
Google promoted Texas gunman fake tweets - dberhane
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41915065
======
colemannugent
My summary of the article: An algorithm designed by Google engineers to
promote upcoming stories does exactly what it was supposed to do, and people
who don't understand why Google employees did not manually review just one out
of one hundred thousand things that the search engine indexed that day are
suprised.

Google Search is a content aggregator that show you what it thinks you are
most likely to click on. It does not know about politics, it cannot fact
check, it does not think care about effort journalism, the only thing that
matters is what stories generate more ad revenue.

Of course, Google will try to police its results better after this incident,
but they can't effectively do this without mass censorship. If you don't
believe me, see the recent YouTube drama over monetization.

~~~
maxerickson
Could you explain why it is good for society for Google to not give a shit
about what it promotes?

I mean, the point of limited liability is not to give investors a path to
profit regardless of all other things, it is to encourage investments that are
beneficial to society. If it isn't working, we should retink it.

~~~
lettergram
> I mean, the point of limited liability is not to give investors a path to
> profit regardless of all other things, it is to encourage investments that
> are beneficial to society. If it isn't working, we should retink it.

From my understanding, a limited liability company exists to protect the
business members and shareholders from legal action of their private persons.
I.e. if the business goes under due to a poor product or something, they can't
be held personally liable. That doesn't mean they are excused from criminal
behavior, they can still be liable for some of that.

However, in either case there is no "benefit to society" clauses. It's simply
a legal construct to protect people. In this case, Google did what they did...
They probably weren't criminals though

~~~
ams6110
Yes, exactly. The point of Limited Liability is _not_ simply to create a
guaranteed path to profit (in fact it does no such thing; LLCs go bankrupt
every day, and members can lose every penny they have personally invested).

Though there is no explicit "benefit to society" clause, that is the basic
rationale for limited liability. It's an incentive to allow members to define
the extent of their personal financial exposure. In so doing, they are more
willing to invest in businesses, which can produce a net benefit to society
(e.g. by employing people, paying taxes, etc.).

------
beaner
I feel like there's a big push to blame "fake news" and related phenomena on
tech companies right now.

Fake news is created and shared by people. Tech is just one of the vehicles
through which we share it.

The problem isn't tech, it's people. Fix the root cause with education and the
tech will reflect it.

~~~
PostOnce
The problem is that tech companies aren't just showing you everything everyone
says... they're picking and choosing what to show you.

The 10,000ft overview is that they show you whatever keeps you coming back or
staying on-site longer. This gives them more ad impressions and makes them
more money.

Therefore, if their algorithms determine that showing you fake news, lies, and
other socially-destructive and false propaganda is more profitable... they can
and will do that.

So the question is, how do we regulate what the tech-utilities get to filter
from your view? Should we regulate? It's not the regulation of speech, but
rather the regulation of the willful filtration of speech for profit.

i.e., "dont show this guy dissenting views to his position or he'll stop
coming back", where does that fit into our needs as a society and how should
our laws tackle it, if at all?

~~~
opportune
I just wish people were able to collectively give up social media. I
completely abhor the stranglehold its placed on culture and media, especially
for the younger generation. It has dumbed everything down into what will get
clicks, and is extremely invasive to boot. The only thing we "gain" from
having social media as a society is advertisement.... which is essentially a
way to get us to consume goods we wouldn't be consuming otherwise (i.e.
waste). I don't see anything good coming from replacing the more or less
natural human social structure that evolved over millions of years
increasingly with an app designed to get us to buy goods we don't want, or get
just 5 more minutes of attention. Such a waste of humanity's minds and effort.

Ultimately I really don't think you can say that Google/FB's dominance is a
net positive for humanity. Sure we get to enjoy a lot of "free" goods, but
those goods are merely a vector through which advertisements can learn more
about us. Google/FB wouldn't be rolling in it if advertisers weren't making
money off from advertising through them.

I see it almost as a maladaptive coping mechanism adopted by our society at
large. We have a completely self-destructive reliance on perpetual inflation-
beating growth, and at this point some of the most important mechanisms
driving this growth are highly sophisticated advertisements designed to
squeeze every last bit of consumer spending out of the economy as is possible.
Not only that, but they've collectively convinced almost all of humanity to
whore out all of their own personal information just so they can browse meme
pages or check up on old high school acquaintances. It's absolutely disgusting
behavior that to me resembles the informed preying on the ignorant.

~~~
PostOnce
A couple points and devil's advocacy on a couple as well:

Search is as bad as social, even if we give up social, it'll be hard to
replace search (I read Wikimedia is working on something... a nonprofit search
would be a fantastic asset to the world.)

Advertising generates a lot more than waste, in fact it may advertise to you a
tool that you didn't know existed that prevents waste. Maybe rechargeable
batteries or a water filter so you don't buy water bottles or who knows what,
that sword cuts both ways. The ethics of advertisers and the lack of
regulation in advertising though is easy to attack. That stuff is a mess.

As for Google being a net negative, I lean to your side of the argument but I
think it'd be difficult and both sides would have a lot of merit; other search
engines are just less efficient; think of all the man-hours of wasted research
Google has saved by giving you the right result the first time, it must be
billions of hours annually, maybe more. A lot of time and money has been spent
competing, and the competition hasn't gotten much closer in terms of actual
search results, so, if Google didn't exist, we may just be at a loss for that
stuff.

~~~
annabellish
Neither is intrinsically bad for society, merely the monetisation model.
"State owned" search/social would obviously be even worse, however, so there
isn't a clear path to having a version of either of those things which
actually have as their primary aim the things Google/Facebook claim to.

------
runesoerensen
Not sure what to think here... Google's 'public liaison for search' says _"
Google briefly carried tweets with dubious info "_[0] without defining further
what that means - except their Twitter results are changing _" second by
second"_[1], and later assuring that it _" only happened for a few thousands
who searched for his name"_[2].

This was not my experience. I took a screenshot of my search results at 9:06PM
ET [3], e.g. 1-2+ hours after the egregious tweets (which were already
prominently featured within 30-40 minutes, if not earlier, as several other
sources suggest[4]).

I might be missing something, but it seems disingenuous to suggest that this
only happened for a short period of time, while downplaying the matter by
vaguely and generally hinting at second-by-second dynamic tweet update
algorithms.

Also I even think the claim that only a few thousand people saw this may be
disproven by Google's own statistics. According to Google Trends, searches for
Devis Patrick Kelly peaked between 7-9PM ET [5] - so before I took the
screenshot that night.

I find it very hard to believe that only a few thousand people saw this over
the 2+ hours when this peaked on that night. Based on the Google Trends
graph[6] it seems the vast majority of searches happened during the peak, and
I suspect it's reasonable to assume that millions have searched for his name
since his name was publicly revealed?

[0]
[https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/927713318172635137](https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/927713318172635137)

[1]
[https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/927713426440253440](https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/927713426440253440)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/927713578827653120](https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/927713578827653120)

[3] [https://imgur.com/a/ao4kK](https://imgur.com/a/ao4kK)

[4]
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/06/google_twitter_fake...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/06/google_twitter_fake_news/)

[5] [https://imgur.com/a/lAh12](https://imgur.com/a/lAh12)

[6]
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2017-11-05T05%...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2017-11-05T05%202017-11-08T06&q=Devin%20Patrick%20Kelly)

~~~
csydas
More than likely it is Google trying to downplay it, but it's their search
being gamed - the BBC article is actually inaccurate as far as I'm aware, as
at least in the case of Sam Hyde, I was under the impression he was in on the
joke, though I may be wrong.

Regardless, the length of time probably isn't as important as the frequency
with which this occurs, as the search frequently returning verifiably wrong or
fake information is probably a bigger issue. The length of time it lasts is
just a symptom of the tool providing news without the news being curated.

------
mythrwy
Yes, there is bad information on the Internet. Yes, when you aggregate tons of
user content some inaccurate things will be there. Go somewhere else BBC, NYT,
WaPo. We know, you'd like to see a content regulated Internet. I wouldn't and
I'm weary of seeing these articles day in and day out.

Beside why are articles from newspaper on HN front page so much lately?

From HN guidelines: Off-Topic: "Most stories about politics, or crime, or
sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon....... If
they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

This self serving media policy seeking doesn't belong here IMOP. It's not
interesting, it's not informative. Shouldn't be constantly on front page day
after day.

------
tclancy
>Google's Danny Sullivan - "We want to get this right"

I feel like in a better world that would be, "We are legally obligated to get
this right or stop trying."

------
imdhmd
A little off-topic, but on similar lines: searching for "demagogue" on google,
gets you a Trump's picture:
[https://i.imgur.com/qFJk9io.png](https://i.imgur.com/qFJk9io.png)

I wonder how that ends up happening, is google able to sum up popular opinion
or is this someone's mischief?

------
amelius
I wonder when we finally get mandatory electronic locks on guns. Having an
electronic license for a single gun could have prevented this man from using a
whole battery of guns.

It makes little sense that we can have more sophisticated locks on an iPhoneX
than on guns.

