite THAT big an impact, but every little piece either shines a light and shows where criminal investigation by the FBI and/or fact-finding by congressional oversight committees is necessary, or potentially helps them along by uncovering something they weren't aware of.
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Monday 6th November 2017 22:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
"represent a dynamic conversation that is going on in near real-time"
A "conversation" is not a ringside seat to a collection of trolls shouting abuse and lies as they game Google's deliberately-feeble filters. In the real world we'd call that "a disgraceful imposition, excused by smarmy yes-men"
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Monday 6th November 2017 22:38 GMT Daggerchild
The sacrifice must enter of its own free will
So, people don't like what they see in the metal mirror, eh? Well, we both know which side is solely responsible for changing that.
So, this realtime zeitgeist modification engine that people are talking about:
a) - it exists, is run by evil corporations, and should be destroyed
b) - it exists, is run by evil corporations, and should be given to $trustworthy_unbiased_imaginary_algorithm
c) - doesn't exist, and shouldn't exist, because a)
d) - doesn't exist, and should exist, because humanity needs to be protected
d) - doesn't exist, and should exist, because humanity needs to be censored
e) - doesn't exist, and won't work, because objectivity isn't even a human thing, let alone an algorithm.
f) - doesn't exist, won't work, but will be forced to exist anyway, whereupon everyone and everything will fight over control of it, forever.
The only way you'd get anything approaching a reasonable filter is to tag sources and readers with their various viewpoint polarities, to keep dissonant realities apart, which would of course just create unchallenged singularities which would then tear at the fabric of reality, AND mean everyone just handed over their own psych profile.
I prefer the unvarnished truth, with polarity tags/magnitudes/controls, so I can make my own filter, which will never happen.
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Tuesday 7th November 2017 09:28 GMT RyokuMas
... the biz is still refusing to accept its responsibilities and obligations as a de facto publisher.
That's because Google is, was and always will be an advertising company. It doesn't care if what it shows is factually accurate, as long as it generates clicks that can be tracked and/or earn revenue.
The problem we now face is what can be done about this. Google's potential to control information is on a level where they can effectively ignore this responsibility, should they so desire - between lobbying power, friends in the right places and a legal team that can tie process up in knots for years, it will take someone with a huge level of clout - as in EU or US government - to bring them back under control.