Opinion masquerades as legitimate news on Google News (2020)(misinfocon.com)
misinfocon.com
Opinion masquerades as legitimate news on Google News (2020)
https://misinfocon.com/opinion-masquerades-as-legitimate-news-on-google-news-3c25848dc005?gi=b44dc54025c1
6 comments
> And no, I don't want yet another story about another Amber Alert in Oklahoma (I'm a thousand miles from Oklahoma) or a dismembered body found in a ditch (the headline didn't specify where).
I get the much more positive "a restaurant with food you would like opened" with "and it's somewhere you'll likely never be" revealed when I click on it.
I get the much more positive "a restaurant with food you would like opened" with "and it's somewhere you'll likely never be" revealed when I click on it.
Shocking, surely. The necessary ingredient to make something news is the story of a conflict between an audiences expectations and events as they occurred. What makes mainstream news so useless is even if the events actually did (decreasingly) occur, the necessary conflict is so entirely manufactured by an underlying ideology as to render the resulting news product fake. It's the veneer of events over a core of reconstituted criticisms.
The conflict is manufactured by a false conflict between supposed oppressors and the oppressed that is the artifact of a dim ideology, which is simplistic and meaningless enough that you can apply to anything. Ideology is what people iterate and riff on to produce satisfying theorems when they are too dumb to be funny, and now we hire them to produce "news."
The only real sources of truth are comedy and fiction, and if you don't read those, it may be worth seriously examining why.
The conflict is manufactured by a false conflict between supposed oppressors and the oppressed that is the artifact of a dim ideology, which is simplistic and meaningless enough that you can apply to anything. Ideology is what people iterate and riff on to produce satisfying theorems when they are too dumb to be funny, and now we hire them to produce "news."
The only real sources of truth are comedy and fiction, and if you don't read those, it may be worth seriously examining why.
TL;DR not all of the opinion pieces are correctly identified with the "opinion" tag on Google News. So what.
I'm not a Google fan boy, but I do get sick of the constant thought policing by our self-appointed intellectual superiors.
I'm not a Google fan boy, but I do get sick of the constant thought policing by our self-appointed intellectual superiors.
I'd wager the majority of actual news source websites masquerade opinion as news and Google is just downstream of that. I'd rather see it all than have an overlord cherrypick what I'm allowed to see.
If you get your news from Google, you're going to get Google's political bias: https://i.imgur.com/Si183zE.jpg
Years ago it was a decent news feed, but more recently I find the quality to be abysmal. Despite trying to click and offer (mostly negative) feedback on stories, every day it presumes I want to hear more about celebrity marriage gossip and fatal car accidents in random American towns. And no, I don't want yet another story about another Amber Alert in Oklahoma (I'm a thousand miles from Oklahoma) or a dismembered body found in a ditch (the headline didn't specify where).
For weeks I'd click daily that I didn't want any more Sudoku solver hints, but every single day there would be a new "story" about it. It made me worry that there was an error in the feedback mechanism that flips the sign: less of this actually meant more of this. Eventually I solved this by adding all those sites to the "hide all stories from" list, but "fewer stories like this" still seems to be a placebo.
Making things worse, it doesn't update on any regular schedule: there's no way to say "OK, I've seen these stories, please don't show them to me again". I live in a small town that doesn't tend to make the news, and (I'm not making this up) it's still showing me a story "2 cited for stealing catalytic converters" from last February! How can there be no way not to get rid of old stories?
Anyway, is there any inside story from Google on why it's the way it is? Is it an office politics issue? No clear path to profitability and hence it's only worked on by interns? Given all the recent progress in AI and informatics, I can't figure out why it would consistently give me such terrible and useless stories.