Google is to "derank" stories from Kremlin-owned publications Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik in response to allegations about election meddling by President Putin's government. Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt said the search giant needed to deal with the spread of misinformation. RT has been described by US intelligence agencies as "Russia's state-run propaganda machine".
The publications said the move was a form of censorship.
Well of course it is. And a jolly good thing too.
"I am strongly not in favour of censorship. I am very strongly in favour of ranking. It's what we do," he added. "It's a very legitimate question as to how we rank, A or B, right? And we do the best we can in millions and millions of rankings every day," said Mr Schmidt. But he added that it was a constant tug-of-war altering the search giant's algorithms to detect "weaponised" information because those seeking to manipulate the news agenda "will get better tools too".
Nah, it's censorship matey. But people tend to confuse that with automatically with "bad thing", because they also confuse "free speech" with a good thing to an absurd extreme.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42065644
I am not in a favour of Putin, but it's hard to believe only Putin uses media as weapons. Well, in fact as I trying to remind some Hollywood movies, really seldom are not definitely USA propaganda from one or another point of view.
ReplyDeleteThere are always limits to free speech. The question is where the line is drawn. Propaganda has always been a weapon of war. As such, it should be treated like a weapon, not as speech.
ReplyDeleteEveryone who has ever done marketing or sales communications, awareness campaigns, politics, etc. has done weaponised information. That is most of us, with the exception of very few people of high integrity and near perfect scientific mindset. I am not sure if such people exist. Even those who have done several unbiased publications have usually done something else that is biased. If you have never done any persuasive, biased writing, you haven't probably done much anything at all, save some purely technical work.
ReplyDeleteKazimierz Kurz yes, all true. But opening the flood gates to permit an enemy country's propaganda machine is all sorts of daft. And yes, the US would bitch louder than Russia if countries started banning movie studios. But it's the right of those countries to do so.
ReplyDeleteI am told, by several former East German citizens, many years after Mauerfall, the most effective propaganda the West ever sent over the Iron Curtain... was entirely accidental. It was television advertising from the West German television stations. Adverts for cars, washing machines, candy, lingerie, groceries. Blue jeans!
ReplyDeleteRT and Sputnik are just silly retreads of the old tyres of Soviet-era agitprop. Of course they tell lies and exaggerate, of course they're unreliable. And nobody's shutting them down, we're just making them register as agents of a foreign government.
What's needed, it seems to me, isn't censorship, but to feed American and UK children a nourishing meal of Rhetoric. Good old Plato said rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men. Forget everything else. We're inundated daily from the firehose of Internet Bullshit and Broadcast Hokum. Compose some scale of Bullshittery, it would have to be on a log scale, for some of this bullshittery is mighty bullshittiferous. Teach people to think for themselves.
Ah me... what a delicious fantasy that previous paragraph was. It won't happen. Too much depends upon the masses being reduced to sheep. But Pink Floyd did write a song about those sheep....