Look, I am all game for attacking fake news. However, this seems to me like a blanket ban which could apply to anyone. For example, Fox News has a slant which one could consider highly misleading. Would they get de-ranked too?
Wouldn't a better solution be to identify the claims in the article and automatically alert the reader that one or more claims have been debunked? Then let the user decide?
Google makes no illusion about it any longer, they aim to curate what their users have access to and want to ensure that the curation conforms to an acceptable spectrum of thought.
They are in the business of feeding users advertisements and information, and hitherto that has benefited users with easier access to the world's full breadth of information and ideas. That era is drawing to a close.
Obviously this is a lazier approach than others that could be taken, but I do think that it's completely fair that a state run news agency would be given less inherent credibility on a wide range of topics(read: any that might effect the nation in a positive/negative way.) How can you guarantee the objectivity of a by-design mouthpiece for a government? You can't.
I'd be the last person to defend RT, but the cost/benefit of blacklisting such a site belies atrocious foresight. Google is opening up a huge can of worms for what will be very little gain in terms of improving the signal-to-noise ratio of mass media consumption.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter are all doing a very poor job of countering the backlash on Capitol Hill. That's partly their own doing as they willfully perpetuated the myth of the magic of their technology. But rather than reign in the misperceptions they're doubling down to save face and making very concrete, very stupid promises.
The BBC are awful. The way they covered Corbyn in the last election was sick and horrifying. They are no longer the example to use in these situations, if they ever really were.
A couple of days ago Alexa gave me a BBC briefing where the newsreader referred to 'President Xi' and 'Mister Trump'. They're not even trying to hide it at this point.
So I expect you'd support banning NPR, BBC, ABC Australia, NHK, Al Jazeera, and the numerous other state run or funded news organizations? And what of news organization that could be shown to be willing to get in bed with government? This [1] video is of a hot mic moment between Bill Clinton and Larry King. It's from just before Clinton was elected, but has relevance today for rather self evident reasons.
- Larry King: It's crazy - Ted Turner changed the world. He's a big fan of yours.
- Bill Clinton: Is he?
- Larry King: He would, uh, serve you - you know what I mean?
- Bill Clinton: You're kiddin?
- Larry King: Oh you'd be surprised - he's ready what's he got left in life to gain? I'd call him after you're elected. Think about it.
The reality is that nearly all media today is spiraling towards partisan and biased tabloidism, and so this action seems completely arbitrary. We can try to spin it as being "election interference" but let's imagine we played a similar game as we have with Russia, with the UK. And we qualify anybody who posted on issues even tangentially related to the US election from an England IP, with an England phone number, etc as an "English agent." How many would there be? Or even vice versa how many "American agents" are there that tried to "influence" Brexit?
Unless there's any form of consistency and objectivity in these actions, this looks more like a witch hunt than anything else.
NPR Isn't a "state" funded organization. The vast majority of funding comes from listeners like you and corporations (not CPB). Republicans cut most of that funding remember?
How can you guaranteee the objectivity of a private, for-profit, media agency? If a company like Monsanto wanted to bury a story, I’m sure they wouldn’t have any issues knowing the right people in CNN and Fox to take out for dinner.
Just as an aside, if you'd asked me a decade ago whether Al-Jazeera would have the highest quality journalism of any institutional news source and superior to the BBC I would have probably suggested this was vanishingly unlikely.
Not sure I'd get my news on Qatar from that source though.
BBC is public service, not a British state propaganda outlet.
RT/Sputnik etc are state sponsored channels. A public service outlet is critical of government, not its mouthpiece.
I think this should just be solved algorithmically. Google assigns importance to linked articles and if you assign massive negative importance to fake news outlets and articles then those who reference them or report the same things should drop in ranking.
Obviously you’ll need an army of people to decide what is fake news - but I think that’s unavoidable. I beyond the point where I think people can “see all the facts and decide for themselves what to believe in”. It’s unfortunate that we have to hope for some global megacorp to solve our news filtering so people don’t do stupid things.
I think the difference is that RT is literally registered as a foreign agent now, so everything they produce is actual propaganda in some form.
It doesn't mean that it is all fake news -- actually, the most dangerous articles are somewhat true but intentionally misleading or sensationalizing some component of a true story that helps Russia's cause.
This is precisely what people often claim of the New York Times Israel coverage. Should we de-rank it? I think the NYT is the best newspaper in the world but wouldn't dream of reading it uncritically...
> RT is literally registered as a foreign agent now
They were forced to register, AFAIK. I'm not sure how that proves anything. I mean, I know that RT is a propaganda outlet, but them complying with some law requiring registration is not proving anything - it's like saying "you paid taxes therefore you are a spy". Total non-sequitur.
> the most dangerous articles are somewhat true but intentionally misleading or sensationalizing some component
Which of course US press would never dream of doing. Have you watched any news recently?
When you say "better", remember to ask yourself, "better for who?" For you?
Honestly, I'm pretty sure Google doesn't care what would be better for you. You're a product, not a customer. Now, who is a customer, then? Usually, answer seems pretty obvious, but you couldn't answer it regarding this particular case, could you? It might be government, it might be some other company, it might be Schmidt himself for whatever reason…
And it seems to me, the fact you are being sold without even being able to tell who likely buys you anymore is even more noteworthy than the notion itself.
Fox News, being a stridently partisan media outlet, is a somewhat incendiary example (I edited that sentence a lot to take out more pointed insults about Fox News). A more neutral one is: imagine Google invests in Media Org A, and de-ranks competing Media Org B's sites. Bye bye, Media Org B.
We're ignoring the fact that there is an active malicious campaign by elements fueled by the Russian government in order to artificially inflate the visibility of news articles that the Russian government wants people to see. Deranking these articles in response is totally justifiable.
Well actually it has been so for a long time. And this is a good thing. There is only one reason why a country pays money to push news in anothet country. French television has been bannef in many African countries several times for the same reason. And many countries prevent their media from being bought by foreign agents.
Replace "Russian government" with the name of any news organization and your claim is (still) true. So your conclusion is based on the presupposition that the Russian government has such incredibly bad things to say that all the world's naive people need to be protected from it. Really? Are they spreading a new global communism ideal or something?
Fox News probably should get de-ranked, yes, in comparison to generally reputable and truthful right-leaning news sources like the Wall Street Journal.
It takes an incredible amount of chauvinism and arrogance to believe that the American people are too stupid to realize that perhaps a news source called "Russia Today" might publish articles that would reflect unflattering aspects of American society and unflattering stories about American politicians. If our domestic news outlets reported on these things there would have been no market share left to be grabbed by RT in the first place.
Schmidt seems to want to suppress such ideas, helping to suppress these unflattering stories so that the Al Frankens, Donald Trumps, and George HW Bushes of the world can stay in power.
As an aside, Schmidt is the ultimate establishment opportunist, so of course he would do this sort of thing. He cares only about making Eric Schmidt powerful.
> Wouldn't a better solution be to identify the claims in the article and automatically alert the reader that one or more claims have been debunked? Then let the user decide?
Of course that would be better. It would also be what a capable tech firm should do to help create an informed populace. But Schmidt doesn't want that, he simply wants to be viewed as one of the "good guys" by the partisans who are promoting the Russia story and trying to make political headway with it.
I have zero respect for Trump, but the Russia story is total bunk and RT has published more important stories about America's disadvantaged citizens and failing infrastructure than all of the major news outlets combined.
This also probably reveals that Google rankings can no longer be trusted simply to reveal pagerank results with corrections for spam and pagerank exploits.
Note to Google: We do not want you to be an information censor or a moderator of the ideas that we are exposed to. Please stop.
> Schmidt is the ultimate establishment opportunist,
It can also be seen as a business move. The perceived failure of the news media to convince people to vote for one candidate has left a void in the market. So now Google, Facebook, Twitter and others are racing to fill that void. They are signaling that they are willing and able to better target and manipulate public opinion than anyone else.
Does Google and others believe that lizard people stories and pictures of Hillary boxing with Jesus made a difference in the election? https://assets.pcmag.com/media/images/561223-an-example-of-r... Probably not. But the adherence to the story and the faithful reiteration is a good backdrop to signal a more important message to those willing to read between the lines.
> Schmidt seems to want to suppress such ideas, helping to suppress these unflattering stories so that the Al Frankens, Donald Trumps, and George HW Bushes of the world can stay in power. As an aside, Schmidt is the ultimate establishment opportunist, so of course he would do this sort of thing. He cares only about making Eric Schmidt powerful.
If you think that Schmidt and Google are the forces motivating viewpoint moderation and it's something they're foisting on the rest of the world, you clearly haven't paid even a second of attention to what's been going on.
Liberalism (in the classical sense) is _incredibly_ unpopular right now. There's been a constant drumbeat of articles (including all the ones that make it to HN's frontpage) about how modern-day content platform giants like FB and Google are being and make sure that legal but "bad" things like "fake news" need to be controlled and removed on their platforms. It hasn't been coming from inside these companies: it's been coming from journalists, politicians, and a host of other random (though sadly often influential) empty-headed loudmouths on Twitter.
> Note to Google: We do not want you to be an information censor or a moderator of the ideas that we are exposed to. Please stop.
Dude. Seriously. Read the news every once in a while. Half the country has been screaming at Google for not fulfilling _exactly_ this "responsibility". _You_ may not want them to be a viewpoint moderator/censor (and neither do I), but you're grossly misunderstanding the situation if you think this is a path that they're motivated to do by anything other than intense public and political pressure.
My take on it is that once a few non-techie people realized that Donald Trump's provocative statements were actually a strategy for controlling the news cycle via social media outrage, the focus turned to social media companies in the form of "how could you build a system that let this happen?"
So Facebook had to figure out a way to seem relatively innocent. It had been the major vector by which 10 minute wordpress articles with Times New Roman font face hosted on $10 fake news domains got thousands of shares. So it tabulated the amount of ad spend that had occurred in Russian currency and admitted that $160K of ads had been purchased by Russian actors.
Twitter realized that rather than reveal that a massive percentage of its accounts are bots, it ought to follow Facebook's lead, so it did a similar thing, canceling a small percentage of the fake accounts.
Yes, Google may have felt some pressure, but Google has a much better alibi. Pagerank is based on linking behavior which is much slower than social media, and is not designed simply to promote virality.
Imagine if pagerank worked like Facebook's algorithm, search would be useless but people would stay highly engaged while trying to search amid distracting and emotionally potent items turning up that they weren't actually looking for.
You are making the defense of Schmidt that some people make about IBM's selling equipment to the German government pre WW2.
Having been inside places like Google: yes, in the ways that are relevant. These people may not have as much effect on (e.g.) national elections, because they don't have nearly as much influence. But for places like Google, their press coverage and employees/candidate pools are disproportionately affected by said loudmouths. Again, anyone who's paying attention can't but have noticed that corporations have had to bow to demands from these lunatics.
You don't need much inside knowledge to see this in action: the ability of a trending topic to change corporate behavior has been established for years at this point. And as I said, for tech, this problem is particularly bad.
For a very recent example, consider the Damore memo as a recent example. Leaving aside what action you think should have been taken (_really_ not interested in that discussion right now), there was a marked shift in Google's reaction to the memo once it hit the idiots of the twitterati and blew up. PR matters to companies.
> It takes an incredible amount of chauvinism and arrogance to believe that the American people are too stupid to realize that perhaps a news source called "Russia Today" might publish articles that would reflect unflattering aspects of American society and unflattering stories about American politicians.
The men I listed are examples of powerful Americans who are abusers of power. Franken is among them. The US media pretends that senators, presidents, etc., deserve some sort of bizarre deference. They do not, and we'd all be better off if they were assumed to be scoundrels.
When in the last 20 years have the U.S. media treated politicians with kid gloves? I've been reading about sex scandals and unduly harsh accusations of "hating women," "being secretly Muslim," "dumbest president" (Bush Jr.), etc.
I've been warned that HN mods do not like it when I comment to a lot of different replies all at once, so I'm going to attempt to respond to your various comments in one place.
I think your general approach is reasonable and thoughtful, and so I want to be careful to reply in a way that comes across as respectful of your views. This may get a bit long, but I'm curious about your thoughts.
On the subject of the US media treating politicians with kid gloves, with a special case of NPR. We have a number of highly partisan "entertainment news" companies that constantly amplify the smallest and silliest aspects of the other party, because it entertains their readers/viewers/listeners.
But the question to ask is whether any of these "entertainment news" companies threaten the status quo in any way. In other words, does Fox news existence make it any less likely whatsoever that the Democratic party will hold power roughly half the time over the next century? The answer is, absolutely not. Correspondingly, does the existence of MSNBC or CNN make it any less likely that the GOP will not hold power for roughly half of the next century, or that there will be a significant redistribution of wealth and power in the US? Absolutely not.
The metaphor I'd use is that the status quo moves like a rapid train along an unwavering trajectory. The status quo means powerful people stay powerful. The vast majority of the partisan fray that we observe is absurd (sex scandals, secret muslimness, etc.) and distracts people from issues of substance. By distracting people from issues of substance it strengthens the interests that benefit from the status quo. A lot of people watch one or the other partisan "news entertainment" networks and consider themselves well-informed, and outraged (appropriately) about the right things.
NPR plays an interesting role. It offers a lot of serious, high quality content. I t even reports calmly about many of the scandals and situations that make other news outlets reveal their partisan stripes, but one thing remains constant. NPR does not question the legitimacy of US institutions whatsoever. During the time of the financial crisis it had extensive coverage of what the banks did, how greed and negligence contributed to the crisis, etc., but did not shine a critical eye on the role of regulators and poorly designed (and poorly enforced) regulation on the crisis. NPR can deliver in-depth coverage, but it always pulls back before questioning certain sacred cows.
When you think about it, NPR's behavior is functionally similar to the highly partisan "entertainment news" fray. It helps to focus attention on things other than fundamental problems with the status quo and its institutions.
To dig a bit deeper into this example, the proper response to the financial crisis would have been to fix the broken regulatory system that allowed the dangerous combination of inadequate underwriting requirements and regulatory capture that created the impression of some firms being "too big to fail". Either would have been easy to fix, but instead the "fix" was to simply socialize some of that risk by having Taxpayers buy some of the risky assets, artificially inflating prices and preventing market forces from correcting enough to cause more widespread firm failure.
Even if asset support was warranted as a stability measure, the core incentives enjoyed by banks, insurance companies, and iBanks have remained generally unchanged, and attention was focused on compensation plans rather than on broader firm and industry incentives to socialize risk, which is ultimately what had been going on. Further, accounting irregularities in the GSEs were largely ignored. This process reveals the extent of regulatory capture and looks a lot like corruption. At the very least, transparency is lacking, and news organizations have been silent about it, preferring to focus on sensational stories about executive pay, etc.
On the subject of RT's coverage of Ukraine, my point is just that one could not expect "Russia Today" to report in an unbiased way on the Ukraine, so I'd be skeptical of any of its coverage of Ukraine, no matter what it said. Russia has an incentive to convey misinformation about Ukraine that does not exist for other topics. On US stories, RT has an incentive to write true stories about unflattering things, since overplaying its hand would result in widespread skepticism.
On the subject of the Crowdstrike data, etc: I referenced the homeland security report because it is considered the official roll-up of all available information that leads many to believe a specific narrative about Russian meddling. The Homeland security report referenced the crowdstrike report as a significant basis for its finding, and alluded to additional evidence but did not provide any in the unclassified document (or in the classified one, as far as any of us know).
The linking to GRU seems tenuous at best, and while your statement that even experts make mistakes is true, and while Kaspersky uncovered bits of the Equation group, I think we need a model that reveals the probabilistic reasoning and assumed incentives of each of the parties involved in the narrative in order to get an accurate perspective on what happened. Without that, the narrative implies various intentions that may only be accidental, with the actors instead having much more selfish/local motivations.
In my opinion, the likely scenario is that there are a lot of unsophisticated people doing phishing all the time toward any address that will bite. I receive phishing messages periodically, and several years ago received notice from Google that my account is being attacked by a state actor (whereupon I turned on 2FA).
Chances are if you are phishing for Gmail accounts and you find one that has links to .gov addresses, there is someone in the Russia you can sell it to. Surely if some American teenager hacked a Russian citizen's email and found information relevant to intelligence work he/she would be able to find a buyer for it in the US.
When we read about "links" between entities, what does that mean? I know of cases where the FBI has made deals with "former" hackers, allowing them to avoid prison by helping with various investigations, etc. So does that mean that a hacking org that one of these hackers used to work for is "linked" with the FBI? Context matters. We are hearing one side of the story, but more importantly hearing only one side of a highly politicized story.
As for the Russia story in general, relating to the alleged intention of Russia to meddle in the US election, there are a lot of people who are hand waving and pointing to "links" that don't check out. Suppose Wikileaks received emails from some third party who was not Russia and who WL did not know to be Russia. And suppose Russia gave the emails to that third party. WL claiming not to have received emails from Russia is true, so WL's credibility is not on the line even if there is hard intel making Russia the source of the emails. But for some reason due to the political nature of this issue, partisans are making all sorts of claims about WL's motivations. There are similar claims about RT's motivations being thrown around, but very little actual data. Of course RT will publish stories that are broadly favorable to Russia and Russia's interest. I don't think anyone would expect otherwise. Of course WL would publish juicy information, no matter where it came from and no matter if it came from an adversary of the US or a partisan within the US. Nobody would expect otherwise.
All of the above is perhaps an aside. I guess what really matters is whether one thinks Google should be in the truth business. I guess with advertising as the main source of revenue, Google is ultimately in the influence business, since what advertiser would buy ads if they did not create influence. Since not all ads are conversion-oriented, much of Google's revenue must come from broader, branding campaigns which are meant to create mindshare for certain ideas over others among a target population.
So maybe all this amounts to is Google giving US Government some free brand marketing for it's American Exceptionalism campaign, which is itself much older than Google.
I'm not sure that most 'readers' are able enough to balance points and counterpoints. If readers were capable of separating fact from fiction, you would think that 'fake news' would be less prominent.
They're also being subjected to outright manipulative tactics that aim at where they're weakest emotionally and intellectually in order to exploit their resulting behavior.
What RT exploits are pre-existing prejudices and narratives inculcated by a wholly domestic popular nationalist movement begotten by the GOP.
The demonizing of Hillary Clinton, for example, originated with Newt Gingrich's 1994 Contract with America, which saw a resurgent GOP control both the House and Senate for the first time in over 40 years. That was a campaign which normalized calling Hillary Clinton a "bitch" after it came out that that's how Gingrich referred to her in private, and refused to walk it back, instead only lashing out at the leaker, Connie Chung. Ironically (given how events precipitated 15 years later where Democrats adopted the previously-conservative alternative) the main reason (but hardly the only reason) Hillary came to the foreground was because she was appointed to lead a task force to investigate healthcare reform in 1993.
Basically, the poisonous, vitriolic, conspiracist, and highly personal attacks of today can be directly and unequivocally traced back to our daemons from the 1990s, some of whom literally walk the halls of government today using the same playbook. Laying the blame on RT and other outlets simply obfuscates things. The Democrats are idiots for their ham-fisted use of the so-called fake news narrative. Not because it's completely wrong, per se, but because the emphasis is so misleading and counter-productive. And it's why so many Republicans are joining the Democrats in the assault on fake news, as they know they have absolutely nothing to lose and a lot to gain in terms of their own credibility, which will undoubtedly be used to perpetuate more poisonous narratives (i.e. Birther Movement, Benghazi, etc). These poisonous narratives are domestic, crafted and perpetuated by domestic, elected politicians. We might as well "de-rank" C-SPAN.
For all the techies on HN, we should be pushing back against this GOP and DNC attack on Silicon Valley. The Democrats idiotically created a scape-goat in Silicon Valley and the Republicans happily adopted the narrative. The only people stupider than the Democrats in doing this are Facebook, Google, and Twitter, who seem to have drunk their own kool-aid regarding their social impact andthen decided to do a mea culpa. The whole thing is absurd from every conceivable angle.
RT is an island of sanity by comparison. At least their own journalists don't believe their propaganda. They aren't fooling themselves; not like all the players in the U.S.
I'm honestly tired of hearing this (don't take it personally, I just read it a lot) argument that "Well what if we ban Fox News? Where does it stop?
It stops where we bloody well want it to. Fox News is not the only news org that puts out crap content on the regular, they're just one of the bigger ones. CNN has a similar problem in the other direction, both doing the same basic tactic; taking and leaving facts and figures that don't suit what they want to say.
The vast majority of news networks yes, have a bias, but also report more or less the facts with more or less a complete picture. There are only a few news orgs out there that report just plain, outright, easily disproven bullshit and at the front of them is Fox News, that, in perhaps an honest attempt to counter the bias of most mainstream media, -or- in a cynical cash grab picked up and stoked the fears of white middle America, choose the narrative you prefer. Outside of that, most are relatively fine.
And yes, get Fox News the hell off Google. I'm all for it. Let's get rid of CNN too for the same reasons, and make news agencies compete for ranking based on who gets the story RIGHT, not who gets it FIRST.
Who decides what the right story is? Right and wrong should be decided in public debate. Not be some private or governmental entity deciding for us what is right and wrong.
Facts are not up for debate. For way too long we’ve allowed idiots to argue facts with opinions. Your opinions are less valuable than facts. So are mine. We need to be dealing in reality, everything else is noise.
If fact checking were a thing CNN wouldn't have been used as an example of "left-leaning" media. CNN is fairly mainstream, which isn't to say their reporting lately isn't garbage.
The reputable polar opposites are Fox News and MSNBC with everyone else somewhere in the middle. You can legitimately tell that someone listens to conservative media if they consider CNN left wing.
This is the general problem. You've got good, honest people who already have biases and the echo chamber is so loud if you're not vociferously fighting side X you're obviously side Y.
I highly agree that most news nowadays has become clickbait focused in an effort to both drive revenue and stir up loyalty by making people pick sides.
> If fact checking were a thing CNN wouldn't have been used as an example of "left-leaning" media. CNN is fairly mainstream, which isn't to say their reporting lately isn't garbage.
CNN is left leaning but that is not the source of my gripe with them. I don't like the "hair is on fire" 24/7 style reporting they do, and I find that their quality work gets lost in a mess of exactly that kind of "everything is fucked and we're all going to die" style of reporting.
There are plenty of what people would call left leaning orgs out there that do excellent work. CNN is not among them IMHO.
Deranking FOX would be an atrocious attack on investigative journalism and drain the brave people of the United States of America of a very valuable news source!
Welcome to the murky world of SEO. If you don't like it, use another search engine. It's up to Google how they want to rank websites and what criteria they use. I also doubt the technical feasibility of "identifying debunked claims". By annotating results and providing commentary, you take up an editorial stance.
But AIPAC isn't forced to do so, despite even engaging in espionage[1] and literally boasting about how they've corrupted and influenced top politicians[2]. So everyone should take this foreign agent registration stuff as more political theater.
Exactly. It all depends on whose side you are. If it is from the side which the establishment/puppet masters favor, then its all fair. How much trust do MSM's have these days?
They have bought it upon themselves by being slaves of people with agendas.
For better of for worse, when USAmerican citizens spend their own USAmerican money to lobby the US Government on behalf of foreign countries, they aren't considered foreign agents.
Of course not, they follow the Red Scare trend because if you start with something else, you get pushback, but who would defend the Russians, especially now? Do you want to look like Putin's agent? And then when they'd need to tweak the ranking next time for next political scare of the day, the precedent has been already set, and there's nothing to it, just the usual...
What does this have to do with the fundamental fact that Google decides to make access to information / opinions from certain sources less accessible than others?
Google.com is a website, belonging to a certain commercial company, which is obliged by law to work in the best interest if its shareholders. They can do whatever they want with their website.
Same goes for Facebook. Each time you read or post there something -- they generously allow you to do that using their website.
They don't break no First Amendment -- one is free to create their own website and practice their own free speech any way one wants.
PS: I'm not trolling, I'm just tired of how many people used to treat media resources like public utilities.
> They can do whatever they want with their website.
This is completely vacuous statement. Nobody says Google has no legal right to tweak their search algorithms for political reasons. The claim is that this is despicable and unwise thing to do, not that Google shouldn't have control of their own website.
You can get sued for anything. Especially if you have money -
it gets some people into the mood "why would they have money which I should have instead?" Getting successfully sued is quite different thing.
> _“Good to have Google on record as defying all logic and reason: facts aren’t allowed if they come from RT, ‘because Russia’ – even if we have Google on Congressional record saying they've found no manipulation of their platform or policy violations by RT,”_ Sputnik and RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said in a statement.
Funny, the official PR rings like a thousand troll posts I've read.
Good on Alphabet, some CSR in this area is long overdue.
I don't doubt that RT has a pro-Russian slant, but is there any objective evidence that the traditional sources are any less biased? It was only last decade when American media proved itself to be frighteningly biased in favor of the US government's agenda[1].
By abandoning algorithmic rankings, and directly targeting "enemy" news sources, Google is moving away from its engineering roots, and is starting to become a weapon for the US government's foreign policy objectives. Is it any surprise that foreign countries, including our allies in the EU, are becoming increasingly distrustful of American technology platforms?
It's not that RT is biased. Fox News is clearly biased, but I wouldn't treat it the same way. It's that RT utterly doesn't care to report the facts.
To show you what I mean, I came across an RT article that was trying to pin the blame on the hacking of the Estonian government on UIUC. The article had several flaws:
* It miscounted the number of people in the city. While I understand there's definitely some room to come up with different values (having two cities and a general not-in-city suburban area), I couldn't come up with a combination of reasonable values that was close to their estimate.
* It misidentifies the NCSA as the NSA.
* There was an odd bit about how it's "suspicious" that the area has so many IP addresses, which is a) nonsensical, b) I've no idea how to actually come up with a number here (I'm quite sure it was made up for the article), and c) not so surprising if you understand historical IP address allocation policies.
* It also identifies the small town as having three major airports. There is in fact only one airport served by one airline (now two) that serves two destinations (Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth) with 5 flights a day. There is a second, 4000 ft airstrip. I don't know what they think the third airport is--best guess is the decommissioned Air Force base in the next town over.
After reading that article, I have decided to never again grace RT with even ad revenue.
I came across an RT article that was trying to pin the blame on the hacking of the Estonian government on UIUC
I presume you are avoiding a direct link to the article so that you don't publicize it further, but ironically, when I searched on Google for "estonia uiuc hacking rt" (https://www.google.com/search?q=estonia+uiuc+hacking+rt) I found that Google choose to ignore "uiuc" and "rt" in the first two results, and "estonia" and "rt" from the third.
Any other day, I would have assumed this is just Google's relatively recent policy of assuming essential search terms are typos, but now I have to wonder if they are c̶e̶n̶s̶o̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ de-ranking results! Still, while I may just be lacking Google-fu, even when I search for "estonia uiuc site:rt.com" (https://www.google.com/search?q=estonia+uiuc+site:rt.com) I get nothing. Maybe you could provide a link?
Thanks for the link. While the 2014 article you linked does mislabel The University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne as "Illinois University", it conspicuously does not even mention the specific details you chide it for: population details, NSA vs NCSA, so many IP addresses, or number of airports.
As such, it seems like an odd "last straw" regarding RT's accuracy in reporting facts. Did you maybe link the wrong article, or am I maybe I'm failing to understand your sense of humor, and in fact you are making a subtle joke about the implausibility of using apparent IP address location to assign blame for a DDOS?
I didn't read the link I posted directly (as I said, I will not give them the clicks), so I didn't verify that it was exactly as I recalled. The article I read definitely did mention the airports (since I spent quite a bit of time staring at the satellite view trying to figure out what they thought the third airport was), so it's possible I found a cleaned-up version of the article when trying to find it again.
Citations 13-17 and 182 are all cited as sources for the sentence "Critics regard RT as a propaganda outlet for the Russian government[13][14][15][182] and its foreign policy.[13][15][16][17]"
This has to do with Russia's official PR aimed at its own people. RT can't contradict that any more than NPR can call for the imprisonment of high level officials due to Gitmo.
This is actually a bad example, as NPR has criticized plenty of U.S. government officials. It was especially inflammatory about the NSA.
I think you should instead use the Voice of America news agency instead, it is overtly an American propaganda arm, used for the same purpose as Sputnik, and as RT is used de-facto.
> By abandoning algorithmic rankings, and directly targeting "enemy" news sources, Google is moving away from its engineering roots, and is starting to become a weapon for the US government's foreign policy objectives.
This is precisely Schmidt's goal, and has been for a long time. He wants to weaponize Google and sell it to Government as if it were a defense contractor.
It's totally shameful. Schmidt is one of the enablers of villains like GW Bush. History will judge him harshly.
Most of the popular US media is very biased towards the US, but that's not what's spurring this action from Google. It's not just that RT is owned by a foreign state or that RT is biased or even propaganda. It's that it's owned by a foreign state which attempted to interfere in US elections, partially using RT, and partially with the help of Google search results showing RT stories. Google, being an American company, needs to draw a line somewhere, and that seems like a reasonable place.
American state-owned or private outlets deliberately attempting to influence other countries' elections (as they undoubtedly do) are also right to be de-ranked by those countries' search engines and aggregators.
Aside from the accusations made by US intelligence agencies there has not been any data presented that links the Russian government with the stuff you mention. Surely there has been lots of mischief on both sides, but it's absurd to think that anything Russia did altered the outcome of the election.
If you look into the details the evidence is not there. The reason Russia is being blamed is because the US has lost the chess game in the middle east with Russia and will need to do something more aggressive to fight back, but can't do that unless Americans start hating Russians again. Let's not buy into the hype.
I think you should change "there has not been any data" with "there has not been any data that I like".
The Crowdstrike, Mandiant, and the Facebook & Twitter reports all linked Russian government actors with unregistered election interference, with varying amounts of forensic evidence; the Crowdstrike and Mandiant ones were chock-full of evidence, while the Facebook and Twitter ones just claimed that Russian media agency IP ranges were used to control the social media accounts.
So basically what you are saying is no conclusive evidence, or no evidence that can be considered conclusive since any state actor could forge it.
Further, any state actor (such as Russia) could easily avoid leaving such a trail if it wanted to. Of the many "campaigns" linked using loose turns of phrase to the Russian government, several would certainly have been obvious/easy to keep under the radar if they were indeed conducted by Russia. Why hand the US a smoking gun due to amateurish mistakes?
I am not aware of any forensic evidence that it seems reasonable to consider conclusive. In fact, statements issued by Homeland Security concerning the exact same bits of evidence were not considered concerning or confidently linked to the Russian government prior to the insane politicization that occurred after the election.
So as someone who does not want to help fuel the escalation of tensions toward war with a nuclear power, I demand that all evidence be made public so that independent security experts can conduct a full audit under full transparency.
What specifically about the Crowdstrike and Mandiant reports was particularly suspect? They have tracked these campaigns and found them completely consistent with APT 28, whose infrastructure leads back to GRU.
All actors leave traces, how do you think Kaspersky was able to track down Equation Group?
Why did you choose to deflect with the Homeland Security "report"? I didn't bring it up, and it isn't meant to be evidence of anything.
Why are you choosing to be a bit disingenuous in this argument?
I agree it's unlikely Russia altered the outcome of the election; Trump likely would've won with or without their influence. But intent matters more than results here. If a country tries to affect your country's election through deceit, even if they're not really that successful, it still deserves a response.
I'm not sure what "if you look into the details the evidence is not there" is supposed to mean but in terms of intentions, the Russian government did intend to help Trump win (or at least help Clinton lose) and did intend to achieve this goal in part through spreading misleading information. The evidence is pretty damning.
This is a general comment, not particularly aimed at the russian stuff as I see similar comments about other stuff too, but the American election result was super close.
There's probably a thousand different factors that could have swung it either way. There doesn't seem to be any logical reason to exclude Russian support from that list.
That doesn't mean the opposite is true, and that only Russian support for one candidate matters, but I think your statement is far overestimating the size of the final result in comparison with the impact of Russian support.
It probably doesn't help that the President continually refers to it is a historic landslide, which will probably confuse people who aren't paying attention. But it wasn't, it was very close.
What information was misleading or false? There were lots of emails leaked. The FBI investigation was concerned with the legality of using the private server, but none of the potential campaign finance or ethics violations revealed by the contents of the emails has received any attention at all.
As an American citizen who is not aligned with either major party, I'm pleased when one of the power mongers from either party is destroyed.
What should have happened is that a panel of experts should have reviewed the troubling aspects of the emails and issued a statement. But the partisans wanted to pretend the issue was either a) automatically damning or b) a complete non-issue. The truth was likely somewhere in the middle.
RT did nothing at all wrong by reporting on those things, and surely would have been happy to report on more Trump scandals or leaks if they'd existed.
I think that what people miss is that the intention of RT was simply to reveal unflattering truths to help make Americans unhappy with their leaders. This is not a bad thing. If our leaders have committed crimes or ethics violations I want to know about it so that it can appropriately impact my vote.
The most peculiar implication of the criticism of RT is the idea that somehow Americans should not know these things or should remain blissfully naive of embarrassing things about our leaders. It's almost too patronizing to believe.
You're picking one of many of the events that occurred during the election. No, RT is not necessarily biased for reporting on the leaked emails, which did contain legitimate information that was in the public interest to report (and which US and other outlets of course did report on), but it puts it in a different light when it became known that it was Russian intelligence who procured those emails.
But even if we pretend that whole thing never happened, RT regularly pushes stories that cast the Russian government in a good light and the US government in a bad light. Ukraine, Syria, Trump, Hillary. They have the right to do that, being Russia's media, but doing that while also being owned by a state whose intelligence agencies interfered in the election is what creates the major journalistic conflict of interest.
> when it became known that it was Russian intelligence who procured those emails
So the server in question was apparently un-patched for months. Chances are dozens of third world intelligence agencies had the emails.
Is it really plausible that Russia would have its highly trained hackers infiltrate a server and then leave a trail of Russian language metadata on the data?
We also saw recently in some of the stuff leaked by Wikileaks that US intelligence agencies have tools for making attacks look like they were state sponsored from one of any number of other agencies (by leaving code comments in the language of that nation).
This doesn't add up.
Also, if a true political adversary obtained the emails, the most damning way to do it would be to release the worst stories one by one before key campaign events. The troves were too large to be processed in a timely fashion and many of the scandals faded from view almost as soon as they were revealed.
There are two different things being argued here: is it right for Google to do this, and did Russian intelligence actually interfere in the election. You're trying to re-open a debate into the latter, in which case the discussion of the former is kind of moot. The latter has been discussed and debated ad nauseam in a lot of places and this thread isn't really the appropriate environment.
But as someone who works in the infosec industry, I can say yes it is believable GRU would accidentally leave some tracks (NSA has done the same, which were caught by Kaspersky), and that there is far, far more evidence tying Russian intelligence to election interference than merely the DNC and Podesta email breaches. And also that it was more than just the US intelligence agencies and more than just Crowdstrike that came to these conclusions.
Please review the history of events. The Hillary email server emails were released as part of FOIA actions, and reposted by Wikileaks. The Podesta emails were novel because they had been exfiltrated by the Guccifer 2.0 persona, reasonably attributed to Russian state actors by Crowdstrike.
> surely would have been happy to report on more Trump scandals or leaks if they'd existed.
If only, then RT could have had the balance they were craving! But poor RT, thwarted by ol' squeaky-clean Trump.
Why is it shocking that a Russian government-owned news agency would promote things aligned with the Russian government? Do you think Voice of America doesn't push American topics?
RT is trash and propaganda arm of Russian government, however what Google is doing is thousand times more scary to me that what RT is doing. When you come to RT (if you do), you know where you are, you know how to evaluate the information and you don't even have to go there if you don't want to - every link would clearly tell you "you are going to RT". It is exactly what it says on the box, no surprises.
What Google is doing is essentially telling me "we own your information diet now, and for your own good we're not letting you to see this. Because we know what you should be seeing, and this is not part of it. So we will choose which content to show and not to show for our own reasons, and you don't bother your little head with it, we've got it".
This is an approach that takes away my choice, takes away my power to decide which content I want to consume. I'd probably be ok if the content Google demotes is clearly junk - like spam sites that game the ranking etc. Maybe even with sites which are clearly criminal or used as a tool to commit crimes. But here we clearly have tweaking search ranking as a response to political pressure. This is terrible, and also now you can't trust Google with not doing the same for any other reason - maybe they are tweaking the ranking to boost political candidates they like? Maybe to boost businesses they invest in or partner with? Maybe tweak it to demote some companies that offended them in some way or stepped on somebody's toes? Before, I could say it's paranoid to think so, Google would never risk their business by doing this. Now I see head of Google saying this and I can't honestly say it's just paranoia anymore. Thanks, Eric Schmidt.
That's why one should use every opportunity to use engines alternative to Google (I use DDG, other suggestions welcome) - when Google thinks they know what we need better than we do, it is a very bad symptom.
I remember seeing separate interviews with Richard Stallman, Steve Wozniak, and Andy Müller-Maguhn on RT about five years ago. Also, some early pieces delving into Bitcoin before that.
Has RT changed substantially in the last five years? Does it no longer interview people who are experts in their field?
No, it just covers issues that are unflattering to powerful US officials and to the US in general. The regular US press has somehow been conditioned to write lots of stories that are critical of other governments, other countries' infrastructure, etc., but always to carry the torch of American exceptionalism.
Once we realize that American Exceptionalism is among the most evil ideologies of the modern era, it makes sense that other nations would want to offer a competing voice.
RT has not been criticized for the quality of its journalism, only for its source of funding.
For general reporting, their journalism is probably fine (or at least no worse than most other outlets), but when the state's interests are at stake they will always toe the party line even in the face of facts. Not saying many US outlets don't do the same, but this is Russian state media we're talking about.
Also the fact that identified Russian propaganda bots and troll armies have been sighted on numerous occasions disseminating RT articles. You'd be blind not to realize that RT is an important part of their machine.
Propaganda bots and troll armies? None have been linked to the Russian government. Surely someone wishing to spend time making bots and hiring trolls would promote certain articles, but if the American papers did an acceptable job writing about facts, those bots/armies would obviously prefer to link American articles if trying to persuade the American people.
So it's not sufficient to cite the means of distribution/virality, one must actually dig in and find factual problems with the content.
Motive is even more difficult, as the motive of discrediting American leaders for lies or misdeeds is arguably in the public's best interest, so it's hard to persuade me that doing that is somehow harmful to America, even if it was done by an adversary.
1. RT is reporting about themselves. Of course some other source is preferable.
2. RT is owned by the Russian government. I have no particular fondness for Vice, but they're worlds apart.
More generally, "X has a hugely compromising feature, Y has a mildly problematic feature, therefore they're exactly the same as each other" is the kind of fallacy that causes the public to trip and fall on its face over and over. Let's try to avoid it it we can.
I don’t see any reason you should view vice as better than RT—they’ve consistently shown a complete lack of regard for journalism, and they’re incentivized by page views rather (or in addition to) their owner. Why should they bother to get anything more correct? Their brand is a nightly show on HBO that isn’t boring, not a credible news source.
And man, I wish I were being hyperbolic. But they are possibly the worst american news source to link to.
At the very least, they aren't a propaganda organ owned by a foreign government.
Yeah, their coverage is sometimes kind of shitty. But every news organisation is beholden to their audience and their owner. If Vice actually did publish lies all the time then their reputation would tank and they'd stop getting clicks.
The free market connection to honest journalism is a tenuous one, but it exists.
Journalism is earned, not assumed. No matter the stance of RT vice still needs to demonstrate journalistic integrity. Have they? No. They’re on equal footing as i’m concerned. Propaganda is at least interpetable.
Also they do tell blatant falsehoods, intentional or no. Americans care much less than they say.
You're falling into exactly the fallacy I described: Vice is not the best news organisation in the world, therefore it is functionally equivalent to a propaganda outlet. It's absurd logic.
Almost as absurd as the fact that yours is a brand new account created specifically to comment on this story. I'm sure it's just coincidental though...
I did not say they were not the best, I said they need to demonstrate basic journalistic integrity at any point. They fail to do basic story updates to reflect obvious errors. At that point, it’s not news AT ALL, it’s just entertainment. So they aren’t just not the best, they aren’t a news outfit, they are an entertainment outlet.
look at his syntax. he's using the right single quotation mark char (’) instead of a plain apostrophe: that's because he's not typing, he's copying the predefined chunks of text from some approved document aka the fresh methodichka (методичка).
Journalism in USA is totalitarian. There may be two points of view, but they differ so little as to be indistinguishable to anyone whose intellect isn't constantly gaslighted by the overwhelming ideological conformity. The journalism to which we are subjected is still propaganda, because after all a journalist has to stay in the club in order to work, and he does that by parroting the bullshit the insiders tell him. Nobody steps outside the lines and stays on the air.
A great place to get reporting without the approved USA right-thinking is foreign state media. I actually prefer Al Jazeera to RT, but I'm under no illusions: after they shut down RT, AJ is next, soon to be followed by BBC.
It's good to get a wide range of views, but RT, Al Jazeera, and even BBC all provide their own skewed viewpoints. An informed person would be wise to read their stories and compare them to stories from American journalism outfits, but the idea that Al Jazeera or RT is inherently more credible than American journalists is pretty ridiculous. They suffer from overwhelming ideological conformity as well; it's just a different ideology.
Haha "balance". Don't worry that's impossible to avoid in USA. In this country one can never escape the constant messaging: that War is good, that we ever actually win Wars, that we should fear minorities and the poor, that we should express that fear by locking them up and otherwise making their lives miserable... Thanks very much I'm still getting my recommended daily dose of that bullshit!
Have you ever taken a week to mostly watch Al Jazeera or BBC or France 24 or CGTN or even RT? If you did, you might reconsider the blind certainty you evince here. This is one reason it's good to live overseas for a time: the corporate-state-approved media can't get you there, mostly.
There is zero difference between "opinionated" reporting and state-sponsored propaganda since both are pushing an opinion from a point of view. When you start injecting opinions it is no longer reporting. I'd say that Google is more of a propaganda engine than RT since Google has an order of magnitude more money and power than RT does. Propaganda both foreign and domestic should be treated the same if we are going to start censoring or injecting opinions on top of what other people say.
> There is zero difference between "opinionated" reporting and state-sponsored propaganda
Some differences:
- Governments have far more power and resources to skew the narrative.
- Governments are less accountable than any private individual or organization. Organizations are at least accountable to shareholders, the rule of law, and the government they operate under.
- Domestic organizations are at least ostensibly committed to maintaining the system, many foreign governments literally want to tear the system down.
- Governments have a historical track-record of tyranny, and have generally caused more harm than private organizations.
>
- Governments have far more power and resources to skew the narrative.
s/Government have/Google has/g
>
Governments are less accountable than any private individual or organization. Organizations are at least accountable to shareholders, the rule of law, and the government they operate under.
Again s/Governments/Organizations/g
>
- Domestic organizations are at least ostensibly committed to maintaining the system, many foreign governments literally want to tear the system down.
Based upon what? Is that any justification for propaganda? Both Facebook and Google are both domestic entities and look at all of the polarization and discord that they have caused this election cycle.
>
- Governments have a historical track-record of tyranny, and have generally caused more harm than private organizations.
In this era, the source of tyranny is private corporations that grant themselves monopolies with red tape and further regulations that make competition impossible. I guess based upon your arguments, we should grant private corporations a monopoly on speech.
I haven't seen it, but maybe I'm not running HN comments through bash. Regardless, your sed arguments (if you can call them that) make no sense. They just restate your original premise that organizations are the same as governments, ignoring the several points I raised.
There is also a subtle but noteworthy difference between highly opinionated think pieces trying to present their views as being unbiased reporting and credible state-sponsored media outlets that don't force feed propaganda. But I guess you'd consider your view to be the objectively sound way to look at things without realizing the irony in the way you're portraying media outlets you favour over others you don't seem to like.
"Highly opinionated think pieces trying to present their views as being unbiased reporting" are a major problem in the US and around the world, but let's at least consider why RT is a special case here.
RT is not only owned by a foreign state but is specifically owned by a state which attempted to deceptively influence Google's home country's elections, partially with the help of RT. RT is undoubtedly Russian propaganda and can't be anything else; anyone at RT who genuinely wants to provide a view that isn't uniformly pro-Russian risks retaliation from the government.
If the scenarios were flipped and Voice of America were peddling propaganda to influence Russia's next election (which they probably actually are doing), Yandex would have a pretty valid reason to lower the rankings of Voice of America stories.
I don't largely disagree with some of the concerns I question the motives and timeliness of the decision to de-rank a media outlet like RT. It's not something that is done for the reasons presented and the whole Russian influence on the election has so many holes to be a proven credible threat. People are ignorant of media outlets and think stations like Al Jazeera are Al Quaida driven so I am highly skeptical that any party is doing any censoring for legitimate reasons or valid concerns. They aren't looking out for your best interests when it comes to presenting the news.
>and the whole Russian influence on the election has so many holes to be a proven credible threat
I'm not sure the impact so much matters as the intent. Even if it wasn't really a big threat, and even if Trump would've won without any sort of interference (which probably is the case, but it is and will be impossible to truly know), the fact that they did it at all shows they're trying to game the system, partly by gaming Google. Google is now going to make it harder to game.
It is a bad precedent to de-rank results in this way, but I think this is a special circumstance. I agree that a better approach would be to provide warnings and context rather than merely trying to push things down.
> I'm not sure the impact so much matters as the intent.
I think some of the election-related stuff is mostly politicization. If you follow some of the hearings on the subject of Russian propaganda (cspan has some) it seemed more that they were targeting and prodding cultural divisions.
Organizing anti-immigration rallies at the same time and location as Muslim rallies and pushing racial and cultural divides. It seems like their focus is to polarize people and try to promote extremism.
Yes, this was undoubtedly one of the Russian government's goals, but the US IC also came to the definitive conclusion that their goal was not only this but also to get Donald Trump elected. It was an open question for some time: were they merely trying to cause chaos and increase the divide, or did they specifically want one candidate in office? The answer, at least according to 17 US intelligence agencies, is both. And this isn't a huge shock considering Putin's well-known long-standing grudge against Clinton and Trump being considerably more pro-Russian than she was during the election cycle.
I don't know why you're making assumptions about me personally or my preference towards news (Vice isn't one of my usual news sources fwiw) rather than keeping it to the subject.
But I don't believe that Vice has quite the divisive and disruptive agenda that these state sponsored propaganda bullhorns have.
You were more dismissive of one source over another so I brought it into question. I am very familiar with Vice's reporting for the past few years and while they cover a wide range of topics and have an appealing style of presenting their documented footage they politically lean very left. I find their reporting on average to be less credible in many instances than state-reported media because state-reported media is often bland and less opinionated and there's less of attempt to blatantly sway my opinion through a click-bait title and with skewed information and a moralizing tone.
Less biased, or merely less obviously biased? Given that the argument against RT is essentially that they are too dangerous to include in search results because of their known and obvious bias, it would be interesting to look for distortions in their coverage. Did you spot any substantial differences in the two versions of the story? Or is the danger possibly that they will lull us in with factual reporting only to betray us once we let our guard down?
I think it's both legitimate and important to point out the fact that as this is a popular public internet destination where presumably some quite influential people are known to frequent that it could be a very likely target for Russian-backed (or otherwise) trolls looking to sway public opinion. I think it's important that everyone consider the intentions and motives behind the comments that they read.
> it's important that everyone consider the intentions and motives behind the comments that they read.
Isn’t it always? If critical thinking was a little more commonplace, maybe we wouldn’t have gotten into this mess i the first place. People are too quick to play the victim of big bad media. The first step should be a look in the mirror.
> The Alphabet chief, who has been referred to by Hillary Clinton as a “longtime friend,” added that the experience of “the last year”
They don't even pretend to be unbiased. "Hillary is my friend and she refuses to acknowledge she lost due to her own hubris. Instead blames Russia, so I am going along with her here".
> showed that audiences could not be trusted to distinguish fake and real news for themselves.
"The people don't seem to be swallowing our propaganda for some reason. The Manufacturing Consent machine has broken down a bit. Please stand by while tweak our algorithms to ensure they are force fed the proper version of truth".
To be more serious, RT is propaganda and a branch of the Russian government just like Fox New is a branch of Republican party. What is interesting is the other media (traditional TV and print news) and now the tech companies have also dropped the pretense.
Well at least things are bit more clear. Nobody is pretending anymore. That in itself is a step forward as well.
You do not have to be a fan of Hillary Clinton to think that "audiences [can] not be trusted to distinguish fake and real news for themselves" based on the "experience of 'the last year'". The mention of her name in literally the same sentence where they implicitly question the validity of the "fake news" narrative could not be more transparently calculated.
So yes, you are right that RT is propaganda, but in that light I'm not sure how to take your first two sentences. The word "irony" comes to mind.
There is irony in how it is presented, and I tend to be confusing, but to clarify my position, just because I think Google is going too far and don't like Hillary doesn't mean that I automatically like or support RT or Fox News.
RT is Russia Today, which is funded by the Russian government. Sputnik, the other media outlet mentioned in the article, is similarly funded by the Russian government. Their Wikipedia pages imply that both are use for Russian government propaganda... in case anyone else also needed background context.
As a person, who lived in Crimea and survived Russian invasion I'm very happy about that. RT is not a media news it is absolute propaganda which exists for only one reason - to help russia seize other countries
Making the world safe from fake news is the new war on terrorism. In the same way there is just as much terrorism since 9/11, there will be just as much misinformation in the future, only with less freedom.
Please answer me this question - have your mods flagged this story? It sure is odd how an incredibly active discussion in a fresh story with >100 points is on page 2 behind stale and dead stuff on the front page.
Seems kinda relevant to the topic at hand. Also relevant is how little coverage this story is getting outside of RT - Fucking hmmm.
If you blacklist things that people like (however misguided their reasons are for liking them), they will double down and probably consume even more of their propaganda news.
Instead, demand that articles use language that states things plainly, probably with a machine learning model to help. No personal attacks, etc.
It's interesting to see people take sides here. We freely rely on Google to sift through people trying to manipulate search rankings and show us the best results. Part of this process often results in entire domains being blacklisted. Hell, we we even allow copyright law to dictate what we can find on Google.
So I don't understand why it's so controversial to exclude insidious propaganda and proven bad journalism from news searches.
Some others have called this a slippery slope, saying Fox (or the left wing equivalents) could be next... But seriously, why not? The threat to excluding bad outlets should be extended to all outlets.
One way to workaround this is simply to prefix your Google search with site:rt.com
ex
site:rt.com my search query
With or without the communist Chinese style ban on RT.com it is convenient to use this technique if even to cross reference a specific issue you've heard buzz about with an non-US (and by extension, non Five Eyes) based source of news. Otherwise your news is, now openly admitted, at the discretion of Google's / US governments distorted and now limited view of what is 'news'.
Have always enjoyed RT because it is one of the few quality international news outlets not based or biased in US - and will continue enjoying it despite Google or US introducing Chinese PRC style blanket censorship.
Jim Rogers and Peter Schiff are just a few of the respected names who have routinely appeared on RT to share their commentary.
Slippery slope, but hey - this way they seal their own demise as independent thinkers lead the way in replacing the likes of Google and other compromised tech companies with decentralized, censor-proof solutions.
The problem with Google "ranking" is that it's linear, when a real substantive analysis of results would first categorize results and then rank within those categories. Google needs to indicate the intent behind an article, such as to inform, to convince, to sell a product, or to generate clicks to show you more advertising.
I wonder if anyone has noticed that you can't even query a search without it already being flooded with the news. You can't really customize the search in away you get zero news from any search.
Since US agencies are not meddling with other nations politics, and esp not through their news agencies, US based medias are safe from googles hammer /s
As oppossed to any western mouthpiece (BBC, CNN, ABC, Washington Post, NYT etc)? Every news outlet parrots the opinions of its investors, and even when you think that a report is neutral, the adjectives try to slant the message in a certain direction. By agreeing to censorship, you are disagreeing with the concept of free speech. In the end, if Google becomes more political, it will alienate a demographic, and lose funds. In which universe is this “good”?
Only the BBC fits, as it is also government controlled. The others may sometimes publish shill articles or whatever but they are not a government run propaganda arm. We don't have such a thing in the US, as NPR has lost almost all of its government funding. The US government runs media operations in other countries but none of our big media companies are government run like RT.
And the fact that we just elected freakin' Trump helps underline the fact that the US is not yet a dictatorial country. So the comparison between Russia Today and any US media is pretty ridiculous on that level as well. Our media has plenty of flaws (answering to corporate sponsors instead of the government has its own drawbacks), but again, they are not comparable to RT.
> In the end, if Google becomes more political, it will alienate a demographic, and lose funds
This is delusional and ridiculous logic.
Trying to purse the truth in news should not mean alienating a demographic. And frankly a competitor search engine designed to cater purely to them is never going to be successful.
But one shouldn't fail to see the bigger propaganda of them all. Not country sized, but Multi-National propaganda of which most people have fallen into and fight for. Anything against it is called propaganda.
Exactly. Same multi-national garbage you allude to is routinely regurgitated on evening news in US, Canada, and Japan - all the same message typically (anti-freedom, anti-free speech, anti-health, pro-state, pro-military, pro-pharma). I've never been subjected to evening news from much elsewhere but I imagine the mainstream news of any 'colony' of the Queen and/or US empire tows the line much the same way.
But, you know - we're hackers so we are figuring out the solutions and working to implement them. For every meaningless social ego boosting app startup there is a real entrepreneur building something that will fight against this decadence and help civilization move forward into the brighter more prosperous era we deserve.
I'd consider RT more reputable than Fox News, The Sun or BILD. What are they going to do about the others?
There is hardly a news outlet right now that wouldn't print lies if those lies make them money or increase their power and influence, so where do we draw the line?
Google giveth and Google taketh away, that's true for products as well - they changed something and now we get less organic search results and fewer purchases. Everyone on the Internet is in the same boat.
I've watched RT videos on YouTube and after I realized where it was coming from I was able to connect the dots with various socialist leaning good feel pieces embedded in larger stories. But I mean it's not like it was super aggressive propaganda worth censuring. I think a lot of their material is interesting and well produced.
Just about any news source has a viewpoint that can be found by connecting the dots, in Western sources, that might be termed "editorial policy".
So basically we're seeing that all the powerful states seem to be moving towards not just producing their own propaganda but demanding outside propaganda be filtered out - China is far much more aggressive of course and thankfully for me, the US is merely exerting a "light touch".
I assume this level of censorship is more or less happening proportionate to the degree the various ruling forces feel threatened.
Wait till they start "de-ranking" or something similar when users manually enter undesirable URLs in their browsers' address bars. It seems implausible right now, but the stuff that is happening now was equally implausible in the internet when Google was just starting.
>>"But we don’t want to ban the sites – that’s not how we operate.”
Virtually every small business website has seen how you operate, you don't ban just bury them on page 15 and get a click every 4 months. How nice of you. At least you help us by letting us buy ads.
I agree that RT is official Russian propaganda, but so is Voice of America or our government websites
OMG it's such a racket. Why are our customers going to our competitor? Oh, they're using our name in adwords, and our customers are idiots who use google to navigate to the next block... ok Google here's thousands of dollars every month. Please don't extort any more from us.
Deranking is sensible when the site is explicitly part of a campaign to manipulate its visibility though, isn't it? Aren't you drawing comparisons too quickly?
And then re-shared and promoted by bots masquerading as US citizens specifically for maximum impact against targeted individuals who are most susceptible to manipulation and most likely to propagate the material.
So you are critiquing the mechanism of getting social media likes for content? Don't all newspapers do that these days? I think the way to criticize the articles is by pointing out untrue content or bad journalism. So far nobody has done that.
Did you really mean that? Do you think people who are susceptible to manipulation need to be protected by Google, not for their own good but because they can be manipulated to have political opinions that you personally disagree with? That means you think your political belief is so right that competing ideas should be suppressed. That's the complete opposite of freedom of speech that America is one of the world leaders in. Do you think the way China's government limits the spread of political ideas is good too?
Who the fuck is Google to tell me what I can read or not?! I rarely consume RT, but if I want to, I should be able to do so freely. I'm a free person with agency and a sense of reason. This is why I stopped using Google months ago...
Wouldn't a better solution be to identify the claims in the article and automatically alert the reader that one or more claims have been debunked? Then let the user decide?