I agree and the author, Alex Madrigal, seems to be ignorant to the history of the dissemination of misinformation. He commits the same error as other journalists complaining about Google/Facebook algorithms by not mentioning their "human judgement" within news orgs causes similar problems.
Let's look at how the news publications handled the "truthiness" of Iraq WMD:
- No skepticism that WMD exists: September 2002 article (WMD fever 6 months before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq)[1].
- WMD not found: January 2004 article (10 months after the invasion when soldiers found nothing.)[2]
Before March 2003, all the influential news orgs in USA such as NYTimes, Washington Post, and all 4 major tv networks pandered to the Bush administration's "slam dunk" narrative for Iraq having WMD.
You can't make excuses for those USA news orgs and say they were tricked. That's because the news outlets in Europe (especially the journalists in France and Sweden) were more skeptical about WMD and wrote that attacking Iraq would be a big mistake.
It's fascinating how the journalists write as if they're on a perch of higher judgement over the mass of helpless readers when they themselves fall victims to the same scams of misinformation and spread that misinformation to audiences just like bad Google algorithms.
(See documentaries "War Made Easy"[3] and "Buying the War"[4] that show how journalists lack independent critical judgement and fall in lockstep to spread misinformation.)
>There’s no hiding behind algorithms anymore. The problems cannot be minimized. The machines have shown they are not up to the task of dealing with rare, breaking news events, and it is unlikely that they will be in the near future. More humans must be added to the decision-making process, and the sooner the better.
But humans and their judgement are not even up to the task of slow-moving news like the buildup to war. For the Iraq fiasco, maybe the better solution in 2003 is "more algorithms" in such that USA readers would end up in a 50/50 split with half believing Iraq had WMD and the other half remaining skeptical. Instead, the polls showed that majority of Americans believed Iraq had WMD.[5]
How did they get that wrong belief?!? The mainstream news, that's how. (Facebook "fake news" didn't exist in 2003.)
Yes, Google needs better algorithms; but I'm not convinced that people like Alex or government officials should be the ones regulating the algorithms. They have a proven track history of being as flawed as the readers they're trying to inform with the "truth". (Thought experiment: if Google search results in Feb 2003 had returned more results saying "no proof Iraq has WMD", American journalists and the government would have criticized Google's algorithm for spreading "fake news"!)
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-ir...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/01/spies-l...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9DjSg6l9Vs
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KzYL6e3sV0
[5] http://news.gallup.com/poll/8623/americans-still-think-iraq-...