
Google admits citing 4chan to spread fake Vegas shooter news - pulisse
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/10/google-admits-citing-4chan-to-spread-fake-vegas-shooter-news/
======
pilif
_> We are working to fix the issue that allowed this to happen_

This is not some issue that you can fix. This is not some color being off, or
some chat message appearing out of order. This is about AI in its continued
infancy that’s now being actively and maliciously targeted.

It’s also about a huge responsibility of the worlds two greatest media outlets
that both think they can have machines do a humans job and miserably failing
at it.

Some users unable to log in? That’s an “issue” you “fix”.

Bringing the world closest it has been to the brink of a world war in the last
30 years, that’s the point where you step back and f'ing take responsibility
for your actions and start rethinking your approach.

Sorry for the harsh words. I’m probably overreacting.

~~~
8ytecoder
You are understating and giving a pass for the real issue at hand - a lack of
ability to think critically by a large portion of our population. Let's assume
for argument's sake that Google News and Facebook shut down their feeds
tomorrow - can you tell me with confidence that another one won't mushroom up
and take its place or that people won't switch to "dark" networks - Whatsapp,
Messenger, Email and what not?

I'm not absolving Google and Facebook. There are more trustworthy places to
get your news and information. Why do you think people flock to less reliable
sources? Unless that's solved, democracy and with it culture and progress as
we know it is destined to be doomed.

~~~
folksinger
Lesson to be learned:

Wisdom and knowledge do not come from technology. They come from wise and
experienced educators working one-on-one with their students, not to tell them
the truth, but to help them experience the truth. Nullius in verba!

Ed-tech is confidence game.

What technology offers is the productive capacity to support a world filled
with actual human educators and actual human intelligence.

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why_is_it_good
I am amazed at how bad this situation is.

> Something happens.

> /pol/, being /pol/, flipped the switch that generates semi-random
> information around a subject, seasoned with bias-of-the-day

> some posters on /pol/ decide to blame Geary Danley for the Vegas shooting

> google indexes /pol/

Given that:

> Searches for _words_ yield content related to _words_

> Searches for a name yield content related to a name

> Searches for "Geary Danley" yield content related to "Geary Danley"

This ensues:

> Media shitstorm because google is "citing 4chan to spread fake Vegas shooter
> news"

This only happens because:

1) We are expecting google to feed us only the truth? Otherwise we would say
"someone took google seriously and arrived to the wrong conclusions"

2) We don't care the slightest what URL we follow from google? Otherwise we
would say "someone who doesn't know what /pol/ is is taking it seriously"

3) We find it easier to blame some conspiracy than to take a step back and
think? We ascribe blame to google.

4) All of the above?

I feel I am living in some bizarro world where everyone's feelings and
expectations must be met, and any deviation from this will result in riots and
name calling[0].

Few things exist to serve your purposes. Think before using any tool. You
wouldn't use a blowtorch to trim your nails.

[0] [https://phys.org/news/2011-11-poop-throwing-chimps-
intellige...](https://phys.org/news/2011-11-poop-throwing-chimps-
intelligence.html)

~~~
DerfNet
It's weird that people are blaming a _search engine_ for providing relative
links for discussion on a topic. Again, it's a _search engine_ first and
foremost, not a _media outlet_. It _indexes_ media outlets.

It shouldn't be Google's job to vet articles. That should fall on the end
user, and this push to hide "fake news" is just asking for more problems down
the road.

~~~
mc32
Exactly, what happens when a credible news source has to _retract_ a need
story?

Do we crucify Google for surfacing an expost facto false story?

It's not Google's job to verify sources of news. Could they algorithmically
"guess" a credibility score and attach that to the newslink, sure, I suppose.

~~~
ominous
> Could they algorithmically "guess" a credibility score and attach that to
> the newslink, sure, I suppose.

Then why bother with other sources? Just generate a random summary based on
the search terms, rank it, and present it to the user if it is credible
enough. Repeat as necessary.

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SloopJon
I don't know whether these automated news aggregators rely on machine learning
per se, but this kind of reminds me of recent ML fails like Microsoft's Tay
bot turning into a Nazi, or Google Photos labeling black people as gorillas.

Andrew Ng interviewed Ian Goodfellow in the first course of his deep learning
specialization on Coursera. Ian said that he's really interested in machine
learning security, in part guarding against untrusted or adversarial inputs.

Whether they're poisoning your network in the first place, or your network is
misclassifying them because they're too weird, it seems like you need to treat
random inputs as potentially adversarial.

~~~
reaperducer
Part of the problem is that there's no quality control in AI or ML. "Good
enough to show the investors" is the benchmark.

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rightos
I really don't like the "fact checks" being done by news sites these days -
that's your responsibility as a reader, tech can't do it for you.

Even more reputable sites like Snopes tend to draw absolutist conclusions
about things which I find are certainly not absolute.

~~~
kartan
> that's your responsibility as a reader

I live in Sweden. How do I fact check what happens in a neighborhood in the
USA? How do I know that a result of a clinical test is reliable?

Do I check it on another on-line source? Do I spend millions on R&D and do my
own analysis? Or just few thousands going to Las Vegas and gathering my own
data? Or do I need to wait for a Newspaper that actually has fact-checking?

> Even more reputable sites like Snopes tend to draw absolutist conclusions
> about things which I find are certainly not absolute.

Billions of citizens fact-checking every single news is not cost effective. It
will be good to have a minimum of quality, and then you can apply any
correction to the inherent bias of that medium. There is a difference between
someway biased information and bullshit.

~~~
KekDemaga
> I live in Sweden. How do I fact check what happens in a neighborhood in the
> USA?

I question the utility of you having any opinion on US politics, especially at
the local level. You are certainly entitled to one but I don't know what it
gets you without a vote.

~~~
eterm
Well you've assumed they don't have a vote. US citizens are entitled to a vote
while living abroad.

[https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/legal-m...](https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/legal-
matters/benefits/voting.html)

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doktrin
There's a recurring theme in this thread :

> [insert internet company here] did nothing wrong! It's the reader's
> responsibility to think critically!

Obviously, there's a lot of truth to that. I'm sure everyone here broadly
agrees with the concept of personal responsibility. I just don't see how
making this blatantly obvious point gets us anywhere. It's like working with a
bad colleague who management won't fire. Of course they're failing at their
duties, but so what? You're stuck with them. It seems weirdly nihilistic to
just accept the situation, instead of trying to improve it by making the
colleague suck less.

Personally, I think it's OK to trust experts. We broadly trust doctors,
engineers, researchers and lawyers to inform us about their specific fields.
Journalism is different, in part because of the 1st amendment : the government
can regulate who's qualified to give you legal advice, but not who's qualified
to inform you about geopolitics. That's a feature, with some undesirable side
effects. My contention is that curated fact checking is an acceptable, if
imperfect, way to mitigate those side effects. Everyone's entitled to an
opinion, but not every opinion is entitled to the front page of Google.

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notahacker
I mean, I'm all for Google deciding that in the interests of pluralism and
avoiding partisanship in its filtering it can't rule out Breitbart, political
blogs or even Infowars as news sources, but including a web forum which -
quite apart from being an infamous cesspool - doesn't even pretend to be a
news source in Google News results?!

~~~
Karunamon
Indeed, this is the problem. If their algorithm is so naive that it accepts
_frickin ' 4chan_, it's probably going to end up making the wrong decision in
the other direction (that a reliable thing is not).

~~~
cisanti
Yes, this this this.

If they can't just rule out an image board famous for trolling, why should I
buy all these stories about ai, machine learning and all the buzzwords.

------
bitL
Ultimately, the issue is whether we allow freedom of speech or not (or
suppressing it severely). Tech is becoming political now, it's going to end up
regulated and meaningful advancements will be rare, as they will risk "rocking
the boat". That is going to be the most likely result when all major tech
companies bow down to "filtering", "censoring", "suppressing" unpopular
opinion. Automation would in infinite limit allow perfect control; now the
question is are we going to build a society for automatons, i.e. allow only
predefined human interactions, or for actual humans? Freedom always brings
horrible things with it, but also greatness not possible in restrictive
societies.

~~~
dasil003
A distinction needs to be made between the Googles and Facebooks of the world,
and "tech". In practice, huge corporations love it when they can serve as a
proxy for a human rights issue like freedom of speech. But there is no reason
that mega-corporations with unimaginable power and increasingly control of the
world's information should have the same freedoms that we allow individuals or
even smaller companies. To the contrary, they need government checks and
balances because there is no other counter-balancing force to their power.
Over the last 100 years or so American culture has been totally subverted to
this idea that any restrictions on corporate activity are inherently fascist
and will destroy our economy, and the only solution to overwhelming market
dominance is deregulation and magical thinking about the efficacy of the free
market.

~~~
bitL
I think the distinction here is not about limiting corporations but about
basic human issue of freedom (more specifically of "feeling of freedom";
unlimited freedom is out of reach even for the richest/most powerful humans).
As official media are losing their raison d'être, i.e. medial control of
population due to alternatives provided by self-inhibited freedom on the
Internet, allowing all kinds of ridiculous information to pop up, the usual
approach is to inhibit access to unapproved information sources, reinforcing
the feeling of having one's freedom attacked via censorship. Word of mouth was
always ridiculous, a sewer with a few pearls here and there, it was always
there though... Obviously, corporations in favor of "feeling of freedom" would
lose a lot where it matters, in popularity. To me it seems like the quality of
"story tellers", conjuring believable lies as was the case in the past, went
dramatically down and population overcame that paradigm and can't be fooled
with them anymore. Trying to shove population back to ancient approaches won't
work; new, smarter stories need to be invented for people to believe in.
Anyone up to the task?

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kylehotchkiss
One thing I was thinking about was how to leverage Open Graph share details
for less than reputable sites. If scammy sites lost the ability to have an
image/description attached to share, wouldn't that be a powerful way to show
maybe a link isn't reputable?

So many fake news sites are using high quality stock images fo OG share, and
we are more or less conditioned to believe a headline with a high quality
image attached, right?

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ng12
This is a problem as old as time. Just because you can find the Enquirer on
the same rack as the New York Times doesn't mean they're equally valid news
sources. Just read the material and decide for yourself. It's especially easy
for sites like 4chan which publicly avow that all posts are "artistic works of
fiction and falsehood".

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fluxsauce
In an unrelated note, Christopher Poole, the founder of 4chan began working
for Google in 2016.

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pukipumbam
Google do not suprise me anymore.. its sad that we have greedy companies like
google existing..

