Google’s New Fact-Check Feature Almost Exclusively Targets Conservative Sites

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What else is new? This is the new censorship… people creating their own bubbles of isolation, and the whole political spectrum is guilty of it.
 
I remember , as a young adult, we used to laugh at the Russian media for their obvious phoney propaganda. “Bagdad Bob” the gulf war Iraqi media puppet would be perfectly at home and “trusted” on most any of the American mainstream media today.
 
chieft said:
war Iraqi media puppet would be perfectly at home and “trusted” on most any of the American mainstream media today.
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That’s ironic, if not hypocritical. The same could be said for everyone that took this story, from an obviously very conservative news source, at face value. I do not know if it is right or wrong. I just know hypocrisy when I see it. The video sounds exactly like something ran from a despotic state-run news.
 
The claim made by the Daily Caller is based on a redefinition of terms by the Daily Caller, and so is meaningless. The Daily Caller would like to classify themselves as normal conservative media. They are not. They are extreme to the point of playing fast and loose with the facts, thus deserving of the Google fact-check conclusions. Similarly, the Daily Caller would like to classify Vox and Gizmodo and perhaps many others as “liberal media” when in fact they are just “not conservative” or “neutral” and apparently have a higher standard of journalism that accounts for the lack of fact-check citations from Google. Also, I doubt the accuracy of their measurement technique. Is the Daily Caller just upset that they have been negatively fact-checked? Or did they conduct a systematic and objective survey of google fact-check citations to come to their conclusion? I suspect the former. If you look at reputable conservative media outlets (not Daily Caller and their ilk) I think you will find no extraordinary negative fact-check citations.
 
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whyeyeman said:
In before liberal “catholics” call this fake news.
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Uncharitable use of scare quotes. You do not get to decide who is a Catholic based on your personal politics.

It is an irrelevant story though. Google has suspended the feature. It was useless anyway. Most people will believe what they want, as people here took this article by Daily Caller at face value. Others know how to fact check for themselves, using search engines and comparing moderate, liberal and conservative news stories.
 
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“Atheism in legislation, indifference in matters of religion, and the pernicious maxims which go under the name of Liberal Catholicism are the true causes of the destruction of states; they have been the ruin of France. Believe me, the evil I denounce is more terrible than the Revolution, more terrible even than The Commune. I have always condemned Liberal Catholicism, and I will condemn it again forty times over if it be necessary.” - Pope Pius IX
 
whyeyeman said:
Liberal Catholicism,
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You should understand the word “liberal” if you are going to use it, especially from 150 years ago. That quote is 100% irrelevant to political liberals who are not atheist or religiously indifferent. As to the Church’s position on a Catholic State since the 20th Century, that has changed completely.

Consider this. In his time the Republican Party was the liberal party that would be the one denounced. Does this mean Catholics should not be Republicans? That is the type of logic you get using such changeable terms across six generations.
 
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The liberalism Pius IX condemned was the liberalism of the French Revolution - the idea that people have the right to do what they want and the freer they are the better society will be. The truth is that freedom rests upon a complex system of laws and attitudes that constrain the individual’s fallen nature.
 
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I use Google routinely for searches, but I have never considered it to be an unbiased source, even for searching. I find that Catholic sources do not seem to be favored, nor conservative sources.

Library card catalogs were far more objective. But Google is convenient. It would be nice to find a search engine whose results did not depend so much on page rank, i.e. popularity, and whose management had a neutral worldview.
 
JimG said:
I use Google routinely for searches, but I have never considered it to be an unbiased source, even for searching. I find that Catholic sources do not seem to be favored, nor conservative sources.

Library card catalogs were far more objective. But Google is convenient. It would be nice to find a search engine whose results did not depend so much on page rank, i.e. popularity, and whose management had a neutral worldview.
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I like your sunflower!
 
JimG said:
I use Google routinely for searches, but I have never considered it to be an unbiased source, even for searching. I find that Catholic sources do not seem to be favored, nor conservative sources.
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When I searched to find articles about this topic, mostly conservative web links popped up. The first page of links include two to the Daily Caller, one each to Breitbart and thefederalist. I have not noticed this particular bias.

I have often had similar results.
 
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Yes, and this brings up a slightly different point. Quite likely every person typing the exact same query into Google will get different results or differently ranked results. Because Google is not simply searching for the closest match for the query, but the closest match for whoever is typing in the query.

“It would be difficult to function on the Internet without search engines, but it’s a bit unnerving to realize that my son and I can type the exact same query into Google Search, and get close, yet recognizably different results. That tells me Google is acting as an editor, advisor, or maybe both. Is that creating reality or a reflection of what Internet? I’m not sure.”

Source
 
Go on the website quora, try answering questions as a conservative, get banned for a week, because it happened to me
 
JimG said:
I use Google routinely for searches, but I have never considered it to be an unbiased source, even for searching. I find that Catholic sources do not seem to be favored, nor conservative sources.
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I was reading a book about TensorFlow (an AI library that was made by Google) and in one of the book’s code example they presented a simplifed page ranking system that is also a part of what Google and some other search engines do. I won’t try to describe it here because even the simplified version is math intensive. Based on what I read about it pages and sites that are not linked to by other popular pages and sites are going to end up with a lower search ranking. A sites ranking is based on the traffic going to the site and the popularity of other sites that link to that site among other factors. It’s possible that the Catholic or conservative sites that you are seeing getting less than favoured treatment have lower scores on these metrics.
 
We know the DC leans one way but this is hardly fake news. Google did suspend their fact check feature for quality issues. We have also seen persistent bias against conservatives by the likes of Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc.
 
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