
Google’s top news link for ‘final election results’ is a fake news site - pessimizer
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/14/googles-top-news-link-for-final-election-results-goes-to-a-fake-news-site-with-false-numbers/
======
sethbannon
We were previously worried about filter bubbles -- that is, people only seeing
_true_ news that agreed with their worldviews. This election cycle we seem to
have a rise in blatantly false news that agrees with people's worldviews
spreading through social media. Everyone is talking about Facebook and Twitter
fueling this problem, but it seems not even Google is immune. A healthy
democracy relies on an informed citizenry, so this phenomenon is truly a
threat to democracy itself.

~~~
splawn
This is always going to be a problem unless critical thinking becomes a skill
that everyone accepts as fundamental as reading and math.

~~~
ThomPete
Well a hell of a lot of academics who claim to be critical thinkers didn't
critically think about their own bias in this election.

Critical thinking is not a shield against your own bias.

~~~
guelo
What does this mean? What biases are you talking about?

~~~
chongli
I am not _ThomPete_ but if I had to guess, it's PC bias that blinded many to
the potential of this outcome. Perhaps most glaring of these biases is the
idea that all women should demonstrate solidarity for their gender and vote
for a woman, even if it means voting against their own best interests and the
interests of their communities. I don't see too many people calling that for
what it really is: sexism.

~~~
guelo
If you're talking about the pollsters, which are not necessarily academics
(bias much?), it seems like a stretch to say that making a prediction of a
complicated future event based on statistical techniques is due to a lack of
critical thinking. Their prediction models will have to be adjusted, sure. But
all the people that were "proven" right because their intuition happened to
match the outcome are using a much worse critical thinking technique.

Also, Clinton won women 54% to 42%.

~~~
chongli
No, I'm talking about all the columnists who openly refer to that 42% as
_traitors to their gender_.

~~~
ern
_No, I 'm talking about all the columnists who openly refer to that 42% as
traitors to their gender._

I did a Google search (ironic, I know) for "Trump traitor gender" and I
couldn't find columnists referring to Trump-voting women as traitors to their
gender. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but I think this illustrates the sort
of problem we are faced with

~~~
ThomPete
Took me one search.

[http://www.chicksontheright.com/feminists-say-white-women-
ar...](http://www.chicksontheright.com/feminists-say-white-women-are-traitors-
for-supporting-donald-trump-heres-what-i-think-about-that/)

~~~
ern
Thanks, but that's a column that _accuses_ feminists of the same thing that GP
did. It isn't a column _by_ a feminist accusing Trump voters of being gender
traitors, although it does link to a single blog post on Slate
[http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/11/09/white_women_...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/11/09/white_women_sold_out_the_sisterhood_and_the_world_by_voting_for_trump.html)

Perhaps that blogpost partially satisfies GP's assertion, but this little
thread illustrates how difficult it is to fact-check political rhetoric, even
in the absence of fake news.

~~~
ThomPete
This is silly.

Anyone who followed the election just a little bit saw plenty of that.

Here is another one that didn't take me more than one search either.

[http://www.nydailynews.com/news/election/republican-women-
su...](http://www.nydailynews.com/news/election/republican-women-supporting-
trump-ashamed-article-1.2822728)

If anything it proves exactly what I said.

------
j_bond
There seems to be a lot of focus on the popular vote and the fact that Clinton
won the popular vote but lost the presidency. But is it really useful to look
at the popular vote for a close elections like this? I feel like people's
behavior would change if the metric to elect the president was solely based on
the popular vote. Many people that live in very red or very blue states feel
like their vote "doesn't matter" and are not enthusiastic to vote. Not to
mention campaigning strategies would be very different. We don't really know
how the election would go under a popular vote scenario. It seem kind of
disingenuous - like focusing on strikes out in a baseball game instead of the
score.

~~~
nostromo
People need to understand that the electoral college is working as designed.

The US was created to be something like the EU: a confederation of states.

Everyone intuitively understands that Luxembourg and Malta need to have
protections in the EU so that Germany and France don't always get their way.
The only way to achieve this is to have some disproportionate representation
for the smaller member states.

In the US we have become much more centralized since WWII and FDR and now we
seem more like a regular country with a unified power structure. But the
system we're built upon is still designed for a group of largely autonomous
states.

~~~
twblalock
> People need to understand that the electoral college is working as designed.

The electoral college was indeed intended to ensure representation for all of
the states, but it is definitely not working the way it was originally
designed.

The original design assumed that the voters would vote for electors by name
(i.e. the electors' names would be on the ballot, not the candidates' names),
and the chosen electors would exercise independent judgment and vote for the
candidate they thought would be the best president. We know this is the
original intention, because the people who designed the electoral college
wrote about this at length.

When some states started putting the names of the presidential candidates on
the ballots instead of the names of the electors, James Madison and the other
people who designed the electoral college were very unhappy about it. They
felt so strongly about it that they proposed amending the constitution to
require that ballots contain the electors' names rather than the candidates'
names.

When electors are bound to vote for a certain candidate, it's clear that the
electoral college is not working as it was originally designed.

------
spiderfarmer
What can Google do to prevent this from happening?

If Google really wants to organize the worlds information and make it usable
for everybody, they have to make sure Google news is a news source you can
trust. Pagerank is not going to cut it.

A couple of suggestions:

\- prevent less reputable websites from showing up for political queries _at
all_

\- ignore articles with headlines in ALL CAPS

\- work with a dedicated team of editors, like politifact, to give websites an
honestyrank

\- be transparent, show honesty rank in the search results

Any other ideas?

~~~
jrnichols
A start would not let anything that is run on Wordpress or Tumblr become the
top news result for something. That's where most of the spam/fake websites
seem to be these days.

~~~
treehau5
Then you filter out legitimate news websites.

source: run a legitimate news site built on Wordpress.

~~~
Nition
I assume you mean your site runs on a Wordpress back-end, but in the case of
this article the dodgy 70 News site is literally running on Wordpress.com's
free hosting (it's 70news.wordpress.com). I suspect that's what the original
poster meant since they mentioned Tumblr as well.

~~~
treehau5
Oh ok, yes sorry misunderstood!

------
danso
Kind of surprising...as I remember it back in 2013 working at a news startup,
getting listed in Google News seemed like a manual, hand-curated process. Not
perfect, but frictiony enough to block this kind of crap

edit: by "manual", I only know what it was like on the news outlet side. You
had to fill out a form, provide a real address and phone for contact info
among other bits of company info, and the wait was several days if not a week.
It felt like the process one goes through when a human has to verify the info,
like an iOS app.

~~~
angry-hacker
You still do, b t if something goes viral, the specific viral page can be
shown there.

I know since I run a site that had similar scenario.

------
randomgyatwork
Who gets to decide what the real news is? Like if you make a white list of
legit news, then you are creating an inherent bias.

What if the real news list chooser doesn't like a certain website, so they
black list it?

Isn't trying to control this unintentional or maybe even intentional
censorship?

~~~
xs
It's a bias that you can trust but verify. For instance, AV software, and web
filtering apps rate websites you visit with a score and could block you from
visiting sites with a low score to keep you "safe". If web filtering vendor A
is a competitor of vendor B or doesn't like the world view of candidate X,
they could easily block you from going there. So we have to trust but verify.
This is why open source is helpful so we can see the algorithm or reasons why
something is blocked.

~~~
randomgyatwork
I see the problem you are describing.... But if google or Facebook blocks
something, its totally possible that you won't even be able to verify...
Things will vanish forever.

~~~
JacobJans
Shouldn't blantantly false information vanish forever, or at least be pushed
out of the platform? For example, the meme on Facebook that said the Pope
endorsed Donald Trump. It was blatantly false; and yet it was shared over a
million times.

~~~
randomgyatwork
Truth is super subjective, plus people should be able to spread the memes they
choose... It's up to the reader to decide what is real and true.

If someone else gets to decide its censorship.

------
hellofunk
I am already missing the days when all information disseminated to the masses
was hand-curated by passionate, serious, intelligent professionals who staked
their careers -- their lives -- on accuracy and objectivity. Those are days
that went out with the internet.

------
dkrich
This is an extreme example that illustrates something that happens all the
time.

In this case the publisher is reported as a "fake news site" but I would argue
that any publication that cites sources that are not thoroughly researched and
fact-checked should be considered a fake news site.

Huffington Post does this all the time- they link to their own articles and
other sites' opinion pieces to make points and pass them off as legitimate
fact-based sources.

------
brentm
It is a crazy time that we live in. We have a massive group of people that
openly reject mainstream news and were lead there by the now President elect.
Trump spent his entire campaign crafting an alternative reality and now
millions of people are all in. If he continues down this road of trashing
mainstream media institutions while pointing people to his cronny owned
newsertainment entities like Breitbart I am very concerned about the future.

The Trump bubble has to burst eventually and I think the American's that voted
for him are in for a rude awakening when it does. I just hope the fallout
doesn't bring down too much of the country.

------
tmaly
This reminds me a lot of Ryan Holiday's book, Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions
of a Media Manipulator.

Except that is it something that happens via automation rather than through
methods listed in the book. Still the book is a good read if just to get
acquainted with how one can manipulate media in this day and age.

------
w8rbt
How do you define 'fake' news sites now after all the mainstream media outlets
called the election so completely wrong? It all seems like propaganda with
people trying to push their views.

~~~
ctdonath
There's a difference between succumbing to your own bias when seeking out &
reporting news, vs willfully making $#!^ up as clickbait.

------
protomyth
I really think they need to look at what the difference between "news" and the
web is. I thought news was a list of sites that I could exclude if I felt they
weren't worth reading.

They also have a bug with the interpretation links to snopes.com that has been
reported to them[1]. I wonder if that affects any other site? I would doubt it
would be just one.

1) after filling out their form on news.google.com, I posted here
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12384851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12384851)

------
pavanred
What is the top news link, isn't part of the problem that what I see when I
search for 'final election results' is different from what any one else would
see, personalization, in other words?

~~~
MaxfordAndSons
I am able to reproduce, both incognito and signed into chrome. I'm guessing
it's not personalized because the actual search is short circuited by a
specialized result view, with Google's own "2016 US election results" widget
appearing above the search listing.

Though ironically it's now been bumped to second by the WaPo article about it.

------
imgabe
Google also includes the correct election counts in a big box directly above
any of the search results...

~~~
ctdonath
Question is: what constitutes "correct"? The Federal Elections Commission
hasn't released the official results.

Google does (in light gray) mention that there's still 20 electoral votes to
account for. It does not, however, give any disclaimer to the very precise
looking "popular vote" count[1], which will change significantly when those 20
EVs are finally accounted for, and change again if[1] more counting occurs. A
whole lot of arguing is going on over that popular vote, which indications are
actually puts Trump ahead even though Clinton is authoritatively presented by
Google as having more. No major site is showing Trump having the 306 EVs which
he will undoubtedly have; the stalling at this point is getting suspicious.

[1] - To clarify: the USA presidential election does _not_ establish a winner
from the straight count of all voters. Since we are the United _States_ ,
voters in each state vote in their jurisdiction, the state decides how to
handle the results, and then each state submits a set of votes (weighted by
population in a way to ensure low-population states aren't invariably washed
out by a dozen major cities elsewhere). We don't necessarily complete the vote
count because, mathematically, there comes a point (usually) where the
remaining votes simply don't matter (say, candidate T is ahead by 200,000
votes and there are 100,000 votes remaining to count) because the allocation
of the state's electoral votes are provably complete (and because counting
every vote usually gets pretty messy at the end; look up "hanging chad").

~~~
ctdonath
BTW: the official results will be published here -
[http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/electionresults.shtml](http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/electionresults.shtml)

------
danso
I guess while we're on the topic, and since it appears in the WaPo's
screenshot, can someone give insight on how the hell Heavy.com is almost
always at the top ofbreaking news links when doing standard Google News
searches for people suddenly in the news? Things like: "John Doe: 5 Facts You
Need to Know"

Here's one:

[http://heavy.com/news/2016/09/keith-lamont-scott-
charlotte-n...](http://heavy.com/news/2016/09/keith-lamont-scott-charlotte-
north-carolina-police-shooting-daughter-facebook-live-video-brother-officer-
name-photos-reading-book/)

Entirely cribbed from real news sites' coverage when it's not just innuendo.
And yet when the news is fresh, Heavy.com is almost always at the top, beating
out original coverage and even sites that do it much better (DailyMail comes
to mind).

I get that prioritized placement of proper nouns in the headline and page
title can boost SERP, but this is ridiculously effective SEO-gaming, the likes
which were mostly stopped when Google's Panda was thought to drastically hurt
content farms like Demand Media [0]

Even the article the WaPo screenshot, which is the _very first link_ for
"clinton vs trump", is just fluff:

[http://heavy.com/news/2016/11/popular-vote-clinton-trump-
hil...](http://heavy.com/news/2016/11/popular-vote-clinton-trump-
hillary-2016-2012-2008-uncounted-ballots-electoral-college-presidential-
election-results-california/)

The first 3 lines:

> There are millions of ballots that haven’t been counted yet from the 2016
> presidential election. How many? The New York Times estimated on November 12
> that there are 7 million uncounted ballots in the country.

How is this beating actual URLs to live poling data that have Clinton vs Trump
in the title?

[0] [http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-update-
costly-11206...](http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-update-
costly-112062)

------
tunesmith
I just googled for "Was there a Trump wave?" for legitimate reasons, and the
top news result (second entry) was a Breitbart article next to an image of
Trump with the words "Sieg Heil!" This is so upsetting.

------
ern
Zuckerberg seems to be downplaying Facebook's fake news problem, and I'm not
particularly optimistic about Google taking it seriously either.

Software engineers are smart- software engineers who work for Google and FB
especiallly so. It isn't inconceivable that they, and the people they know,
are smart enough to see right through fake news, and that the idea that anyone
can be fooled by fake news is probably absurd to them.

Unfortunately in the real world, many otherwise normal, functional people just
aren't equipped to do basic fact-checking.

Just yesterday, I got a forwarded fake news meme from my uncle, about a woman
who had 11 babies[^]. My uncle, in his 50s, is a college dropout and of above-
average (though not stratospheric) intelligence. He is simply not equipped
(along with many others I know) to deal with a world where hostile, greedy and
mischievous actors are working to shape their reality.

This is an example of where some diversity would help improve tech. The
monoculture at the top seems to have isolated the industry from its customers
and their intellectual weaknesses.

[^]It happened to be a Whatsapp family group, so I was able to see the story
and tell him it was fake...my FB feed is already filtered to hide that sort of
junk.

------
brentm
I noticed this on Sunday but it seemed par for the course for a Google news
result. I wish they would use better signaling on any domain being returned as
a news result. A domain registered less than a year ago with a link profile
almost all alt-right is probably not the best source.

------
cpeterso
Google News allows you to tune which news sources to prefer (under Personalize
> Adjust Sources). I have a long list of "news" sites that I mute. It would be
useful if there was a way to export or share these lists, similar to some
Twitter blocklist sharing services.

------
seoseokho
I think one of the issues is, unlike the printing press days, you can't
unsubscribe from bad news outlet. In the old days, you'd cancel your
subscription and delivery. Now your best shot is adding 70news.com to
adblocker or something.

------
ocdtrekkie
What's funny, is now this article is the top result for "final election
results" on Google. :) And then the article they're talking about shows up
second.

------
awqrre
Why does Google wait so long to report the real election result? They don't
want to make Hillary look as bad as she did in the election?

------
dougmany
I typically go to the state registrar of voters for official vote counts.
Aggregating them over multiple states is hard though.

------
eva1984
Fake news is a hard business. Even human cannot tell whether it is true or
not, if without intensive fact checking.

~~~
ctdonath
I've been wondering about that for some months now: for all the stuff I see
reported as news, I'm increasingly suspicious about how any of it comes into
being as reported.

------
dforrestwilson1
The printing press dramatically changed the sociopolitical landscape of the
world.

Should we expect less from the internet?

------
nerfhammer
I googled "safety pin" and 50% of the top results are clickbait garbage

~~~
37
I googled "kardashian" and 90% of the top results are clickbait garbage

------
jotadambalakiri
Wow, self-criticism from WaPo? I applaude that.

------
0xmohit
AI will eat the world.

------
mikebay
Every corporation try to hide now they hate against Trump. Sad that there is
so many liars in corporate world. I Don't trust anything that Google, Facebook
& Twitter is pushing. Trust issue is really understatement.

------
lowbloodsugar
Hilarious that WaPo is complaining about other people spreading fake news.
Stealing some of their readership no doubt.

------
adamors
Ironic that WaPo should call out anybody for being fake this election cicle.

For those downvoting, read at least this:

[http://nypost.com/2016/10/12/how-the-washington-post-
killed-...](http://nypost.com/2016/10/12/how-the-washington-post-killed-
bernie-sanders-candidacy/)

~~~
treehau5
I am with you, friend. On reddit's /r/politics, there was a heavy influx of
Correct The Record shills, and now that the election is over, things have
returned to relatively normal there. With Bezos controlling WaPo, I have no
reason to believe things are not being manipulated here as well. The only
thing, and maybe good, this election cycle has done was throw out the window
the small shred of faith I had in fair and unbiased reporting in this country
in critical moments. They throw a puff piece, or a good piece of journalism
here and there on side topics, but when it comes to crunch time -- as shown by
the WaPo days leading up to the Democratic Primaries, they unleash the full
weight of their propaganda machine with no remorse.

The only thing I'll turn to these corrupt giants now is weather events. Can't
slant those in any way. We need to break up the 6 corporations that control
our media, ASAP.

~~~
scholia
Discrediting honest reporting has been the foundation of the whole alt-right
approach to the media, and getting acceptance for the lies broadcast by
sources such as Breitbart News and Drudge Report. In fact, it's essential to
discredit honest reporting if your lies are going to get any traction. And,
evidently, it has worked on you.

Sadly, it's even worse than it sounds, because now even the alt-right websites
can't tell the truth. For an interesting short piece about this, see the final
section of "Donald Trump broke the conservative media" (1). Quote:

One of the chief problems, Sykes (2) said, was that it had become impossible
to prove to listeners that Trump was telling falsehoods because over the past
several decades, the conservative news media had "basically eliminated any of
the referees, the gatekeepers."

"There's nobody," he lamented. "Let's say that Donald Trump basically makes
whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows
it's a falsehood. The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to
say that, 'By the way, you know it's false.' And they'll say, 'Why? I saw it
on Allen B. West.' Or they'll say, 'I saw it on a Facebook page.' And I'll
say, 'The New York Times did a fact check.' And they'll say, 'Oh, that's The
New York Times. That's bulls---.' There's nobody — you can't go to anybody and
say, 'Look, here are the facts.'"

"And I have to say that's one of the disorienting realities of this political
year. You can be in this alternative media reality and there's no way to break
through it," Sykes continued. "And I swim upstream because if I don't say
these things from some of these websites, then suddenly I have sold out. Then
they'll ask what's wrong with me for not repeating these stories that I know
not to be true."

(1) [http://uk.businessinsider.com/conservative-media-trump-
drudg...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/conservative-media-trump-drudge-
coulter-2016-8)

Edit/insert:

(2) "Charlie Sykes, a popular conservative talk show host in Wisconsin"

~~~
treehau5
> And, evidently, it has worked on you.

Yeah, no. I see the dung heap in front of me, I don't need conservative click
bait news outlets to help me.

~~~
scholia
Which dung-heap is that?

------
thisisdallas
Be fair I didn't read the article. Just judging by the site, the headline, and
current events, I assume the problem is that the content of the page is
opinion instead of fact.

Ok, what's wrong with that? If that site/blog post has gained more traffic,
social signals, backlinks, etc. etc than it's "competitors" shouldn't it
naturally be top ranking?

~~~
libeclipse
That's not what the article is about. It's about misinformation; the fact that
people are citing these sites and touting numbers that "prove" that Hilary
lost on both electoral and popular vote.

~~~
0xfeba
I've seen some (really condescending) comments doing just that. I thought they
were on drugs or just trolls.

