Google claimt waarheidsmonopolie

'Big Brother' weer een stapje dichterbij?

Met de 'ismen' (communisme en fascisme) in de vorige eeuw was de door George Orwell beschreven dystopie, '1984', geleid door 'Big Brother', die bepaalde wat waar en niet waar was, voor oudere generaties onmiddellijk herkenbaar. Ik vraag mij af of dat nog steeds voor jongere generaties geldt.

Thans is het niet het Orwelliaanse Ministerie van Waarheid, maar het conformisme van de MSM, dat op sommige terreinen een bedreiging vormt voor de diversiteit van de meningsvorming. Ondanks het feit dat de opwarming van de aarde reeds 18 jaar geleden is gestopt, geldt dat in het bijzonder voor klimaat. Maar gelukkig is er internet als vrijplaats voor opvattingen die door de MSM worden geweerd. Echter, vertegenwoordigers van de de meest populaire zoekmachine, Google, hebben laten weten dat zij momenteel werken aan een 'waarheidsfilter' om politiek niet–correcte opvattingen en controversiële websites te brandmerken door een waarheidslabel aan de zoekresultaten toe te voegen.

Onder de titel, 'Google works to rank sites based on ‘truthfulness’', schreef Maxim Lott voor Fox News daarover:

In a step that critics worry will inject political bias into search results, a Google research team released a report this month on ranking search results based on how factual websites are. They propose eventually using that to change Google rankings, which are currently based on website popularity.

The Google researchers give, as an example, websites that say President Obama was born in Kenya; such sites would be penalized in Google rankings, whereas sites that correctly say he was born in the U.S. would get a boost in rankings.

That fact is not controversial, but critics worry that this is a first step towards Google playing God and effectively censoring content it does not like. They fear that skeptics of things like climate change or more immigration (both subjects that Google founders have expressed strong feelings about) might find their websites buried if this ranking system were adopted.

“I worry about this issue greatly… My site gets a significant portion of its daily traffic from Google,” Anthony Watts, who runs Watts Up With That, a popular blog that is skeptical of global warming claims, told FoxNews.com.

“It is a very slippery and dangerous slope because there’s no arguing with a machine,” he added.

Lees verder hier.

Ook Marc Morano wees op de gevaren van dit initiatief. Zie video clip hier.

De Australische klimaatscepticus, Joanne Nova, verklaarde zich in een gepassioneerd betoog eveneens fel tegenstander van dit soort praktijken. Onder de titel, 'Is it the Blue Pill for Google? Will it consign itself to oblivion with “truth” filters?' schreef zij onder meer op haar blog:

Google is considering the possibility of “filtering out” politically incorrect and controversial sites by adding a Truth TM ranking for their search results. It is hubris unbounded — oh hear ye, Google ranks truth for humanity! Fergoodnesssake, the narcissism of it.

It might be a “truth” ranking in Orwellian Newspeak but everyone knows that translates as being whatever government and biggest man in the room decides is true. Like every organization which silences debate and censors ideas, it will be superseded in a flash by those who don’t.

Why would Google even toy with a move that makes it as much fun as a sterilized encyclopedia? Too big for their boots — do they think They Are The Net?

By alienating the most active sector of the Net — the creative, high-risk thinkers — the buzz of the web will shift. It will become known that Google is the place to go for official boredom, and safe state propaganda. ...

The driving lifeblood of the Internet are the people debating and hunting for the forbidden — the controversial and unpopular theories. The most motivated searchers and most passionate writers want to share exactly the kind of information the mainstream already filters out. (Otherwise, why bother?) Consider how many Bloggies the climate skeptics won compared to the officially approved competition — one unskeptical site had the entire official world behind them but lamely bailed even though the skeptic vote was divided four ways. So if Google takes the Blue Pill, it will be giving up the “edge”, and standing smack in the boring safe middle of official nothingness.

Ideas will always seek an outlet. On any computer, Google is only a click away from being replaced.

Even the Soviet Union eventually fell, simply because too many people just stopped believing in it.

Instead of letting humans figure out what is junk on the Internet, Google wonders if it can do it for them. The narcissism of believing they have the formula that beats three billion brains will be Google’s undoing.

Lees verder hier.

Ten slotte nog commentaar van Pierre Gosselin. Onder de titel , ''Megalomaniac Google? … Internet Behemoth Now Fancying Itself As The Ultimate Gatekeeper Of The Truth'' schreef hij:

A wave of commotion has just been unleashed by the very recent FOX News report on Google’s contemplating of changing the way it ranks website pages with its famous search engine. Also read here.

Towering arrogance from speech-rights midgets? The self-appointed gate-keepers of the Truth: Image cropped here.

Rather than ranking websites on their popularity, a Google research group is looking into ranking websites based on how “factual” they are. If implemented, it would literally mean Google taking on the gatekeeper role of who deciding fact from fiction. Google has already created a “knowledge vault” containing “commonly believed facts”. In summary sites found to deviate from what Google considers facts, would be automatically down-ranked in searches. Result: dissident opinions would surely get buried.

Though the system may have some merits, it is chock-full of pitfalls and it risks the establishment of an information dictatorship – a so-called Orwellian Ministry Of Truth. In other countries such information control programs are the sort of things one associates with tyrannies and dictatorships, like Iran, North Korea, Red China, Russia, Venezuela or Islamic fundamentalist states. Note in all these states, leaders are convinced it’s for the overall good of the people. ...

While Google maintains this project is only in the development phase, others are not so sure. One climate science dissident, who wishes to remain anonymous for the time being, believes that Google is already “heavily biased and directing traffic away” from climate science skeptic sites.

With Google’s new proposed policy, dissident voices would never see the light of day and progress would be stunted as a result. Dissidence is the life blood of science itself. By removing dissidence, as Google unwisely moves to do, science itself would de facto get starved and be catapulted back to the Dark Ages and the times of the Inquisition. ...

It cannot be that an organization with the power and might of Google would take it upon itself to police the world’s body of knowledge and to decide who is trustworthy and who isn’t. This borders on dangerous megalomania. ...

Lees verder hier.

Voor mijn eerdere DDS–bijdragen zie hier.