This week made it clear that Facebook isn’t going to stop hosting pages that spread conspiracy theories about U.S. mass killings and those that deny the Holocaust killed millions of Jews. And Google will continue showing us stuff that we maybe wouldn’t have chosen to look at.
Algorithms will continue to rule, and the social network and No. 1 search engine will be easy to game.
Those are the sad conclusions of a wild news cycle that saw President Trump share a world stage with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and initially say that he bought Putin’s denial of Russian interference with the 2016 election. And the co-founder of Facebook tell a tech news website that he wouldn’t remove offensive posts just because they were spreading wrong info.
“I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened,” said Zuckerberg in an interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher, referring to Holocaust denial posts (look it up, they’re easy to find on Facebook). “I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong.”
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After a rash of criticism, Zuckerberg tried to walk back some of that defense, though Facebook didn’t change its stance on conspiracy theorists like Infowars: it makes it harder for users to find the content in their news feed, while allowing those pages to stay on the site.
Facebook still loudly says it wants to combat the false news crisis that took hold in 2016 when Russians gamed the system and put up phony posts that got believed as truth by a portion of Facebook’s over 2 billion users.
Indeed, Facebook this week debuted new video journalism from CNN and Bloomberg in an effort to dilute the fake stories and conspiracy videos. The newest show, from ABC, “More in Common” about people from opposing viewpoints “overcoming their differences,” debuts Saturday.
Also this week, Rich Gordon, a professor from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, opened up Google News to read about the Helinski summit, and was surprised to see the top choices were conservative commentaries from Fox News.
“My experience suggests that the Google News algorithm is, quite simply, broken,” Gordon wrote in a Medium post. “It is not only incapable of separating factual reporting from commentary — it can’t even provide a semblance of left/right balance on a story as polarizing as this one.”
Gordon would like to believe that from a technology standpoint, having an algorithm decipher between news and commentary shouldn’t be that hard. “If it were a higher priority at Google, I’m sure it could be done.”
Google didn’t respond to our request for a comment. .
Meanwhile, if you’d like to the news straight, with human curation, may we recommend a certain newspaper or website you already know and love?
Date: July 25, 2018
Source: USA today