[docmars]

I believe Google is more concerned with combating the apparent world-ending risk of someone discovering misinformation and parsing that information themselves (gasp), than providing a useful search engine to the majority who are using it with good intentions, as you described.

[markdown]

You jest but USA elected Donald Trump to lead them, proving once and for all that misinformation spread by the internet is potentially world-ending.

You jest but if a pandemic 100 times as deadly as COVID came upon us, anti-vaxxers and the misinformation they spread via the internet could potentially end the world.

You either education your people, or you have to control the information they receive.

The GOP has long chosen to make Americans more stupid (privatisation of education, the teaching of fairy tales in the science classroom, etc) so that they can continue to be manipulated into voting for charlatans. As a result, the only way to keep the country from completely going off the rails on the backs of dumb fucks is to manipulate the information they receive... try and protect them from misinformation, disinformation, and lies.

[docmars]

I wholeheartedly disagree with just about everything you said (much of it is misinformation and/or hysterics), but I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. :)

[licebmi__at__]

Heh, I wholeheartedly agree with most of what gp said and I still wouldn’t trust google to protect people from misinformation. But I also disagree with ggp, as I don’t see google doing anything other than push ads.

[markdown]

I probably was a bit hysterical there, but I think the underlying point that an uneducated populace just can't cope in the modern world centered around information on the internet.

I know someone I consider intelligent who started with one Joe Rogan video and a year later was a raving pro-Russia, pro-China, holocaust denying anti-vaxxer. Youtube took him from fun, reasonable guy who you'd love to have at a party to the bore who found a conspiracy in everything and who just oozed bile and anger at this new world that millennials had destroyed.

If he couldn't fight the propaganda, your average person on the street can't. It's a recipe for disaster, and to my mind the only short term solution is to censor the propaganda.

Of course over the long term, the only real solution is to create a smarter population who aren't just trained in arithmetic, but in logic and philosophy.

[qyi]

I've never studied logic and yet I have never agreed with any conspiracy theory (the logical flaws are still obvious even if I can't name them).

If you want people to think logically about topics, the first step is making them not be taboo.

[nbardy]

Whatever problem your describing, the answer isn't to control people

[scrollaway]

Putting a lid on propaganda isn't "controlling people". When propaganda is thrown at you from foreign states, those states are the ones attempting to control your population. Fighting that is defending your citizens.

How you fight is tricky and i don't agree that censorship is the right fix in the long run, but i don't think the person you are replying to thinks that either, it's just one easy way to combat some of it.

[skinkestek]

In USAs case I'm hardly allne in thinking that it definitely wasn't foreign states who got Trump elected. If so they must have been insanely clever because the Democrats outspent them by orders of magnitude AFAIK.

Trump got elected because people were tired of "politicians" and because Hillary messed up her campaign. Seriously: She was so close to winning it anyway that I like to think it was her calling a large chunk of her voter pool a "basked of deplorables" that got it over the edge.

[markdown]

Not people, just lies and propaganda.

[1cvmask]

So google search got Trump elected?