Google Tells Army of 'Quality Raters' To Flag Holocaust Denial (theguardian.com) 429
Google is using a 10,000-strong army of independent contractors to flag "offensive or upsetting" content, in order to ensure that queries like "did the Holocaust happen" don't push users to misinformation, propaganda and hate speech. From a report on The Guardian: The review of search terms is being done by the company's "quality raters", a little-known corps of worldwide contractors that Google uses to assess the quality of its systems. The raters are given searches based on real queries to conduct, and are asked to score the results on whether they meet the needs of users. These contractors, introduced to the company's review process in 2013, work from a huge manual describing every potential problem they could find with a given search query: whether or not it meets the user's expectations, whether the result offered is low or high quality, and whether it's spam, porn or illegal. In a new update to the rating system, rolled out on Tuesday, Google introduced another flag raters could use: the "upsetting-offensive" mark.
Google as gatekeeper of truth (Score:4, Interesting)
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The slope is slippery! WAKE UP SHEEPLE!
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It's Google's search engine. Go create your own pro-Holocaust Denial search engine if you think it's so important.
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You can however decide not to use them.
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Germany has its head up its ass and they are quickly becoming more hated for their stupidity than America. Keep it up. we can use the break.
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Re:Google as gatekeeper of truth (Score:4, Insightful)
As I see it we are in a no win scenario.
On the Web, Lies, Misinformation, Conspiracy theories, and Passionate Hyperbole carry the same weight as solid truth. Often when something is true, it is often sited a small number of times, while the Anti-truth messages need to broadcasted over and over again so to be ingrained.
While I don't like the idea that there is a small number of people judging what is true and not for the public to see, however as a culture we had abused our free speech rights creating a situation where checks and balances need to be put in.
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...You're so, so, so very late to the party. Google is only allowed to operate in China if it plays by the rules. There's quite a lot of history behind this [theatlantic.com]. Outside of China, Google's moral compass is largely guided by its founders, including Sergey Brin, who grew up in the USSR and has been an outspoken opponent of censorship [wikipedia.org]. Even Julian Assange feels [wikileaks.org] strongly that Google's political objectives align closely with those of the Obama administration, a point backed up in Brin's Wikipedia article, where he's
Re: Google as gatekeeper of truth (Score:5, Insightful)
It has to do with an attempt to manipulate the Overton window [wikipedia.org]; neofascists have historically attempted (and still attempt currently) to downplay the Holocaust and accuse Jews of fabricating or exaggerating it. By doing so, they aim to make Hitler's regime (and by association, themselves) appear less unreasonable, and to maintain opportunities for public discussion about the supposed untrustworthiness of Jews in general by accusing them of pretending to have been victimized. It's more strategically useful than taking responsibility for the Final Solution, which creates a comparatively foreboding and unapproachable image of SS officers in gas masks.
This is the same strategy employed by 'fake news' stories on Facebook: assert that your enemy is doing something bad, thereby making your followers more hostile to them, and, hopefully, tipping the balance of opinion for those who are undecided. Most propaganda works this way.
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Where do you draw the line? Some people think the earth is flat, so when you google "globe" should you get a message informing you that actually the world is a disc? Some people think that gravity isn't what pulls everything towards the ground, it's magnetism.
What is the standard for disputed facts that warrants presenting them along side the widely accepted facts?
It works both ways and someone will criticise you not matter what you do.
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I am concerned that Google is attempting to act as a gatekeeper and arbiter of truth. While holocaust denial is certainly appalling, what else are they going to censor? What if China decides that Tiananmen Square is offensive?
From my understanding, they are not censoring the speech, they are just making sure that factual results occur at the top of the search list. I'm pretty sure that you'll be able to search on things like holocaust denial and still get to the pages. They just won't show up when you ask a direct question that requires a factual answer.
Conflate it as much as you like with free speech, but there are proven facts that are under assault by outright lies (i.e. "alternative facts") to support pre-conceived opinion
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I am concerned that Google is attempting to act as a gatekeeper and arbiter of truth.
The unwashed masses already blessed Google with that role when they stopped learning how to use the address bar on their browser and just started Googling everything (even addresses).
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Why shouldn't they? I mean, it is a search engine, the point of which is to provide users accurate information. If a user googles something, they expect to be getting facts, no?
I mean, the algorithm already ranks pages by criteria. If you're arguing that Google shouldn't be doing this, you're essentially arguing they should allow people to push disinformation by manipulating search results by either Google bombing [wikipedia.org] or just d
Re:Google as gatekeeper of truth (Score:5, Informative)
Because it isn't an honest conversation, and never was. Holocaust Denial is literally a lie, and there are no compelling reasons to accept it.
Go read the transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials. It's all right there. The "six million figure" is an estimate based upon the number of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe before the Final Solution, and the decided lack of Jews after. Countries like Poland, which had large Jewish communities prior to the 1930s, had virtually no Jews afterwards.
It's simple math. The Nazis killed millions of Jews, Roma and other undesirables in a systematic and bureaucratic fashion. The only reason to deny the Holocaust is because you're a Jew-hater who wants to assert some new version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion-style conspiracy. In other words, you're an advocate for an evil and false ideology that is in fact responsible for the deaths of six million innocent peoples whose only crime was to be Jews in Europe.
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Bullshit. This is a philosophical problem of communicating information between sentient beings. I am under no obligation to accept your truth no matter how well reasoned and 'truthy' it appears to you. I have no DIRECT personal proof the Holocaust happened, I have only heard from others. There is an absolute, distinct non-zero possibility it was all made up. You cant FORCE people to accept your truth just because you
Re:Google as gatekeeper of truth (Score:5, Insightful)
Reality is not dependent upon semantics. Unless you're a nihilist or an omphalist, in which case, your philosophy truly is pointless.
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I did. Reality isn't dependent upon semantics, nor is it dependent upon observation. To insist that only direct observation is to basically reject much of science.
Have you ever seen an electron?
Re:Google as gatekeeper of truth (Score:4, Interesting)
He's not being very philosophical at all. There's nothing particularly compelling about Omphalism. It is, in fact, a denial that any kind of knowledge can be reliable. As you point out, if direct observation is the requirement, then any ability to determine the truth of a historical claim won't get much further back then when you were 4-6 years old, and really, couldn't even count things that happened anywhere beyond your immediate vicinity at that time, since watching something on TV isn't necessarily direct observation either.
The real joke is that what our brains "see" isn't even in and of itself direct observation. What we perceive in the visual center in our brain is a highly altered representation of the photons that struck the retina. None of our direct senses are really direct, and all go through considerable processing before we actively and consciously perceive them. About the only things that come close to being directly "observed" are some automatic reactions, like the jerking back at a painful stimuli, where our nervous system has evolved so as to not wait for the brain to sort out what painful thing our skin has contacted, but rather the sensation hits the lower parts of the central nervous system, the spinal cord. But even there, I'd argue that the sensation of pain that the spinal cord is detecting still has at least some processing by pain receptors at the site of the signal and by the nerves themselves, since even nerve cells have some processing capability.
So ultimately, if we're going to call Omphalism in all its forms a philosophy, I'd lump it in the category of "things people believed a long time ago, but which only stupid people still think are sensible ways to measure the world now."
Agree, but still claim no censorship should exist (Score:5, Informative)
While I fully agree with your perspective, there is no reason to censor speech. There is plenty of information out there to show that the Holocaust was real. We also have facts showing that Mao killed an estimated 80 million Chinese people, Stalin and Lenin killed more than 30 million Russian people. China hates these facts being in public and given the chance they certainly would censor information. Russia hates their history put on display, and just like China would censor if they could.
Hell, don't you think that the US is embarrassed about some if it's own history being put on display? Don't you think that certain people in Government would like you to never know about Operation Mockingbird/COINTELPRO? How about the wars with the American Indians? How about the Democratic Party pushing Jim Crow Laws? How about Iran/Contra? In other words, censorship would be an issue for much more than just Holocaust deniers and in the US it's not just a Republican/Democratic party who would want to take advantage of censorship.
Free speech is all about having the fake and stupid ideas on display, so that people can learn to defend themselves against fake and stupid ideas. You don't learn and grow by living in an echo chamber, you learn and grow by having your beliefs and opinions challenged.
Trusting some arbiter of "truth" to censor gives the censoring body the ability to censor not just fake and stupid ideas, but anything that they dislike. Wholly hell, look at the media in the US today to see what a mess they can make by manipulating information. People are lied to openly, and even worse through more nefarious means by omission which is hard to detect. Those people are the ones who would be censoring if we allowed it.
People like Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, who happen to be some top notch conservative thinkers are not invited to Facebook or Google for any input. Why? Because their input harms the beliefs of the people who want to censor. That is why we can't allow it and need to push back against it.
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I don't see how not elevating a grossly incorrect idea like Holocaust denial in search results is akin to censorship. Google isn't taking these delusional twits off the Internet, they're just not directing unsuspecting fools to it. This isn't censorship and not a bad thing from my perspective.
People can have their soapbox. Google is under to directive to point people to the bullshit ones.
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The difference here is that you are under no obligation to trust Google at all. Use another search engine if you want to. It's not like Google hasn't filtered search results for years, it's just that anti-Semitism is simply the latest flag. At the end of the day, there's always someone being an arbiter of some kind. You're not likely to find too many libraries that will have any of Ernst Zundel's work, and you won't find any mainstream encyclopedias that have articles debating whether the Holocaust happened
Re:Agree, but still claim no censorship should exi (Score:4, Interesting)
That's an upward estimate of the Great Leap Forward. I think I've read that 20-40 million is a better count, but nobody really knows, since the whole famine itself was caused as much by local officials intentionally distorting virtually all the data on food shortages and deaths for the Chinese government. One thing is certain, however many died in the Great Leap Forward, it was enough people for the Party to sideline Mao for several years and for the more technocratic party members like Deng Xiaoping to run the country until Mao found his footing again and used the Cultural Revolution to sideline those in the Party that had diminished him due to the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward.
The Great Leap Forward is indeed a good example of how suppression of information can, if not create a catastrophe, then greatly inflame it, but in that case it worked somewhat in reverse. It wasn't the central government trying to stifle information, it was local and regional officials. But the reason those officials did it was because they had been handed absurd quotas (like the amount of steel to be produced by a certain district), and because they were sufficiently afraid that they wouldn't meet these quotas, they had a great deal of impetus to distort both the production numbers and quality of production (there are plenty of stories of large amounts of steel being produced that were of such low quality that it was effectively useless), and almost certainly to try to suppress any reports of famine and death tolls. But it's hard to imagine even if the figures had been honestly communicated to the the Chinese government that that information would ever have been disseminated, though possibly the plan might have been abandoned before the death toll reached as high as it did.
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they burned the bodies after having their slaves remove gold teeth and anything else of value
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And those chambers, seen by millions of visitors every year at the museum that is/was Auschwitz, what's your explanation for them? Daycare units?
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I seem to have read your argument about gas chambers somewhere else. It's pretty damn similar to the wikipedia article concerning criticism of Holocaust denier arguments. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Google as gatekeeper of truth (Score:4, Informative)
You're wrong. 6 million Jews did die, along with millions of other 'undesirables' (as described by the Nazi government). There's plenty of evidence to back this up, enough to satisfy the court e.g. during the Nuremberg Trials.
Some of the luckier ones got out in time, or hid away during the war. But the sad fact is most of the Jewish population in occupied Europe was transported to concentration camps, never to be heard from again.
Saying otherwise is an insidious lie.
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The Germans are nothing if not meticulous and weren't of the type to follow verbal orders, processes would have been created, documented, passed along the chain of command, etc. There would be evidence of this, but there isn't.
That is wrong. It is all documented. There is plenty of evidence. Want to come to a german town? We are plastering brass stones in front of every house where a jew lived. With the name and date he was killed on it. Alone in my town of ~350,000 inhabitants we thousands of those stones
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Interesting information. So the Germans are very responsible for the current atrocities being perpetrated on the rightful natives of Palestine? Thanks for the info, I didn't know that. I'm not so sure about the number of Jews the Germans killed, and I don't know if the Palestinian crisis counts as a Holocaust or even genocide. I am willing to change on that point though as I am not sure of the numbers that have been slaughtered by the Israeli government and its Jewish citizens.
Re:Google as gatekeeper of truth (Score:5, Interesting)
No, they did not emigrate. They were murdered. The only significant exoduses where of wealthier families who had the resources to get the fuck out of Dodge, but since, despite the longstanding ethnic slur against Jews that they were all money hoarders, most European Jews were not wealthy people.
There were millions of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe before the War, only fragmented groups after, there's no evidence they emigrated, since only a few every managed to make it to Israel, Britain or the Americas. So unless you're asserting there's a magic land filled with Jews that nobody knew about, your claims is patently absurd.
But I get it, as with most conspiracy theories, all that is required as retort, even if the retort is utterly moronic and completely untrue.
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You are a kind of idiot?
There was no significant amount of jews that emigrated. Explain me how you emigrate from a country like Poland that is conquered by the germans?`
The Nazis kept book aboout what they "stole" from the Jews before they killed them, they kept book about every incident, arrival in a KZ, death etc.
When we Germans *know* that we have killed ~6 Millions of jews, then I really wonder what your mental problem is to be live it.
There are no bones to be found in the amounts that would be necessar
Re:Google as gatekeeper of truth (Score:5, Interesting)
About 1 million Jews died at Auschwitz. This according to the Nazis, who kept meticulous records of their crimes.
The old sign probably read '6 million Jews died in Nazi concentration camps'. There's no conspiracy behind changing the sign.
The Nazis built factories with the express purpose of killing people in large numbers. The Americans built internment camps. The difference is huge. Calling the Nazi concentration camps "not a great thing" is a monumental betrayal of the people who were exterminated there.
So piss off with your denial. You're not convincing anyone here.
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Lol, my previous comment was labeled flamebait. I make legitimate well-founded arguments and they are labeled flamebait? Thanks moderators, glad you see that moderation is for marking disagreement rather than quality of argument. Kudos!
Not irony! I thought it was ironic that Zyklon B being invented by a Jew and being used to kill Jews would be ironic. Ironic in the same way that being "hoist by one's own petard!" is ironic. You disagree?
Re:Google as gatekeeper of truth (Score:4, Informative)
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Look we *know* it is a lie. However, the idea they can censor things they do not like is very troubling.
They're blatantly incorrect facts, not "something they do not like". While there may be overlap these are in no way the same thing.
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Look we *know* it is a lie. However, the idea they can censor things they do not like is very troubling.
Move past the thing and look at the possibilities. What if suddenly they do not like fuzzy kitties. Is that going to be censored? What is next? Are they going to take on the legal responsibility if someones precious snowflake sees boobies?
One of the things they censored next was the Goldstone Report of Israeli atrocities during the Gaza war. As many Jews will tell you, the Israelis are now doing things that remind us of the stories our parents and grandparents told us of their treatment by the Nazis and Russians. For example:
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My point is that the Israeli right wing (and their American supporters) started out censoring "Holocaust denial" as anti-Semitic.
Then, once they established their ability to censor, they started censoring everything critical of the Israeli government as anti-Semitic.
That included the Goldstone report. Alan Dershowitz said that it would be acceptable under Jewish law to kill Goldstone, because Goldstone was like a collaborator in WWII.
I went to a meeting at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue to hear Ron Dermer, the
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because there are thousands and thousands of pages of documentation and photos of the nazis creating an industrialized killing system
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The best argument for free speech is John Stuart Mill's On Liberty.
On Liberty was standard freshman reading in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Some of my teachers had to leave Germany for their political ideas, because of the Nazis and Hitler. Some of my teachers had to leave the U.S. for their political ideas, because of HUAC and Joe McCarthy. On Liberty was their way of telling us what free speech was and why it was important.
Bottom line: If you don't have free speech for offensive, wrong ideas, you don't
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Briefly, it has been downgraded from 6 Million to ~1 Million. I expect that soon it will change to ~500K. But for now, get up-to-date and start using the 1 Million number, it will make you seem more modern and less hysterical. You're welcome.
You'd rather have your holocaust discussion in an echo chamber? Fine, have at it. Enjoy your circle jerk.
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Follow along please:
The sign now says ~1M were exterminated AT Auschwitz.
Another 800K at Treblinka
Another 600K at Belzek
Another 300K at Chelmno
Another 250K at Sobibor
That is 3M just at the locations built specifically to exterminate as many Jews as possible. Now add in those that were killed at places like Warsaw and concentrations camps not specifically built to exterminate Jews and the numbers add up pretty damn quick. Don't forget to add in camps like Jadovno that were run by the Croatian government tha
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What is this argument that says any action is justified when it has already been committed at an earlier time by a different party?
What it's saying is that Google has no moral compunction against wiping away a topic completely if the authorities ask for it.
They long ago dropped their "Don't Be Evil" line and now it's "anything goes."
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What is this argument that says any action is justified when it has already been committed at an earlier time by a different party?
It's called the law. Move to China and change it. Stop asking others to do your work for you.
Maybe Google and other American companies should have the balls to not do business in countries whose laws would require such immoral actions. Oh, but the profit motive is the highest moral value, and if they didn't do it, someone else would. Silly me.
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China? China has holocost denial laws?
Yes, they do. Specifically about Japanese actions in China, that were scrubbed by Japanese history books to pretend Chinese weren't murdered in the millions and that Formosa/Taiwan "welcomed" the Japanese "friendly colonists".
Try reading a real book sometime.
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No it won't, and no they won't.
Google is already widely known to be indefensibly reprehensible..... and yet we still use their products.
Goody Goody Gumdrops Google (Score:4, Funny)
The line between hateful speech and offensive speech is so thin, it can correctly be identified as in the ear of the beholder.
Even in the freest societies, the right not to be offended is not granted to any of us... that's how we keep the freedom.
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Rather than offensive, the flag ought to be for 'lies, misrepresentations, and other deceptive content promoting prejudice'.
I reserve the right to be offended by someone preaching that a group of individuals is inherently generally inferior based on specific superficial characteristics. You let that go unchallenged, and a percentage of individuals will see that as verification and have have their dangerous ignorance reinforced.
When you allow a group to be successfully dehumanized by another group, hate cri
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go back in time and see whistleblowers:
You: "Tuskegee Medical Facility is infecting black men with syphilis"
Govt: "Prove your point in court room."
You don't prove it therefore you lied and are punished. Hmmm. What a wonderful policy. (If you're a dictator or part of the powers that be.)
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Lies promoting prejudice was what I said. Your example wouldn't qualify.
Holocaust denial would, because for some weird reason racists believe it's OK to hate Jews if Hitler killed less than the generally quoted numbers. Historians can debate revising numbers if and as new evidence comes to light, and their findings aren't lies. People without access to primary sources claiming it didn't happen? Lies, in promotion of hatred.
It's not really that difficult a distinction to draw unless you're defending the
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You're saying that in one case (the holocaust) that it is clear and irrefutable while in the other one it's a "current event" and there isn't any "clear and irrefutable" evidence. Good point.
The problem is in what is clear and irrefutable. I think the path to an Orwellian future is clear and direct with this thinking.
What defines hateful?
The holocaust example is clear and direct and straightforward but many others are not - and where does it end? Why not say that those who defame religious l
Re: Goody Goody Gumdrops Google (Score:2)
Labeling something hate speech and trying to outlaw it is not an appropriate response to someone making claims. All it does is promote treating one group better than other groups which in turn breeds resentment.
If someone is spouting off lies and we can say they are lying beyond all doubt, then surely there is no need to silence them for their claims will easily be proven false and Noone of average (or even below average) intelligence will believe them. If, however, one or more parties have been lying or gr
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"The Holocaust never happened," and "I'm not a puppet".
Re:Goody Goody Gumdrops Google (Score:4, Interesting)
This defines the problem.
You shouldn't be afraid to say what you're thinking. Freedom of Thought, Speech and Press are THE fundamental principles of a free society.
No freedom of speech and you're living under a tyranny. Tyrannies need not be repressive for the majority of the population. (Many people in China are doing quite well. It's still tyranny.)
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Did you forget the sarcasm tag? Not sure what you're getting at here friend.
Searching for racism (Score:2)
That page is exactly the sort of result I would want if I were searching for racism. It's really strange that Google would think it's a bad result. Without it a naive searcher would believe racism is a thing of the past. Does Google seriously think upsetting realities should be hidden from view?
Honestly this story smells a lot more like a trial balloon or fake
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Honestly this story smells a lot more like a trial balloon or fake news than something that actually happened. If Google actually starts censoring unpleasant realities from results I'll be happy to eat my words and stop using Google. Until then color me very skeptical.
I guess denial is not just a river in Egypt.
Re:Searching for racism (Score:4, Interesting)
Why is Holocaust Denial Such a Huge Deal? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Why is Holocaust Denial Such a Huge Deal? (Score:5, Informative)
The reason that it is a crime in Germany and Austria has to do with the historical de-Nazification of both countries after the War. It was part of the effort imposed by the Allies on these countries to make sure that Nazism never reared its ugly head again. It may seem silly in prosaic now (if you're willing to ignore the rise in anti-Semitism in Europe of late), but the anti-Nazi and anti-Holocaust Denial laws were deemed as necessary by the Soviets, British and Americans after they toppled the Third Reich.
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There are plenty of White Supremacists in the US, so it's not like the First Amendment has somehow been a complete defense against the rise of hate groups. The only real defense is that the FBI probably has moles in most of these groups, and tends to keep a pretty close eye on the various Christian Identity, White Supremacist, and various extremist survivalist/prepper groups.
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Mandatory "history" lessons wouldn't have made much sense in 1946-49, when the Holocaust was just a few years old. At the time, it was seen as necessary (and I would agree with the general notion) that Germany and Austria needed a strong de-Nazification effort. Similar efforts also took place in the other Axis nations, with imposed laws to prevent any militaristic nationalist movements from rising again (hence the pacifist constitution imposed on Japan by the American occupation). Germany and Austria have b
Re: Why is Holocaust Denial Such a Huge Deal? (Score:2)
It's hilarious (and by hilarious I mean awdul) that the world's biggest war monger (America) was able to impose their will on so many sovereign states. The Victor's don't just get to write history it seems.
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There are also mandatory history lessons.
In France, where the anti-Nazi laws are almost as bad as in Germany, the last part of history lessons in public schools, the one that really matters for exams is mostly about WW2, with a good part of it focusing on how bad the Nazis were.
This is commonly accompanied by movies and testimonies of veterans and victims of the Nazi regime.
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It's popular with groups that like conspiracy theories, like neo-Nazis and the alt-right. If they are willing to believe Pizzagate, denial of things that happened long ago and which just so happen to suit your cause are an easy sell.
Being the victims is at the core of their philosophy. Conspiracies, blame of things they didn't do, shadowy forces moving against them... It justifies all sort of behaviour, and gives them a warm feeling inside.
Re:Why is Holocaust Denial Such a Huge Deal? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now imagine if the teacher hadn't been an eyewitness and the woman's testimony had had to stand on its own. With fewer first-hand accounts, it drops to a he said/she said state. And the deniers are working their hardest to speak as loudly as possible. I imagine in 50+ years we're going to have similar problems with 9/11 denial (denying that the attacks ever happened, not conspiracy theories about who dunnit).
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This is why Eisenhower PERSONALLY visited the camps. So that he could say he was there and saw it with his own eyes.
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I've always been curious about this. It's a dumb thing to do, and makes the person look foolish, but beyond that why is this actually a crime in some places? I mean I can pretend that Obama was never president, but that doesn't make it so and it makes me look really stupid, but they would never make that a crime (Note to Self: Check back in 10 years and see if they did indeed make this a crime). Just ignore the morons and let them play in their little pretend world.
I'm not anti-European. I've been to, I think, 14 different European countries and I consider myself a lot more in favor of Europe than against it. But it seems to me that this is a crime because when a pendulum swings too far one way, the natural human reaction is to swing it too far the other way. In the US, free speech is protected by the Constitution. Courts consistently rule to protect it here. There's no such constitutional protection in Europe on speech. Keep in mind that even the US protection
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Germany's immigrants aren't unemployable; they go to Germany for work [make-it-in-germany.com]. Otherwise, Germany wouldn't've been soliciting for them in the first place. How did you get "predominately male" without understanding the rest of that?
Racial boundaries were an easy scapegoat in the thirties because the cultures within Germany had a strong sense of individual identity, and generally kept to themselves, breeding mutual distrust. While there's a lot of tension there today, the country is moving toward acceptance, and has
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Really? Name someone who used the N word publicly and didn't pay a heavy price for it? I mean some public figure, not a nobody.
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That is sad on many levels.
Don't forget... (Score:2)
Here's an idea (Score:5, Funny)
We should have a whole branch of government that 'fact checks' things.
We could call it the Ministry of Truth.
Then we could all be safer and happier, knowing the Ministry of Truth is making sure the news says what it should, right?
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Fact checking is not so hard, if done in a transparent and reproducible way. If anyone can operate a fact checking group, and anyone can quickly obtain and understand our standards then there is not really a problem. I should be able to review the input data, and apply the same standards and get the same results. At least with in a statistical range.
The real terrifying abuse occurs when you have organizations that operate exclusively and with opaque standards. No paper trail, no choice if you use it or not,
Depends what the user wants vs. needs, I guess (Score:2)
Maybe we think the user *needs* to find the truth, but maybe they *want* to find an article that makes them feel good about their hatred. Isn't Google supposed to help them find what they want? Of course, some kid could just as easily be typing that because they really don't know and want to understand what the deal is.
Some more of this woulda been real nice (Score:2)
Re:Memory hole (Score:4, Insightful)
> Look at a video "6 million lies" on youtube, there is some compelling evidence that what we all "know" to be true
Ahh, "I hate Jews and that's OK if I can pretend the Holocaust didn't actually happen at all (or at least to the degree historians say it did)".
What a strange position.
I guess that's what you get when you start with "I hate Jews and believe they shouldn't be considered human" and look for ways to justify your hatred instead of looking for truth.
> I may have to give up my comfortable google searches for something a little more open and honest.
Or you could just stop looking around entirely and get all your 'information' straight from Stormfront. Why risk seeing something that contradicts your prejudice?
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Actually, until I saw this video, I was firmly in the camp of believing that it had happened more or less exactly as depicted. Turns out it's a grand illusion, might explain why control of media is important, now that darn pesky internet is putting out information in an uncontrolled manner, how annoying!
Funny that you should think I'd want to be part of a group such as Stormfront as I am probably the first person they'd want to hang from a sturdy tree branch. Yeah, I'm a minority, educated, thoughtful, co
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So, you believe that all the physical, photographic, and first-hand evidence was faked? The gas chambers, the mass graves, the photos and videos of the huge piles of bodies etc were all fabricated evidence? All the people who witnessed this - victims, perpetrators, and third parties - are all actors? Where does this end, how deep does it go?
Denying that the holocaust ever happened is far worse than using the fact that it did happen in an argument ever could be. You've become worse than what you hate in an a
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Actually, until I saw this video
You should check the video on why the 9/11 attacks were actually a controlled detonation by the CIA. You'll love it.
Re: Memory hole (Score:2)
Hating Jews is something most "good" Christians did for centuries. It's no longer in vogue, but trying to claim such hate stems from the Nazi party is to revise history. Some unpleasant truths include the fact that many Christians would have happily seen those awful Jews locked up in camps.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not that I know of. I suspect Google's been disappearing unpleasant facts on their News product for a while now. A number of times last year I went to find an article I knew I had seen on Google News with its own search and wound up empty handed. Using DuckDuckGo, I was easily able to find the article I was looking for.
If somebody can say DuckDuckGo (i.e. Yahoo as sibling pointed out) may be doing this as well, there are other alternatives. StartPage/IxQuick seems to come up often.
If all else fails, I g
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Not that I know of. I suspect Google's been disappearing unpleasant facts on their News product for a while now.
"The holocaust never happened" is not an unpleasant fact - it's an out-and-out lie.
Re:Does DuckDuckGo have something similar? (Score:5, Informative)
Not that I know of. I suspect Google's been disappearing unpleasant facts on their News product for a while now.
"The holocaust never happened" is not an unpleasant fact - it's an out-and-out lie.
Which holocaust? The Jewish one or the Palestinian one or the Armenian one or the Native American one?
Which of these are we not allowed to say never happened? I know many Israelis would like to deny the Palestinian one and many 'Murcans would like to deny the Native American one. And of course the Turks would like to deny the Armenian one.
Are you going to pick and choose?
Re:Does DuckDuckGo have something similar? (Score:5, Informative)
"Holocaust" and "genocide" are not synonyms. The Holocaust is a specific attempted genocide, namely that against the Jews by the Germans.
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There is no such thing as "a holocaust" any more than there's such a thing as "a los angeles". There's just The Holocaust, which is one specific genocide, like there's just Los Angeles, which is one specific city. It's not a generic noun, it's a proper noun.
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"The holocaust never happened" is not an unpleasant fact - it's an out-and-out lie.
But the parent poster didn't mention it was Holocaust information he was looking for, that's just the example used in the article. We can only guess the pages he was looking for.
But be careful if you ask for things to be curated for you. I suspect that it'll be "curated" a lot more than most of us want, just like the child-safe Internet filters that filter out pornography but also filter information about sex abuse recovery, anorexia, tobacco, any information or discussion about cannabis, alcoholic recovery
Re:isn't that a German thing? (Score:4, Interesting)
I find it unusual when people claim that today's so-called "Native Americans" somehow aren't "immigrants", while pretty much everybody else supposedly is (even those who were born in America, and who had numerous ancestors born in America often going back centuries).
It's well known at this point that today's "Native Americans" are descended from Eurasians who crossed the Beringian land bridge [wikipedia.org] during several waves of migration. For the time being, let's ignore that many of today's "Native Americans" also have significant, if not a majority, modern European ancestry due to interbreeding with European settlers.
So ignoring their partial/majority European ancestry, the reality is that today's "Native American" ancestors were just among the latest to arrive, likely displacing/eliminating those people who arrived earlier, such as the Clovis peoples [wikipedia.org].
In addition, there's also some evidence to suggest that people from Southeast Asia arrived in the Americas by boat even before then.
So it's absurd to consider today's "Native Americans" to not be immigrants. Their ancestors arrived in the Americas from Eurasia, just like the Europeans did. Their ancestors weren't even the first to arrive in the Americas. In fact, their ancestors could very well have exterminated the peoples who had arrived earlier. So it makes no sense to give them special treatment, ideologically or otherwise.
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Possession is nine tenths of the law. Nobody is seriously talking about giving North Georgia back to the Cherokee nation.
Big Difference (Score:3)
Those original immigrants, probably the Clovis people, didn't displace people already on the land and force them to move or die. The Europeans that showed up after 1500 pretty much made it a way of life to exterminate or displace those that were there before them.
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Hence I said probably, the older finds are in dispute among anthropologists. They may be validated at some point but the point that the original migrants didn't displace groups already on the land stands. The Americas were at one point, less than 100,000 years ago, human-free with plenty of space to occupy without pushing out an already established population. The Europeans tended to take what they wanted because "might makes right" and since the local inhabitants already had prior claim to the best spot
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No. It's racist fascist nazi mysoginistic alt-right neo-cons. Try to keep up.
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No one disagrees in my safe space.
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As opposed to the "everyone who doesn't agree with me is a neo-nazi" crap from the left wing media?
If ultra-nationalists do agree with you, neo-nazi likely isn't that far off
Re: isn't that a German thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you think that you will ever be able to think critically, or do you have no desire to ever know things?
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Re: AI? (Score:2)
That's Microsoft's "teenage-girl" AI. Not even being snarky.