Climate deniers beat Google and topped the page on searches for "climate change"

[coherent_light]

@redesigned

Poisoned search results is an industry term for a thing that google helped end.

“End”?

@redesigned

the core of their industry is to sell ads, providing us with search results provides them with human eyes which is their product. we are not their customers, we are their product. google doesn’t vet any ads for validity of claim, that would be an impossible endless task.

This is not entirely wrong, but it’s it is wrong to say we’re not also the customers.

Yes, yes, yes, the laundry or doing the dishes never ends, right? But are you going to go through life only wearing dirty clothes merely because you only see the futility in cleaning things? Or only wash that shirt if enough people point out the stains in public?

Like the price of freedom, vigilance in information stains is likely eternal.

@redesigned

but that has much greater issues with equality, bias, and is an impossible task with the nature and size of the internet.

You use that word a lot, but while tech players may have changed online aspects of information, that doesn’t mean their choices and applications are the only means of doing things.

In my experience, expert opinion offers a great deal of value in what information is useful to sift/distribute.

So who told you it was “impossible”?

@redesigned

Algorithms are at least a known, quantifiable, examinable, autiable, refinable thing…as well as essential for every single aspect of modern life, none of which could exist without them.

There’s no reason to pretend something is working when evidence shows the opposite. And if the algorithm, “known, quantifiable, examinable, autiable [uh? audit-able, maybe?], refinable” appears to have failed, then relying on it less makes more sense than defending it.

I admit I don’t see algorithms as magic (or even worthy of the lofty status assigned to them). They’re just sometimes crappy technology/sophisticated technology breakable by some savvy but otherwise unsophisticated folk. Also, I find it weird that you appear to believe issues like “equality and bias”—legit issues—are things which can’t be addressed without resorting to game-able algorithms. Diversity can probably help overcome these issues. But I don’t know, I don’t work for Google, I just have to argue with their results, often by proxy.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the algorithms Google is using to serve disinformation impact policy for dealing with serious issues. Call that “modern” if you like, but if we can’t have experts reliably informing Congress, members of congress and their constituents will turn to other means available.

Maybe you write some algorithms to detect when algorithms are broken, but it seems pretty clear some form of manual intervention is occasionally, absolutely needed, and I tend to trust experts more than I trust tech businessfolk.