The reason fake news, clickbait and SEO techniques on poor content are able to prevail is the same reason spam mail is still a thing in 2017. Because it's an evolutionary race where each innovation is countered by a trick to avoid it.
Google and Facebook Have Failed Us
31–40 of 191 posts
Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us
#32It's rather bold for the Atlantic to complain about low quality news when they have clickbait garbage at the bottom of every article.
It's not either/or; many high quality news sources have clickbait rubbish stories to help pay the bills for the more expensive, higher quality reporting. It's either that, or paywalls (or both)
Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The reason why those of us on this forum can tell the difference between good and bad information is because we received a good education and learned critical analysis skills. We really need to stop congratulating ourselves on how smart we are and we would never fall for such blatant lies, because we are such highly-educated critical thinkers. There are a bunch of silly beliefs that we witness even amongst us like…
What evidence do you have that gender parity in tech (I assume you mean engineering roles) is good and/or natural? The scientific evidence seems to suggest to me that widespread gender disparity in many fields is natural.
Science can't tell you if something is "natural" or good/bad. Science merely tells you what is/what we observe. (with some probability of being wrong, and subject to bias, etc).
Whether something is good/bad is up to us as a society to define, not science. What is considered good/bad depends on each of our individual goals/ethics/morals, which could differ from one another. This is why spoonfeeding people information saying "X is good" / "X is bad" is dangerous, and it becomes more dangerous when social media platforms allow such information to be amplified.
Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The reason why those of us on this forum can tell the difference between good and bad information is because we received a good education and learned critical analysis skills. We really need to stop congratulating ourselves on how smart we are and we would never fall for such blatant lies, because we are such highly-educated critical thinkers. There are a bunch of silly beliefs that we witness even amongst us like…
What evidence do you have that gender parity in tech (I assume you mean engineering roles) is good and/or natural? The scientific evidence seems to suggest to me that widespread gender disparity in many fields is natural.
I would like to see that evidence, thanks.
Edit: specifically I would like to see evidence that 1) a behavioral trait occurs in one gender identity that is universal across the majority of human culture to eliminate cultural bias, 2) that this trait has a causative effect on the career prospects of that person again across the majority of human culture to avoid culture bias (also that when this trait is strong in a gender not normally correlated that it causes same causative effect)
Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us
#35Zeynep Tufekci had a couple great columns about this recently regarding FB and the US elections this year. While I recognize that there's always a concern about who the gatekeepers get to be in the marketplace of ideas, I think this is a considerably more complex issues than "let all the information go wherever it wants and let the people sort it out" Putting 4Chan in a top news slot is not "allowing unedited and unf…
> into a spot that many users believe is fairly authoritative
I mean that's the real issue. You can't be unbiased while trying to be a source of truth. You can be impartial and return results based on relevancy or you can intervene in an attempt to return the truth. Google has ventured into dangerous territory by mixing the two -- especially with their automatic snippets that answer questions.
> There is only figuring out ways to filter and sort the firehose
But it's an unsolved problem for how you put the control of this filtering into the users hands. The best we have right now is to just return everything and let the users choose what to pay attention to.
Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
What evidence do you have that gender parity in tech (I assume you mean engineering roles) is good and/or natural? The scientific evidence seems to suggest to me that widespread gender disparity in many fields is natural.
I would like to see that evidence, thanks. Edit: specifically I would like to see evidence that 1) a behavioral trait occurs in one gender identity that is universal across the majority of human culture to eliminate cultural bias, 2) that this trait has a causative effect on the career prospects of that person again across the majority of human culture to avoid culture bias (also that when this trait is strong in a g…
> I would like to see that evidence, thanks.
You won't find it. This is the problem in the soft sciences. There are certain hypotheses that you just can't test and this is one of them. Choosing to believe that unbalanced gender representations in certain fields is unnatural is just as unfounded as the parent's opposite view. The best we can do is make conjectures based on the results of things we can test but it's incredibly difficult to determine how much the things that are possible to know matter at the population scale.
Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us
#37I think there's already too much filtering. People need to make up their own minds regarding what is true and what isn't, what's worth their time and what's bullshit, which links to click on and which to avoid. If people can't handle this then we need to spend more money on education, or just accept that some people disagree with us. I don't think aggressively filtering "untrustworthy" content will lead to a net bene…
These platforms have hyper-optimized their products to show as much stuff as possible that people will engage with (share, click), so that they also engage with ads and stay active.
The problem is there is often some time when there is no news. No news isn't interesting, so it doesn't get shared as much as "news". Take the moments immediately following a disaster. Two types of news articles will show up:
"There was a shooting. We don't know anything yet, but we will keep you posted". Boring.
"We know who the killer is. Bobby Bobertson done it". Woah!
Now imagine you are a heavy social media user. You don't want to stay silent on such a big news story, so you want to share something showing you are engaged. Which story do you share?
(edit: removed duplicate "the problem is")
Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is this getting downvotes? It's spot on. The "mainstream media" have been failing us for years, yet now suddenly it's all Google's and Facebook's fault that people are getting inaccurate information fed to them?
+1
+1 There are plenty of brave journalists/bloggers but very few editors or corporate media vehicles prepared to publish their investigative reporting. I wouldn't dream of using FB as a go to 'news' source, while Google is essentially an aggregator/curator of information sources I may or may not take seriously.
The idea that these lightweight websites should somehow be the gatekeepers of 'the truth' is pretty offensive. I prefer to triangulate across multiple sources and make up my own mind base don the information I uncover.
Example: https://lasvegassun.com/news/2017/oct/02/gunman-who-killed-5...
A lead story in the local Vegas newspaper states the alleged gunman was a multi millionaire property owner. Is this true? I have no way of proving it but it is certainly food for thought...
Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us
#39Zeynep Tufekci had a couple great columns about this recently regarding FB and the US elections this year. While I recognize that there's always a concern about who the gatekeepers get to be in the marketplace of ideas, I think this is a considerably more complex issues than "let all the information go wherever it wants and let the people sort it out" Putting 4Chan in a top news slot is not "allowing unedited and unf…
Asking the rich and powerful gatekeepers of the majority news sources of the public to filter content for us in a way they have been relatively reticent to do, mostly out of pure altruism, is asinine. I have no love for Facebook or Google, but the world wouldn't be a better place if they cultivated news for us, at least not for long.
Re: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am speaking specifically about this particular article and the topic it is covering. Whatever assumptions you used to arrive at your conclusions were introduced by the story you wanted to tell. I'd rather you didn't extrapolate from what I wrote. Ask me nicely and I will tell you why fixing Facebook and Google are not the answer.
The original replier doesn't sound as if they're extropolating to me. You're also telling a story, and shouldn't be the only one in the conversation to do so. > Over time, the noise is stripped away and what we get is the official narrative and that is one we can "count" on. I'd ask why fixing Facebook or Google isn't the answer, but that would play into _your_ extropolating narrative. Instead, why shouldn't Google a…
Huh? Why would you blame your car or someone else's car for driving when someone slams into you from behind?
You blame the brakes when they stop braking. The car when it stops driving. Don't blame the car when the people are at fault.
It's hilarious seeing people blame Facebook as if it's some real person trying to trick everyone, when it fact it's just someone using the tool wrongly.. hint: you can use nearly every tool wrong. See: 'Man kills person with knife that is only for cutting bread.'
When you start to blame things like Facebook or Google for doing their job and presenting popular/trending topics, you lose any grasp on the real problem... and that is much uglier, so I don't blame those that do.
Would you stop using bread knives because they cut bread fine, but kill people poorly?