“For a few hours this morning, if you searched “Geary Danley,” the name that was erroneously identified by some as the shooter who killed more than 58 people in Las Vegas Sunday night, Google would present you with not one, but two 4chan threads.”
““Google is a digital truth serum,” Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of Everybody Lies, told me in a recent interview. “People tell Google things that they don’t tell to possibly anybody else, things they might not tell to family members, friends, anonymous surveys, or doctors.””
Read: Persuasive proof that America is full of racist and selfish people
“Google is giving thousands of contractors who normally evaluate search results a new, additional task: help the company downrank blatantly upsetting, offensive, and false content. Search Engine Land has a thorough explainer on the updated guidelines used by Google’s quality raters.”
Read: Google is teaching search algorithms to better spot offensive, factually incorrect results
“Peter Shulman, an associate history professor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, was lecturing on the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s when a student asked an odd question: Was President Warren Harding a member of the KKK? Shulman was taken aback.”
“Certain researchers are calling for greater scrutiny of how politics and technology intersect. Ethan Zukerman said algorithms, the things governing your Facebook feed or the links that pop up when you type something into Google, have politics.”
“Certain researchers are calling for greater scrutiny of how politics and technology intersect. Ethan Zukerman said algorithms, the things governing your Facebook feed or the links that pop up when you type something into Google, have politics.”