Fake election news meltdown vortex sucks in Google Google has been sucked into the post-election scapegoat meltdown after it displayed a fake news story at the top of its rankings for election result searches. Early on Monday, internet users were surprised to discover that while trying to find the latest on the US elections (they are still counting ballots), the top Google …
>I don't believe any single source on the internet and I try to ensure that different sources are independent (not just rehashes of the other).
And that's probably true of most Reg readers. Also, I suspect our average age is such that most of us still grew up with print media, which whilst not perfect, was stable enough for any half thinking person to know their leanings and idiosyncrasies: The Torygraph, the Daily Heil, The Grauniad, Screws of the World for UK readers. Many of us will have read print publications from technical or scientific sectors, too, and and see how a story is presented in the specialist and mainstream media.
This is not to say that our world views are unskewed and unfiltered, but we try to get a feel for what's going on behind the scenes. A taste for the satirical helps, too.
Also, Wikipedia's accuracy depends upon how it is used... true, most people likely don't read past the main article, but the citations,reference and article edit history are there to be examined by those who want to check.
> Also, I suspect our average age is such that most of us still grew up with print media
It's also worth noting that the actual papery versions of a lot of these things don't have half the outrage reactionary stuff which very much lives up to the name of 'clickbait'.
As for printed reference material, that's expensive to do so you have to make sure it's right, and when someone buys their deluxe leather-bound encyclopedia they get a short but credible disclaimer from someone with an office they can find, whereas a website can do a 200-pager that changes on a daily basis. Wikipedia is fine as long we we understand the caveats. And check the edit history.
Google and Facebook are not interested in accuracy, only in Ad revenue and clicks, and they pretend they are not publishers.
Because of how they work, they won't be fixed, Facebook especially is broken.
Wikipedia does get pawned, does have deliberate and accidental errors but at least has a commitment and admits to being a publisher.
I'd imagine Snopes is fairly overwhelmed these days.
Google's aim is to provide accurate information. (Or people might be forced to use Bing.) Facebook's aim is to keep you entertained. (And there isn't an alternative, however improbable, in sight.) So Google are more likely to fix it. (And, according to Tim O Reilly, they took a financial hit when they walled off content farms. So they have form in forgoing short term gain,)
Which leaves the BBC (website) I would have thought.
Apart from the IT correspondent, fairly openly an Apple shill, the BBC seems to have tolerable balance.
Probably why it is regarded as a hotbed of commie lies by folks in the USA.
Now we know that to be a positive attribute.
So what's left? So called legitimate news sources don't fact check either. It's all one big echo chamber with news sources repeating the same garbage under the disclaimer, "It has been reported that...", which is newspeak for, "we didn't check this out but we like it so we're reporting it anyway."
Not fully checking a story before reporting it is kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Proper journalists will be scooped every time except on a story they uncover and research all by themselves - and even then they have to hope it doesn't leak at the last minute. Before the internet this was less of a concern, since you knew that other networks / newspapers had journalists with similar standards you did and wouldn't jump the gun on a story that was unsourced. After Drudge Report outed the Lewinsky story that was being carefully researched by proper journalists, the world changed forever.
So a network or paper that rigorously fact checked everything it reports won't be reporting the "news", it will be rehashing stories others have reported while those others will have already moved on to newer stuff. That's hardly a recipe for success in today's world. It would also leave them open to charges of bias, if for instance they didn't report a negative story about Clinton because it couldn't be confirmed, no doubt Trump and his followers would claim the reason is because they are a biased source protecting Clinton.
There's also the question of what "facts" exactly you are checking. When women came forward to accuse Trump of improper advances, should it not be reported unless it can be confirmed? What is confirmation, a sworn statement from the women? Guilt in a criminal court? A finding in a civil court? Trump admitting it? The story was the accusation itself, and it is pretty much impossible to prove such claims especially when they happened years ago. There was no proof against Cosby or Sandusky, but once the number of claims became large enough public opinion went against them. In Trump's case, his detractors immediately believed it, his supporters probably wouldn't believe it even if a thousand women came forward with sworn statements.
As many states stop counting votes at all once a winner is sure, so the popular vote sums are never the real ones, quite. If you know how the system works, you wouldn't be suckered by this, but our education system in the US has become other than educational around issues of civics and politics, more like a propaganda machine.
"As many states stop counting votes at all once a winner is sure"
And absentee ballots may also not be counted unless they could potentially affect the outcome.
Those numbers have typically - in the recent elections - favored the Republican candidate because of the military voters stationed overseas.
"As many states stop counting votes at all once a winner is sure"
also, if you count ballots PROPERLY you'll discover JUST how many Demo-Rat ballots were 'stuffed' (i.e. people voting multiple times, dead people voting, illegal aliens voting, yotta yotta). So heavily-Demo-Rat districts don't want that kind of light shining in their dark recesses...
it's also why Demo-Rats don't want proper ID checks at the polling place, either.
So when Mrs. Clinton is reported to have a "less than one million vote" popular 'win' over Trump, it's probably due to 'ballot box stuffing' *In My Bombastic Opinion*
Before you stop counting ballots, you need to be satisfied that not only the presidential tally is settled beyond doubt, but also the votes for senators, representatives, mayors, councillors, sheriffs, judges and dog-catchers. Right down the ticket.
As long as any of these positions could still be in doubt, you should still be counting the votes. And it'd be perverse to count a ballot and not tally all the votes on it.
But please don't take my word for it, contact your local board of elections and ask them. It's a question that deserves an authoritative answer.
trust the Prophecies* of our good old friend Nostradamus. According to Google he both predicted that Hillary and Donald would win the US elections ....
* If you go to the Utrecht University Library you can ask for it. You may read it, but you can not take it out because it is a pre-1800 book.
Social scientists and psychologists have long concluded that if people hear the same information from multiple sources – typically between three and five – they become convinced of its truth.
And that's the problem right there. Religious nuts and conspiracy theorists have fertile ground in an uneducated and religious fundamentalist society. Until that changes we're going to keep seeing this kind of crap.
I have no love for Google or Facebook, but they can rank and publish all they want and I still won't make up my mind based on the number of times I read something or how high up it is in my search results.
Perhaps it's because some of my FB friends are politically active, 'my' (sic) FB 'feed' (yuck) was infested with fake news items over recent weeks. Most examples were obvious, but were still believed by far too many. Others were quite subtle. And who knows how many I didn't even detect.
It's become a bit hopeless.
I personally hate this apparent need everyone seems to have to create a false equivalence and impartiality where none is justified.
We should be partial to the truth. At least the truth in its most basic and uncontroversial form(s); say, if someone denies they said something that they verifiably did say, etc.
The problem is that the Mainstream Media also suppresses the Truth as much as they promote Lies, all for the interests of those that control them.
The Internet provides a mechanism for the Truth to route around the Censorship, but it is then often drowned out by the noise of false rumours.
So do your own research and be careful in what you believe you are told.
Nowadays of course a big chunk of people never see the URL because on a slab you can't hover over the link* to see where it's going, and the URL bar auto-hides when you get to the destination page, and that's assuming they would know the difference between 'news article' and 'blog' now that the distinction between the two is horribly blurred anyway.
* Even this is no guarantee on links that get rewritten when you click them, including ones that look intra-site but actually go out through an ad server and then back to the page you thought you were getting. Likewise google results links that look like 'example.com' and only turn into 'google.com/url?sa=blabla&url=example.com' when you click on them.
Nor helped by their own narrow agendas, nor their fake sense of balance. They DAILY print and broadcast information they later admit quietly (on Newsnight or Feedback) they knew was false. c.f. Brexit campaign.
BBC is regularly accused by Left (e.g. Guardian) of being Right Wing and by Right (Murdoch and others) of being Lefties. The fact is that they have given up fact checking, given up real journalism in favour of letting random member of public talk, or someone give a speech, that is NOT an interview. An interview involves research of the truth in advance and challenging the interviewee with it.
In contrast to BBC, the Irish PSB, RTE is merely incompetent. The BBC seems to do it deliberately as part of some sort of policy.
The BBC was less patronising when Rieth ran it before WWII.
"The fact is that they have given up fact checking, given up real journalism"
ack. Blogs typically report *FEELINGS* and not *FACTS*. And everybody has FEELINGS, and they all *LIE* and are INCREDIBLY UNRELIABLE, and are IRRELEVANT as HELL on any subject.
Feelings should be jettisoned with the weekly trash pickup.
But, then we'd have no ONLINE OUTRAGE nor DRAMA to snark and lampoon.
/me points out that 'feelings' are not the same as passion nor conviction. 'feelings' are like BEER GOGGLES. Passion and conviction are MOTIVATORS.
Goebbels said that "a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth".
Then, look back at the Gore v Bush election when Fox News broadcast (as fact) Bush to be the winner without the full results? After the report was repeated so many times the Gore camp gave up and did not challenge the article.
Great piece of social engineering by the ALT-right.
Depending on just how much hyperbole and bias you can stand, many major US "news" purveyors qualify nicely as "fake news" sources. Our first amendment, in part, exists explicitly because there is no was to objectively determine what is proper reporting. The new data moguls have reached a level of power and influence such that they represent a much stronger source of potential bias than any eighteenth century government could inflict, and interested parties are taking notice.
Is Matt Drudge a better aggregator than US News & World report? It Breitbart less reliable than CNN? Political bias is going to dominate your analysis.
These fake news sites sound like the new Google bombs. But given the evidence that Google was suppressing autosearch for negative terms about Hillary, I think that we should be at least as concerned that Google is deliberately biased as unwittingly so.
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