The new Google News: AI meets human intelligence

Isn't that exactly personalized news?

But you can just load it on incognito or signed out and not have any personalization other than location/country.

That's what I used to use google news for too. Then a few years ago, google "personalized" and "localize"d news to your area and it became pointless. Google news was especially great for international events in the early 2010s because you'd get international sources listed back then. So you could see the difference in coverage between our media and china's media and europe's media and middle east's media of the same event.

Now, google news is just mostly NYTimes and Washingtonpost stories. And considering they espouse the same message on pretty much everything, I stopped using google news.

I understand that google was heavily pressured by the news industry to push traffic to major US news sites, but I wish they would have given us the option to opt out of personalization and localization.

What's even more disappointing is that google search was updated to heavily favor local news. So if I search for "North korea news" or "syria news", the search result is ridiculously skewed to US news' perspective. They used to list forums, messageboards, etc on search for international events, but they scrubbed those from the search results.

Social media used to have alternate/external/foreign sources but after US media pressure, they've also "personalized" and localized.

It's amazing how easily the news industry has pressured tech companies into limiting what the public sees and hears.

I wish there was a news aggregate site which had a page per news event where it listed international coverage of the event.

They rated this article as "pants on fire" for reporting on something that came directly from the mouth of a public official. The politifact intern actually reached out to the official in question and he personally confirmed that he gave the outlet bad information, and yet it retains the rating that insinuates intentional lying and misleading. I think it's infuriating that Google is getting away with giving these institutions an elevated voice. They do not hold an ounce of the journalistic integrity that they claim to and they make little effort to be nonpartisan.

edit: The issue isn't with any particular institution, it's the general problem of any authority claiming to be an objective purveyor of truth and Google giving anyone like that an elevated voice. Even if it's not corrupt now, it's corruptible, and it serves no purpose. People need to come to decisions on their own.

(edit: for the record, I feel it is necessary to say that I do not regularly read this blog, I came across the fellowshipoftheminds.com post as a result of seeing the politifact article on reddit, I do not endorse the site in question)