
Google updating policy for ads on fake news sites - ChuckMcM
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-advertising-idUSKBN1392MM
======
dandare
I think this is one of the good ideas that pave the way to hell. What is fake
and what is truth? How is Google going to decide? Couple examples: 1/ Is
global warming a huge conspiracy? The president of USA certainly says so. 2/
News: CIA plotted with terrorist to traffic drugs to US - that must be a hoax,
right? 3/ News: The US govt secretly spread syphilis among black population -
this infowars shit must be surely hoax. 4/ How about US pretending being
attacked to start a war? I am talking about Gulf of Tonkin, not 9/11\. 5/ The
government is reading all your emails and listening to all your phonecalls -
bat shit crazy, right?

What I am trying to say is that once such mechanism is in place it can go on a
slippery slope from there on. Next thing they will decide to filter fake news
search results and that very minute they will be subpoenaed to hide something
in the name of state security.

~~~
matt4077
I know there are people who will dismiss it as bias, but you can actually
assign a quality score to publications quite easily. NYT/Wall Street
Journal/The Atlantic/Guardian/Washington Post/The New Yorker vs.
breitbart/HuffPost/....

Note that all those stories you're referencing were all broken by the papers I
listed. The breitbarts of the world usually just repackage what actual news
organizations publish with ideological slant.

~~~
myowncrapulence

      Note that all those stories you're referencing were all broken by the papers I listed.
    

Actually, Snowden was turned down by _every single_ newspaper you just listed
with the exception of The Guardian.

~~~
matt4077
Wasn't it NYT/Guardian/SPIEGEL that released simultaneously? Also note that he
chose to work with these organizations, even though he could have easily
posted it online/given it to wikileaks.

~~~
myowncrapulence
No, they published later after The Guardian and The Washington Post had
already covered a majority of the leaks.

------
ChuckMcM
This is the proverbial "other shoe" and its not at all clear who actually is
getting hurt.

So the back story is that it is trivial to set up a "fake news" site and slant
the crap out of the news and outright lie about what is going on to attract
that segment of the population that is more interested in having their views
validated than they are in learning anything new. And if you do that and fill
it with aggressive ads you can make enough money per month to buy beer easily
and sometimes even fund a comfortable lifestyle in a country which has a low
cost of living.

So Google is going to stop selling ads to those sites. (good move on their
part although it does impact their bottom line slightly) and they are going to
stop taking money from those sites which try to buy adwords and make their
site appear in the search results for a popular keyword. Also good but
somewhat problematic.

This is the problem. Google sells ads on bids, highest bidder gets the best ad
spot. Search ads are their cash cow and lifeblood. Hackers and fake news sites
compete with each other trying to buy the ads on searches that hapless people
do trying to find information about current events. So Google profits both by
selling adwords and by the competition all these bad actors are engaged in
trying to buy that top slot. Stop selling them adwords or stop allowing them
to bid, and Google takes a big hit in topline revenue. How much remains to be
seen, but if its a problem I expect fake news to be a hot topic at
Searchengineland.

~~~
GabrielF00
I think Google risks taking a huge hit to its credibility if the most
prominent result for a topic is an outright lie. I'd guess that the loss of
credibility/constant PR problems would more than offset the revenue.

------
vinhboy
Thank god we are finally focusing on this issue. I can not believe we allowed
right wing propaganda sites to publish so much false information for so long.

Anyone who denies the existence of this is being dishonest. There is no way
you can defend the journalist integrity of the 'breitbart' of the web. It
takes 'yellow journalism' to a whole new level.

It has also become obvious to us that the average internet user, has no idea
how to vet anything on the web. They lack the simplest ability to recognize
the deceiving nature of the URL they are visiting. And we're not just talking
about uneducated folks. I've seen plenty of college-educated people share fake
news.

This is rotting our democracy.

I am at the point where I feel like technologists and journalists have to work
together to establish some sort of browser based credentialing system that we
give to content creators to signal that they are a legitimate news source.
Like how we SSL validate sites. It maybe as useless as a "certified organic"
sticker, but at least it'll be better than nothing.

~~~
Kenji
Thank goodness we can hide away and silence dissenting and right wing voices.
It's not like that was a big part of what caused Trump to be elected.

I really am glad that google, facebook & co curate what political things we
get shown, that fixes democracy once and for all by making us better informed
citizens. /s

EDIT: To those who do not get free speech at all: By silencing people who
spread conspiracy theories, you provide them with the first fact that they
might be on to something. Because if they weren't on to something, why
couldn't you just provide simple facts to contradict and embarrass the
conspiracy theorist?

~~~
Pxtl
Conservatives are entitled to their own opinions, just not their own facts.

~~~
grzm
Everyone should be held to that, not just conservatives.

------
rebootthesystem
This is good but I think there's an elephant in the room Google isn't
addressing...and I don't know why.

Content origin/ownership.

Say I devote three weeks to researching a topic and then publish a detailed
article on my website. A website with more traffic can swipe the entire thing,
word for word, even the images, post it on their site and generate traffic on
stolen content.

Google desperately needs a way for content authors to be able to register
their work and penalize content thieves. This is probably impossible to make
work retroactively but that's not a problem.

When it comes to news websites, the same applies. Why do we have the same
story from 1,000 different sites? Whoever originates the story should "own it"
and get the search traffic. Other sites are just copying. So, if CNN and FOX
are just regurgitating stories from Associated Press, why are they even
relevant?

I think sensible content ownership controls could clean-up a bunch of the
internet and direct traffic to deserving sites. There's almost no incentive to
create original content unless you already have so much traffic that you are
going to capitalize on it.

I have hundreds of original articles I would like to publish on our sites and
don't because I know what will happen. So, we publish articles with much less
depth, because it costs money to sit down and devote hours to writing a well-
researched piece.

~~~
narrowrail
>I have hundreds of original articles I would like to publish on our sites and
don't

Wait, you have already sunk the costs to produce this content, but will not
because others might profit from it? This doesn't make much sense at all
unless I'm missing something here. You might have generated _some_ revenue,
but now it's $0?

~~~
rebootthesystem
The content was written and delivered to our customers directly through email.
It was not inexpensive to develop and that's why I hesitate to put it online
for it to be stolen. We have healthy email lists of our customers and are
happy to deliver good content directly into their mailboxes.

------
mr_spothawk
>"Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent,
misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher's content,
or the primary purpose of the web property,"

That sounds terrible. Does that mean if I'm ICANN registered with my host's
"don't spam me bro" protections, that my blogs can be ad supported?

------
Mao_Zedang
I am sure this will be cheered at here, but this is a troubling trend.

------
jwtadvice
This is going to bring the New York Times down.

------
yahyaheee
Wonder what spawned this?

~~~
jwtadvice
National Security folk calling in favors.

------
forrestthewoods
Does Vox count as fake news? Their manipulative misuse of statistics is so bad
it should qualify as fake.

~~~
mr_spothawk
care to expound on that?

~~~
bcoates
I'm mostly on the buy side so I'm not sure how much of the dogwhistle comes
through, but here's a random article about how Vox is basically a platform for
brands to sell products as news:

[http://digiday.com/publishers/flush-cash-vox-media-seeks-
tec...](http://digiday.com/publishers/flush-cash-vox-media-seeks-tech-
advantage-native-ads/)

Obviously they can't be too blatant about it but Vox promoting any position
you pay them to is literally their business model.

I assume they don't tell their writers this but the softball neoliberalism
that they pitch by default is brand-safe enough that nobody'd notice.

------
DominikR
Strange to see how Google, a company that once refused to do business in China
in order to not have to engage in censorship, now openly seeks to implement
censorship in the West.

And a bunch of "liberals" on a hacker news who in all other cases would rail
against censorship on the Internet happily supporting censorship on the
Internet.

I'm astonished that someone like Sergey Brin would even allow this to happen,
considering that his family immigrated from a country that censored
information it did not like for the exact same reasons in order to impoverish
and control its population.

This is it for me, I'm moving away from all Google services.

~~~
mr_spothawk
Imagine the difference if it had been titled: "Google has agreed that it will
stop serving ads to Chinese sites which are unfriendly to President Li's
conception of Chinese culture and values."

~~~
DominikR
I'm pretty sure now that this mass psychosis in the West will most definitely
lead to civil war.

There are just too many people who can't seem to accept democracy or liberty
if it doesn't go their way.

------
piotrjurkiewicz
What about fake opinion polls?

~~~
DominikR
Well that's a hard one to answer for defenders of the politburo.

------
sparkzilla
Are they going to stop ads on the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the
other mainstream media sites that suppressed bad news about Clinton, while
pushing fake and manipulated news about Trump?

~~~
sigmar
>while pushing fake and manipulated news about Trump?

Link please.

~~~
sparkzilla
Since you asked..The New York Times completely made up the story about Trump
mocking a disabled reporter, to distract from their reporting of his comments
about seeing Muslims celebrating in New Jersey [1]. Freeze framed his arms and
completely made up the story to match. That's just one of many, many
deliberate misdirections and bogus factchecking fails by the MSM in this
election. The New York Times even apologised to its readers for its biased
coverage.

[1][https://medium.com/@sparkzilla/trump-and-the-battle-of-
the-t...](https://medium.com/@sparkzilla/trump-and-the-battle-of-the-
truths-a13450ecbbc8#.kc7t2kiby)

~~~
GabrielF00
Oh come on. I just watched the video again. He says "now the poor guy, you've
got to see this guy" and then he starts flailing his hands around and
imitating the reporter in a strange voice: "'uh uh uh I don't know what I said
ah ah ah I don't remember' he goes like 'I don't remember maybe that's what I
said'". I've watched plenty of Trump speeches and have not seen him use hand
gestures like that, and I wouldn't associate that gesture with not remembering
or hedging on something. I would definitely associate it with a disability
like cerebral palsy.

It's definitely not just manufactured by taking a freeze frame. Look at the
video.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-
checker/wp/2016/08/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-
checker/wp/2016/08/02/donald-trumps-revisionist-history-of-mocking-a-disabled-
reporter/)

~~~
sparkzilla
It is completely manufactured.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiUizn19p7o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiUizn19p7o)

~~~
twr
In the first video, Mr. Trump tucks in his chin, draws back his eyelids, and
adopts a "retarded" tone of voice.

In the second video, Mr. Trump just moves his hands around a bit, as you say.

I had not seen the first video until now, and I am unfamiliar with the
disabled reporter, but I concluded right away that he was embodying someone
with a physical/mental disability -- something like Parkinson's or cerebral
palsy.

If he was not, then Donald Trump has only himself to blame, for behaving in a
misconstruable manner.

~~~
sparkzilla
Except that the disabled reporter doesn't behave like Trump's mockery at all.
He has no outward shaking or hand waving at all. [1] So the situation is
actually worse: The Times not only falsely painted Trump as someone who mocks
the disabled, they used a reporter's disability as a prop to attack Trump, AND
they took advantage of a stereotype of disabled people to mislead their own
readers. You can either accept the evidence that they lied and manipulated the
reader, or continue to follow the narrative. Choose wisely.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baUuXQ443fA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baUuXQ443fA)

~~~
twr
Depends on your take. Was he re-enacting the disabled reporter? Obviously not.
Was he ridiculing him in a mocking caricature? For the audience, who is mostly
unexposed to the subject, it seems likely.

Such exaggerated mimicry is a regular occurrence in American secondary
schools. I saw his exact performance targeted at the "special" kids, some of
whom were quite normal, many times in my youth. If Mr. Trump was raised in
America, he would know not to use those kinds of expressions.

> You can either accept the evidence that they lied and manipulated the
> reader, or continue to follow the narrative. Choose wisely.

No, those are not the only narratives. Here's a third: Donald Trump,
regardless of his intentions, briefly acted the part of the fool. The media,
acting in their own self-interests, covered the story -- with dramatic
embellishment -- which had practically been handed to them. Either way, it's
his own damn fault.

