How do we combat mass global misinformation? How about making the internet a little harder to use
- Reference: 1612770490
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/02/08/make_the_internet_harder_to_use/
- Source link:
What should he do, he asked me?
[1]
Well, I helpfully suggested, why don’t you Google the accuracy of the bog-standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test you’ve just had? That’ll give you some error bars and allow you to manage your risks.
Oh, he replied. I tried that.
[2]
I had no idea what he meant by this, so I typed the following into a search box: “WHO PCR COVID test accuracy”...
...and got back a tsunami of conspiracy and antivax propaganda.
I suddenly understood why my friend had reached out to me - halfway around the world - rather than trying to find the answer on his own.
My friend had stumbled into a [3]data void , a phenomenon noted by social media researcher Danah Boyd who explored areas on the internet where there should be strong, factually based content. Data voids are spaces that have instead been crowded out by insanity, propaganda - and outright recruiting for various radical causes. They're one reason for, and one path towards, organised and violent extremists.
Built to last: Time to dispose of the disposable, unrepairable brick [4]MORE MARK PESCE
That a data void exists on a topic as important as the accuracy of PCR tests highlights the weakness of algorithmic approaches to indexing the Web, something we’ve been doing in one form or another since [5]DEC launched AltaVista twenty-six years ago .
When search engines came along we assumed machines could index the web.
It’s now clear that human curation has a bigger role, separating the chaff (and the spam) from the grain.
Slow, expensive and dependent on humans, curation breaks business models that print money by consigning the hard bits of running web businesses to automation.
Yet automation clearly does the job incompletely, and at worst - as we can see with my search results – can amplify dangerous misinformation.
Which is why Google’s threat to pull search from Australia in the face of laws that force it to share profits rings increasingly hollow.
Yes, Bing, DuckDuckGo and others would simply fill the vacuum left by Google. A lack of Google can serve a greater purpose because making the Internet harder to use could be exactly what we need.
If information lies beyond the range of a search engine, we can’t find it.
For a generation we’ve been able to type anything we like into an empty white box and find something that felt like the answer to our needs. Over time we've assumed it may also be the truth. Or truthful enough.
Yet the complete lack of transparency between typing a search request and receiving results (Google’s deepest secrets) has also become its - and our - greatest weakness. Our ability to find things has atrophied precisely because all the work had been automated.
Now, when we need to find something of vital importance, we can’t. If it somehow lies beyond the range of a search engine, we can’t find it.
Google can’t write an algorithm to fix that; it can only curate its way towards knowledge.
That was the founding principle of Yahoo ! which started life as a curated index of everything on the web. The web’s explosive growth made it more and more difficult to operate or use a curated index; that’s when search took over. Ever since, everything we’ve done on the web has been centered on a blind spot that might, at last, be too big to ignore.
If Australians switched en masse from Google to Baidu, they might find themselves learning a [6]different version of Chinese history in which the Tiananmen Square massacre did not happen.
Data voids are spaces that have been crowded out by insanity and propaganda
That sort of blind spot we can see coming because China tells us what it doesn't want us to know.
It’s harder to anticipate blind spots that only become apparent in moments of greatest need. And in those moments it may be too late to do anything but try to quickly recover those long-abandoned skills for finding important information.
No one wants Google to pull the plug on Search in Australia, or elsewhere. Yet it could present a fantastic opportunity: a chance to learn, again, what it means to dig for information. We would value that information, because of the time we invested in finding it.
[7]
In an era of information overload - and stripped of the blinders of an empty white box hiding all that complexity - we get to decide what’s valuable. We’ll spend time searching it out, verifying it, curating it, and then - we’ll share it with our peers, our children, and our nation. It’ll be slow. But it won’t be wrong. And it won’t leave us blinded by the simplicity of a white box. ®
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[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_datacentre/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YCEZy418SoF6NxwPIdV3qwAAANg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/news/2019/danah-boyd-warns-against-disinformation-data-voids
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/02/10/built_to_last/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/1998/11/17/compaq_wakes_up_to_portal/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2015/12/09/china_plays_down_censorship/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_datacentre/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YCEZy418SoF6NxwPIdV3qwAAANg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Trust nothing, check your data, use various sources.
I am flabberghasted daily that people actually believe what they read in the Press, on the Internet, and what they see on the TV. Are people REALLY that stupid that they believe whatever is put in front of them,.... by someone else? Does it not occur to them that the "someone else" might have a reason for how/what/when it is putting it in front of them? Oh wait, I forgot that we don't seem to teach people to THINK FOR THEMSELVES, rather they are taught to be good little sheeples and everything is made easy for them so they don't have to bother themselves with the effort of thought. I'm no believer in conspiracy theory twaddle but when you see the latest "5G made me pregnant with Alien babies" garbage, just remember that what you saw on the TV News could just as easily have been fabricated/twisted and could have as much to do with reality as the Alien babies drivel.
Re: Trust nothing, check your data, use various sources.
>>>Are people REALLY that stupid<<<
Yes, unfortunately many are and often struggle to comprehend the complexity of modern life. They provided muscle power pre the industrial revolution and as cannon fodder in wars of conquest, now they're the cannon fodder for information wars, being taken advantage of by groups trying push their fringe beliefs into mainstream society.
Re: Trust nothing, check your data, use various sources.
People aren't 'that stupid', they're 'that uneducated'.
We're taught from birth to 'do what we're told' by parental, and then authority figures, with very little in the way of education about 'how' to process those instructions: Who did they come from? Why was that person saying that thing? What implications are there from that particular person saying that particular thing? etc.
Anecdotally: I was lucky enough to be deliberately taught critical thinking during History GCSE (at a good school, thank you mum & dad!), and it's served me well to be critical and analytical of what I read in the news media. Always think about:
"who is stating this?",
"Why are they stating this?",
"Who are they stating this too?",
"When are they stating this?",
"What are they not stating?",
"Does the audience change the message, or the delivery of the message?",
"What implications are there of the way the message has been changed?",
"What are other people stating about this message, to whom, when, why?" etc etc etc.
Re: Trust nothing, check your data, use various sources.
@Rockburner. Nope. IMHO, the reverse is more likely to be the case. The days of taught belief in "Authority" ended in 1964. Once the belief that reality can be different for individuals to the point that feminist glaciology is supposedly a real subject the ability to discern and assess information is long gone. As for checking and multiple sources, regrettably I find GBS aphorism more succinct. " Believe nothing until it is officially denied" Unfortunately that does mean sources that are sometimes accurate (ie, in accordance with the reality that hurts when it hits you on head) are missed in the welter of dross. Yes, I do cross check where it matters, However, I note search engines, Google especially, are now becoming nearly useless for search unless one has a good idea of the relevant keywords to exclude
Valid but with caveats
How many trusted sites are behind paywalls now, but spam propaganda sites open and heavily SEO'd?
It's very related to the subject of the article, and its a big problem.
They can check the top ten sites on their search engines and all will be spam propaganda sometimes, with little actually readable data from real websites.
I use to use Qwant, but it was unusable during the US elections. Results were heavily spammed with political propaganda websites, some literally two months old. It's not just the US elections, Belarus Democracy protests returned attack sites denouncing the protestors, Wikipedia on Belarus, the official website etc. but almost nothing of actual detail on the state of protests.
I had to abandon Qwant, too vulnerable to spam during critical times. I note it seems to be cleaner now, but too late.
How many websites now have their walls up:
You click a link and the website says "you are in privacy mode.... login to ..." nope, bye.
Or "prove you are not a robot by selecting..." nope bye.
"Wait while cloudflare checks your brows...." nope bye.
"You have reached your limit for free articles, come back tomorrow..." er, no thanks I won't.
It's self defeating. They could put generic ads on their web pages since I'm in privacy mode, instead they block or set puzzles or whatever. But I opened the top twenty links on the search engine in twenty tabs ready to look for information, I won't wait for their obstacles. After a while, users learn simply to never visit the problem sites, and save themselves even the click. They don't even get to push generic ads to me.
But fewer clicks, mean lower rankings and over time the website slips down and down the search engine rankings.
And you end up with a world of spam on your search engines. The search engines everyone uses double check their data.
But yes, I agree with the basic DOUBLE CHECK EVERYTHING, apply some common sense. These are good tenets to live by, I just wish the proper news sites would realize that eyeballs are everything and if they lose the volume, they lose the cream with it.
Re: Trust nothing, check your data, use various sources.
I'm really surprised that you're surprised. People have always believed external sources, since the times when that mammoth kill happened out of their own, personal sight (it fought like hell, but then, our glorious leader took a mighty swing and killed the beast, etc.)
HOW do you expect anyone can personally verify how many people really got the jab (jab, what jab?!), or whether 2,500 people really have become a part of a business deal today (by being kicked out of their jobs)? How are they supposed to verify that those smiling, well-spoken leaders they voted for, are lying cunts (other than, by default, assuming that all politicians are lying cunts), unless they happen to be directly hit by those lies? How can they verify ryanair lies to them (other than assuming it's a default ryanair mode), and how can they verify that the ICO supposed to chase scam callers did their job, other than by pretending to do their job by producing a fat, 464pages pdf file to show they did? Etc.
On top of the rather obvious fact that people are stupid AND lazy and the avalanche of conflicting information comes from their mobile, computer and telly, all at once. But all this is moot, "This is the world we live in..."
Teach people?
Do you spend more time online or typing than hand writing? We teach hand writing from an early age because that ability is the second of two ways (talking is the other one*) we communicate, we generally don't teach typing, expecting everyone to pick it up as they go because its just another way of writing.
Search engines are 'the' way most people interact with the world these days, maybe we should start teaching a few pertinent subjects as standard from an early age such as critical thinking, conjecture not being evidence, biased language etc. as part of the language curriculum. The power of language is why 'The pen is mightier than the sword', we have to think our way past conspiracy theories because censorship is a really slippery slope.
Cynically I think it'll never happen, the politicos who'd make these decisions would have to up their game to include rational well thought out arguments instead of knee jerk phrasing and innuendo.
*please don't raise mime to being a valid communication method.
Re: Teach people?
How about interpretive dance?
More seriously, we changed the driving test to include some satnav type details.
It's far past time we started teaching "Internet survival" in school. It's obvious that most parents aren't - or more likely can't - do that.
Re: Teach people?
interpretive dance?
Isn't that just mime to music 8^)
Re: Teach people?
@Richard. After removing time wasting rubbish first so the poor teachers have time in curriculum to teach critical thinking
Re: Teach people?
I do not want to take another driving test. (Hopefully will be OK to when I stop)
Drive by satnav.
"I am just going to get my sledgehammer"
Driving on wrong side of road
"Never done it in 40 years, stupid idea"
There are so many driving things I never do and will not do, don't test me on them.
It's like someone has never heard of Google Scholar for searching academic results.
Aye, there's nothing quite as useful as an 'Academic result' when all you see in most cases is a hundred-word preamble paragraph leading to a ridiculously priced pdf of the actual paper... and in many cases you have no idea as to whether the paper is actually what you were looking for in the first place, or one of the dozens of 'meta studies' that just add up other scholars papers.
Elsevier and their ilk should be ashamed of themselves. ArXiv is to be commended.
Just because it's a published academic particle, doesn't mean it's relevant. Academia has evolved to be somewhat self-serving.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/science-fictions
Academia has it's own problems - I've been reading papers for years, essentially the writers have a viewpoint that they believe is supported by evidence and while this is normally correct and the evidence is good, it don't mean that their viewpoint is accurate. Academics are not normally engineers or technicians and so things can occur when the data is being collected that they have no ideas about.
The death of Google search
For me, was when I realised people were typing in there own names in the hope of some sort of emotional boost.
Re: The death of Google search
My reason for googling myself is to make sure I don't appear.
Mine is the one with the turned up collar and the Fedora.
Blind spots
"It’s harder to anticipate blind spots that only become apparent in moments of greatest need. "
Harder still to 'spot' those you never, erm, spot, 'cos they're blind spots.
Re: Blind spots
@Whitter: See CS Lewis essay: "In Praise of old Books"
Re: Blind spots
CS Lewis essay: "In Praise of old Books"
It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search
Tip Try using words that might appear on the page that you’re looking for. For example, 'cake recipes' instead of 'how to make a cake'.
Need help? Take a look at other tips for searching on Google.
Now I want cake.
Strawman
More fluff from Pesce. Presumably he's being paid by some kind of company to promote the benefits of curation.
Now, when we need to find something of vital importance, we can’t.
But we can. Want to find out about PCR tests? Why not use the curated resources of the [1]CDC ? NB. I used Google to find the website of the CDC. Whether it's possible for most people to understand things like test sensitivity, etc. is another matter.
Google became more popular than Yahoo, Altavista, Excite, etc. precisely because it wasn't "curated". It proved itself more reliable than the pay-to-pay services. And SEO spam (mainly for porn and dodgy medicines) has been around as long as search engines have. Google has a vested interest in weeding out poor results as a way to demonstrate that its suitability for advertisters. But, as long as there is a market for quackery, there will be a supply.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/testing/diagnostic-testing.html
Sounds like a search bubble effect
If you regularly search for rubbish Google will give you rubbish.
Brilliant article
In the early '90s my peers considered me smart because I read books and remembered things. Search engines ruined that, equalised it and externalised memory. I couldn't tell you my phone number now.
I first emailed Danah Boyd in '96 or '97. I was an uber-geek at the time, impressed by her Difranco song lyric site and bored shitless by my Cisco NMS SI&T day jobbie. She sent me a nice reply. I next emailed her a year ago when I learned she'd become a techie guru. She didn't reply but she's put so much online that it's kept me busy catching up. Wonderful woman, total star-bar.
Google is not a search engine
It's an advertising supply house these days.
That's the sort of thing
to use wikipedia as a starting point (& get a few URLs from its links to explore further)
Wikipedia is far from perfect, but thats an example of what its useful for