Google removes over 5M reviews from Play Store to improve TikTok rating

Okay, but it's immediately clear that nobody who wrote this paper is knowledgeable about virology or the norms of academic publishing — but they were trying to fake it. Yet the first author is claimed to be a real person who is in fact a virologist with lots of academic publications.

How about Wired? https://www.wired.com/story/an-old-malaria-drug-may-fight-co...

> Except for that video, which hadn’t come out yet, Rigano put all that together and got in touch with Todaro. “I essentially wrote the publication based on my interface with various Stanford researchers and others, and we developed this body of evidence and hardcore science,” Rigano says. “James, Dr. Todaro, was doing the best job, I thought, of anyone in the media, any doctor, any news outlet, anyone on Twitter, of covering coronavirus. I’d been following his research on other items, like decentralized computing, for several years.”

> Todaro, who got an MD from Columbia and is now a bitcoin investor, was interested enough to collaborate on the document. “I added stuff that pertained more to the medical side of things, and gave a more, I guess, clinical feel to it,” Todaro says. “Something that Big Pharma is not going to like—it’s widely available, it’s pretty cheap, and it’s something that at least a million people are already on. It’s really got a lot of the aspects of something that can be rolled out quickly if the right clinical data is there.”

> Todaro and Rigano together started talking to Raoult about the small study he was then preparing, and they also called a retired biochemist named Tom Broker. He was originally listed as the first author of the Google doc, his name followed by “(Stanford).” That’s where Broker got his PhD, in 1972, but Broker has been, for years, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His area of research is adenovirus and human papillomavirus, which have DNA as their genetic material, as opposed to the RNA inside coronaviruses. They’re pretty different.

> Broker says he wasn’t involved in producing the Google doc and would never advocate the use of a drug without formal trials. Todaro and Rigano have since removed his name from it, at Broker’s request. “I neither contributed to, wrote any part of, nor had knowledge of this google.com document. I have never conducted research on RNA virus pathogens … I have no professional credentials or authority to suggest or recommend clinical trials or practices,” Broker wrote in an email. “Apparently I was inserted as a ‘gratuitous’ author, a practice that I have always avoided over my 53-year career. Moreover, I have never engaged any part of social media, privately or professionally. All of my scientific publications are processed through peer review. I suggest that you communicate with one of the actual authors.”

> Asked about Broker’s statement, Todaro says that Broker just didn’t want to engage with the attention the idea and document were getting “I don’t personally know Tom Broker. My correspondence has been with Mr. Rigano,” Todaro says. “When we started getting inquiries from the press, my impression was, Mr. Broker got very overwhelmed by that.”

So, according to Wired, the "paper"'s first author says that its real authors put his name on the paper without his knowledge or consent, which is dishonest (it goes far beyond the usual questionable practice of "gratuitous author" insertion, which places your sponsor as the last author), and that he disagrees with what it says. The "paper" is obviously not the kind of thing a real professor would produce. The real authors say he's lying.

It seems clear to me who's lying here. Wired caught them lying about a lot of other things, too.

This should have been top comment.

The last time TikTok was proactive in removing violent content, it got blamed for censorship.

There was a girl who posted a video that included pictures of Bin Laden, so TikTok removed it. She then created alt accounts and continued posting. When TikTok removed the video again, the news media said it was because she mentioned Uighurs, when in reality it was because of the Bin Laden pictures.

Not really, we apparently accept that Chinese companies are privately owned, that's the stated legality.

That 'all large Chinese companies are controlled to a greater or lesser degree by the state' - is a matter of fact highly suppressed and obfuscated by the state for purposes of aggressie control and statecraft.

Nobody cares that much that there's a degree of 'central planning' to grow the Chinese economy.

People care a lot that Huawei states they are 99% employee-owned, but in reality we don't really know who actually holds the power and that it seems more likely that the state has deep levers of control.

It would be more transparent to just accept that Zoom and TikTok can and will be used as tools of the CCP.

As far as Google and reviews ... it's going to be important that they remain very transparent and above board in such issues given all of the relevant factors.

Curious, how is India Today generally regarded in India? I ask because to me the style and tone of this article sounds like something that came out of an elementary school newspaper. E.g. "It was still the talk of the town but for all the wrong reasons", "could be the result of Google removing user reviews so that the app could get some balance." The hackneyed cliches and oddly stating a presumption as fact just strike me as extremely juvenile.

I'm in no way saying US news is better, and it is often times much worse, but it's usually not worse in the way this article is.