Home News Fake Twitter News results are now being shown in Google Search

Fake Twitter News results are now being shown in Google Search

by Harikrishna Mekala

The results highlighted a now-typical lineup of chum for the far conservatives: Islam, Antifa, Hillary Clinton, et al.

Justin Hendrix at NYC Media Lab highlighted the problem:

To be free, this is Google one of the most persuasive, profitable, and technically advanced organizations in the world spreading the laughably false news. And they’re covering it through a search engine everyone you know uses. Google is the authoritative search engine. So authoritative, in fact, that they generated $27.8 billion in revenue…in the past three months.

And the absolutely wild part is that, well, the fixes are relatively easy.

They began doing this in 2015, so it’s not exactly a core part of the Google user’s Experience. Twitter, as we’ve all happened to realize, isn’t just people dragging around memes for the lulz, but also, plenty of Russian troll statements looking to stoke political tension. Twitter, as many personalities have known for years, is good in divulging news situations, but it’s also rife with misinformation that can trick even veteran journalists. Why force that information on people when even trained practitioners own trouble sorting through it?

It makes no insight to try to crawl all of Twitter for tweets about significant topics without any sense of their character. Walk up to the first person you see on the street and ask them to explain something to you. That’s a bad idea. Now think to do that in a high school cafeteria, or an insane refuge, except you, ‘re not finding the first person, but the loudest. That’s Twitter, or at least, how Google’s going about creeping it and giving you effects from those crawls. And while Google’s search engine relies on “more than 200 unique signals or ‘clues'” for its events, it doesn’t seem to have a problem taking tweets from random Twitter accounts. If tweets really need to be in Google’s search, it would make sense to use the same strategy as Google News, which pulls coverage from a variety of known, trustworthy media outlets.

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