Google, democracy and the truth about internet search

theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook

What does Sup Forums think of this?

The alt-right (and people looking to profit off of it) basically gamed Google's and Facebook's ranking/trending algorithms on a massive scale to push their articles to the top of the results, enabling data-mining companies to further track and target readers across the web with increasing sophistication.

Consider the extent to which Google and Facebook are able to reach people, the trust and authority that people put into these companies to authenticate what they consume online, and how easily the presumed neutrality of these platforms can be overwhelmed and manipulated by anyone with enough motivation.

Is the web doomed by its openness?
Is humanity doomed by its gullibility?
Should Google and Facebook be forced into being transparent about their algorithms if we are to further trust them with health data, automotive AI, etc?

There's no such thing as "alt-right", I wish people would stop using such an annoying term

And Sup Forums's "SJW" bogeyman doesn't exist either, right?

Turns out that the younger generation who grew up with the internet, knows how to manipulate it.

Suprise suprise.

>Turns out you can game Christains with this one easy trick: ebin misleading translations of the bible
>Turns out you can game journalists with this one easy trick: lie straight to their faces and get them to print it
>Turns out you can totally get people to check if their fridge is running: prank call them
>Turns out you can totally freak out loads of people with this one easy trick: set up an AM radio transmitter and spout nonsense
>Turns out you can totaly confudle retards and make all the news with this one easy trick: cut patterns into crops

It's just a prank bro. If anything the internet is way less susseptible to fuckery, because you can just search for the source right then and there.

>Turns out you can game journalists with this one easy trick: lie straight to their faces and get them to print it

The distinction between fake news and real news is that professional journalists are held to much higher standards than "Uncle Randy's ZOGXposers.com."

They're not supposed to take what they're given at face value and print it verbatim; they thoroughly screen their sources as well as the information.

The problem now is that the web has given fake news the same air of legitimacy as real news in the eyes of the average online consumer.

Alt-right is literally Sup Forums

>sources tell CNN that....

yeah OK man you can take your "higher standards" and shove them right up your asshole

The alt-right are being accused of doing what the Clintons have been doing for decades

This 'fake news' shit is hilarious since it's literally 1984 wrongthink

>basically gamed Google's and Facebook's ranking/trending algorithms on a massive scale to push their articles to the top of the results
yeah, i don't believe this.
sounds like something a delusional Sup Forumscuck would say when trying to exaggerate the effect he really had on the election.

protip: it wasn't much.

Media controlled by the US government, or conspiracy fake as fuck news... i don't know what to listen toi

> gamed Google's and Facebook's ranking/trending algorithms on a massive scale
yeah it's called seo, it's nothing new, and a bunch of "entrepreneurs" have fucked up internet searching beyond repair since about 5 years ago

OP basically states truth-inversion.

alt-right was suppressed and still won. Alinsky's rule is to always accuse your enemy of what you're doing.

>ideas got out
>failure of the free and open Web
Pick one

If there is a problem, it will be naturally resolved by the market. If it isn't resolved, then it wasn't a problem.

Of course, liberals can't handle logic so that's how it goes.

Yeah I do think that Sup Forums went too far and we're doomed but so what

By the time americans has to pay 60 thousand dollars for an avarage car or 4k dollars for a PS4 they will realize that they fucked things up. Just like any other shithole country in the world.

This has nothing to do with "gaming the system", just people who are desperate to find something to blame for the world not being the way they expect and at the same time don't understand how search engines index websites and present results.

Not so long ago poll spewed into g making exactly the same claims about how google was manipulating search results for, among other things, "famous American Inventors," type it into google: the results will mostly be African Americans, not because there is some massive conspiracy with google at the center but because those people are more likely to be described in articles with "American" and "Inventor" next to each other as in "African American inventor" and so will be ranked higher than an article with something like "Inventor born in America". The search will return exactly what you ask it for, so if you search "Ozone cures cancer" guess what the top hit will be.

Proof this is bulshit, google:
"greatest jewish contributions to mankind"
"greatest Irish contributions to mankind"
and so on and so forth.

Google has a hell of a lot of experience dealing with people trying to manipulate search results, it's one of the few things they still do well in fact if people began to suspect that google search was becoming partisan in either direction it would cease to be the most popular search engine pretty quickly.

pretty sure 95% of media covering the election was anti trump. any time you googled trump shit it was negative. The DNC literally paid millions of dollars to people to manipulate online media presence. The people genuinely ate it up when pro trump stuff was spread around and published because they liked the idea of trump.

I thought we weren't going to need cars in the progressive future and gaming is a patriarchal culture that should go away?

This has been going on forever. I remember doing this on Sup Forums years ago but only for the lulz.
Why is this news?

brety gud b8 m8

>if people began to suspect that google search was becoming partisan in either direction it would cease to be the most popular search engine pretty quickly.

They are partisan but it doesn't matter because they have the best search engine by far.

>unironically being an ancap

Dont mistake me for a dnc shill
Thats economics 101, thats what happens when someone wants to tax the fuck out of things that are not manufactured around here.

I agree on trump on almost everything except this and I hope he doesnt go through with this. I doubt he will.

Both are extremely small niche sub cultures that the media gave legitimacy by paying attention to them.
Both have abused this to control the narrative, with SJWs pushing identity politics at every turn and the alt-right becoming a grassroots campaign to bolster Trump's campaign.
Both get attention from outrage (kill all white men v.s. GAS THE KIKES RACE WAR NOW) and attempt to stifle all criticism with ad-homs.

>I agree on trump on almost everything

Even his support for torture?vOr, That retarded fucking wall.

Oh, you're a cunt...

My mistake, on your way cunty.

Economy 101 says a country 20 trillion in debt with a perpetual trade deficit is fucked either way. Enjoy the decline.

Hahaha you fairy coward faggot!

no. go back.

Hey Uncle Randy!

>$20 Trillion

You might have noticed the Government isn't very concerned by this "debt". To people like us it looks terrifying, but, in reality, it's not a problem.

Government "debt" isn't like the personal debt we experience. Most of the money is owed by the Government to the Government. It can be written of with the stroke of a pen or the push of a button. We were in far worse "debt" after WW2, we got out of debt by growing the economy and inflation.

In reality, the $20 Trillion debt will simply sit there and be inflated away.

There's a reason they are pushing this whole 'fake news' thing so hard, when it was just Sup Forumsacks on FB trolling with their bots on cruise control and none of these stories had anything to do with election wins (again, media still doesn't understand why their heavily promoted candidate lost).

They want these monolith tech corps to actively censor content so the plebs can only be manipulated by their fake news instead of anybody's fake news. Also if you don't think the Guardian and NYT is serving up propaganda then start comparing their stories with actual quotes if you can find them.

For example there was a story about cancer med testing the other day day in the NYT. They quoted a doctor as being against the results, without saying why, and cut + pasted his quotes together to make him seem 100% evil.

Later I discovered what he actually said was he was against studies not being replicated/reviewed and just taken at face value. Not an explosive quote but they rearranged it so he would seem explosive.

The guardian also ran numerous hit jobs in my country about our elections (not american) and misquoted the other candidates that they did not endorse.

tl;dr the 'real' media is just as bad as the so-called fake media

Inflating it away erodes purchasing power of foreign goods so, like I said, eventually your chink shit stops showing up either way.

It gets worse, the US has states who are literally bankrupt, such as Illinois and CT, which must pay 200%+ more in pensions and other benefits than they have in income per budget.

These 2 states will require a federal bailout soon and that will just add to the inflation. USD will be Romanian Lieu tier if not careful

>(again, media still doesn't understand why their heavily promoted candidate lost).

Well, it's evident from the Presidential campaign that bear faced lying wins elections. The electorate doesn't seem to care. They still don't care when Trump renegues on nearly all of his promises before he's in the White House (shrug).

Trump's success was convincing Clinton supporters to stay at home on electon day. This was achieved by smearing her. All of the bullshit that was thrown at her was indeed bulshit, but, it began to stick.

If she'd chosen Sanders as her Vice Presidential candidate, she'd be taking Office in January.

>Inflating it away erodes purchasing power of foreign goods so

Which encourages domestic production.

>hese 2 states will require a federal bailout soon and that will just add to the inflation.

Inflation is still at historic lows. We're still at risk of deflation, which is far worse than inflation.

Oh look its a delusional shitlib.

Don't you have a pizza parlor/Clinton child sex ring to shoot up?

I'm not a "liberal". I voted Libertarian.

Clinton is a cunt. Trump is a cunt. But, I'd rather take a Neo-liberal Clinton for President than a Neo-Fascist Trump.

hehe

Where do you get your news?

Well, part of the problem there is that the owners of news organisations made the genius decision a number of years ago to give all their content away for free, then realised they needed to save money, because they had no income anymore, so they sacked all the good (expensive) journalists and replaced them with free interns. Suprise suprise standards went to shit, and they're still not making money

Libertarians are another breed of retarded

>"Trump won because he smeared everyone"
>not the other way around

>libertarian

How to lose all credibility with as many syllables as possible

Are you claiming Trump didn't spout all that bullshit he was recorded spouting?

You personally are the problem.

Don't expect a delusional shitlib to have command over any facts. These people are mentally ill and can't be reasoned with.

There was no need to smear Trump. He did it to himself, and it got him elected.

Are you serious?
Almost all shit that Trump said was maliciously misquoted or mispresented in headlines. USA MSM really reached 1970's El Mercurio amount of fuckery against someone.

>misquoted
>misrepresented

I actually watched him spout a lot of that bullshit. It came straight from the horses mouth. When people attempted to call him out, he double down on it. He was fucking proud of it.

You're attempting to defend the indefensible.

In short, you're a cunt.

Regardless of the headlines, Trump really is a master at saying a whole lot of nothing.

He sounds like a clueless 5th grader running for class president.

>that article

My fucking sides. Too good to be true.

Yes. I'm a fucking cunt
The greatest cunt you will find in the internet.
So? What you will do?
I also watched him spouting shit. But I also saw that he was really mistreated by mainstreal media.
And you know it's true.

> he was really mistreated by mainstreal media.

Are you really claming Trump is simply misunderstood?

That little thing about endorsing the use of torture was just a "misquote"?

You cunt.

Quite insightful

No, he is deliberately misquoten in malicious way.
>endorsing torutre
Yes. Do you know why I said "I heard it sputing shit too"?
Because of that.
And also, in the big picture, that isn't a big deal. Compared for what Miss Rodham was doing and could have done if she was elected.

>No, he is deliberately misquoten in malicious way.

Misquoted?

He actually said that shit. He wasn't "miss" anything.

Are you so triggered that you can't read properly, right?
I said that I'm a big cunt.

Trump wasn't misquoted. He was proud of what he said.

let me educate you about the alt right

Liberals, sirs.
I know he justifies torture. I know he says shit like that. I also know that mainstream media did a shitfest for everything he said, no matter what.
That's what I'm saying.
Do you understand now or you're so offended that your little piece of fecal matter you use can't handle that idea?

There was no need to bullshit about Trump. He came shrink wrapped in his own cacoon of bullshit.

> you're so offended t

It's not "offense" I've taken.

Trump is a demagogue. He is what history has warned us about. The Founding Fathers understood something like Trummp represents and existential threat to the system they created.

Trump is very, very, very serious business.

This fact is lost on the young and the ignorant.

>article of that length said absolutely nothing of worth

And they wonder why no one listens to them.

Wow, fucking nothing!

Trump is going to have a load of fun getting into the whitehouse, saying 'we need to torture more' and the CIA telling him that they don't need to since they do all the torturing they want already. Oh no I'm sorry, the CIA contracts out torture to middle eastern countries and other US supported dictatorships.

Clinton is also what the founding fathers warned us about.
That's the problem- BOTH were the horrible choices that ruin the country.

What you need to understand is that for the last 100 years, everything the founding fathers stood for has been destroyed, and trump is merely setting up shop in the ashes.

>all these fuckers fighting for a guy who has the least powerful charge in the US State.

Im not American so I only got some news about the elections from CNN. But CNNs reporting on Trump looked like a smear campaign. While I always expected unbiased news from them.

Daily reminder that Sup Forums is so ingenous that thinks a guy in the presidency can change CIA and NSA illegal ways.
Your country is rotten from inside.

Is this real? Did they really say that about Sam Hyde?

>the alt-right gamed google

You're delusional mate, google gives you that auto-complete option because most people actually search for that shit. If you haven't noticed, jews aren't that popular in most places of the world.

Same with right-wing articles on facebook. Breitbart is the most successful news outlet of 2016. They didn't need to game anything to get to the top of the ranking. And Trump didn't win on a fluke.

Your preception of reality is not aligned with the actual reality. That's what you should be worried about.

>The alt-right (and people looking to profit off of it) basically gamed Google's and Facebook's ranking/trending algorithms on a massive scale to push their articles to the top of the results, enabling data-mining companies to further track and target readers across the web with increasing sophistication.
It has been proven by Wikileaks that the one's gaming the system are Google and Facebook, the days of Sup Forums-tier SEO'ing are long gone
Fuck off back to lddit with your altmeme shilling
>They're not supposed to take what they're given at face value and print it verbatim; they thoroughly screen their sources as well as the information.
Which has been dropped like never, there's literally no news agency, not even AFP/AP/Reuters, actually fact checking anything and not contradicting themselves every few weeks
>The problem now is that the web has given fake news the same air of legitimacy as real news in the eyes of the average online consumer.
The web has been around for decades now, the """"real"""" news have become so fake that your average conspiracy/halfassed blog has equal legitimacy
>This 'fake news' shit is hilarious since it's literally 1984 wrongthink
\thread
It stopped being a thing years ago user
>He sounds like a clueless 5th grader running for class president.
This is how you get the average american, everyone else was attracted to him just because he isn't fucking Hillary Clinton
CNN/Guardian/New York Times/Washington Post/LA Times news coverage of the election was directed by HIllary's campaign according to irrefutable Wikileaks emails
I don't know how could anyone pretend the old guard has any sort of legitimacy after this election, literally Russia Today and ITAR-TASS are less biased despite being a propaganda arms of the Kremlin
how dum can u be newfriendo

Because some idiots can't take a joke.

There is no equivalence between the Clinton and Trump.

Clinton is a Neoliberal, same as Obama, Bush, Bill Clinton, Bush Snr, and Reagan. She was the continuity candidate.

You've been sucked into the right wing propaganda. Unwittingly, I suspect.

>nothing to see here goy

Your usage of the word 'literally' is disgusting.

Thanks Obama. Literally his fault.