Search Engine to Warn People About Visiting Sites That Contain Conspiracy Theories?

[Ed Jewett]

Stalinist Stanford "Visiting Scholar" Wants Search Engines to Warn People About Visiting Sites That Contain Conspiracy Theories, Browsers Should Flag Information That Does Not Conform to Mainstream Views

January 24th, 2012Via: Slate:
Well, perhaps, it's time to accept that many of these communities aren't going to lose core members regardless of how much science or evidence is poured on them. Instead, resources should go into thwarting their growth by targeting their potentialrather than existentmembers.
Today, anyone who searches for "is global warming real" or "risks of vaccination" or "who caused 9/11?" on Google or Bing is just a few clicks away from joining one of such communities. Given that censorship of search engines is not an appealing or even particularly viable option, what can be done to ensure that users are made aware that all the pseudoscientific advice they are likely to encounter may not be backed by science?
The options aren't many. One is to train our browsers to flag information that may be suspicious or disputed. Thus, every time a claim like "vaccination leads to autism" appears in our browser, that sentence would be marked in redperhaps, also accompanied by a pop-up window advising us to check a more authoritative source. The trick here is to come up with a database of disputed claims that itself would correspond to the latest consensus in modern sciencea challenging goal that projects like "Dispute Finder" are tackling head on.
The secondand not necessarily mutually exclusiveoption is to nudge search engines to take more responsibility for their index and exercise a heavier curatorial control in presenting search results for issues like "global warming" or "vaccination." Google already has a list of search queries that send most traffic to sites that trade in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories; why not treat them differently than normal queries?Thus, whenever users are presented with search results that are likely to send them to sites run by pseudoscientists or conspiracy theorists, Google may simply display a huge red banner asking users to exercise caution and check a previously generated list of authoritative resources before making up their minds.
Research Credit: apethought
Posted in Elite, Perception Management, Social Engineering, Technology

[Peter Lemkin]

:joystick: Cass Sunsteinism!

[Ed Jewett]

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Soros Mouthpiece Calls On Google To Police "Conspiracy Theories"



Stanford scholar wants search engines to flag global warming, vaccine skepticism as thought crimes

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet

Former fellow of George Soros' Open Society and current Stanford University scholar Evgeny Morozov has called on Google and other search engines to become thought crime enforcers, by providing warnings about websites that contain "conspiracy theories" such as the belief, held by a majority of Americans, that global warming is not primarily man-made.

Morozov, whose biography confirms him as a well-connected insider, decries in a Slate piece how the Internet is a useful tool for "People who deny global warming" as well as "the anti-vaccination movement," calling on Google to provide a "socially responsible curated treatment" that would marginalize such beliefs by amending search results.

His solution is to, "Nudge search engines to take more responsibility for their index and exercise a heavier curatorial control in presenting search results for issues like "global warming" or "vaccination." Google already has a list of search queries that send most traffic to sites that trade in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories; why not treat them differently than normal queries? Thus, whenever users are presented with search results that are likely to send them to sites run by pseudoscientists or conspiracy theorists, Google may simply display a huge red banner asking users to exercise caution and check a previously generated list of authoritative resources before making up their minds."

Morozov describes the potential that such a move will be judged as Google "shilling for Big Pharma or for Al Gore" as "a risk worth taking".

This represents a similar argument to Cass Sunstein's "cognitive infiltration," an effort by Obama's information czar to slap government warnings on controversial websites (including those claiming that exposure to sunlight is healthy). In a widely derided white paper, Sunstein called for political blogs to be forced to include pop ups that show "a quick argument for a competing view". He also demanded that taxes be levied on dissenting opinions and even suggested that outright bans on certain thoughts should be enforced.

Giving companies like Google, which has grown to virtually become the gatekeeper of the entire Internet itself and is already engaging in SOPA-like acts of censorship, the power to denote which political and scientific positions are acceptable and which are fringe "conspiracy theories" is an insult to free thinking and smacks of Chinese-style thought control.

Morozov's argument is also completely undermined by the fact that the two so-called fringe "conspiracy theories" he forwards as being in need of Google's thought crime control, skepticism about global warming and the dangers of vaccines, are views held by millions of Americans and are not "fringe" at all.

According to the most recent polls, less than half of Americans now believe that global warming is caused by human activity, a number that has been slipping for the past several years.

In addition, polls show that a quarter of Americans, some 75 million of them, believe that vaccines are unsafe and can cause autism. To characterize this as a minority conspiracy belief is like labeling Catholicism as a doctrine of a tiny fringe.

At best, views about global warming and the safety of vaccines can be described as being split, but to claim that skepticism over man-made climate change and the dangers of inoculations are "kooky" fringe conspiracy beliefs, as Morozov does in his article, is brazenly inaccurate and exposes the agenda-driven bias of his rhetoric.

This is further illustrated by the reader comments, which almost universally deride Morozov and attack his argument as being a thinly veiled demand for Internet censorship.

"The day Google starts doing things like this is the day I find a new search engine," writes one.

"So, you are a supporter of internet censorship? Only of information that you disagree with, of course. So I assume Slate and NAF did not support the recent action regarding SOPA?" adds another.

Morozov's rhetoric is merely one aspect of the wider move to turn the Internet into an echo chamber of establishment propaganda, drowning out alternative voices to the benefit of large pharmaceutical companies who make billions from selling risky vaccines and scientific bodies whose very survival depends upon the global warming myth being upheld.

It represents another effort to win an information war the establishment is currently losing, asHillary Clinton herself admitted, by not just creating a new Orwellian Internet Ministry of Truth, as Bill Clinton demanded, but by ascribing this role to the very gatekeeper of the Internet itself Google.

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.

[Peter Lemkin]

Thought 'CRIMES'......bring in the THOUGHT POLICE! hock: More frightening that these Orwellian proposals is the silence they are greeted by - not even bleating of the Sheeple!

[Ed Jewett]

Warning: This Site Contains Conspiracy Theories

Does Google have a responsibility to help stop the spread of 9/11 denialism, anti-vaccine activism, and other fringe beliefs?

By Evgeny Morozov|Posted Monday, Jan. 23, 2012, at 7:43 AM ET

In its early days, the Web was often imagined as a global clearinghousea new type of library, with the sum total of human knowledge always at our fingertips. That much has happenedbut with a twist: In addition to borrowing existing items from its vast collections, we, the patrons, could also deposit our own books, pamphlets and other scribbleswith no or little quality control.


Such democratization of information-gatheringwhen accompanied by smart institutional and technological arrangementshas been tremendously useful, giving us Wikipedia and Twitter. But it has also spawned thousands of sites that undermine scientific consensus, overturn well-established facts, and promote conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, the move toward social search may further insulate regular visitors to such sites; discovering even more links found by their equally paranoid friends will hardly enlighten them. Is it time for some kind of a quality control system?


People who deny global warming, oppose the Darwinian account of evolution, refuse to see the causal link between HIV and AIDS, and think that 9/11 was an inside job have put the Internet to great use. Initially, the Internet helped them find and recruit like-minded individuals and promote events and petitions favorable to their causes. However, as so much of our public life has shifted online, they have branched out into manipulating search engines, editing Wikipedia entries, harassing scientists who oppose whatever pet theory they happen to believe in, and amassing digitized scraps of "evidence" that they proudly present to potential recruits.


Advertisement




A new article in the medical journalVaccine sheds light on the online practices of one such groupthe global anti-vaccination movement, which is a loose coalition of rogue scientists, journalists, parents, and celebrities, who think that vaccines cause disorders like autisma claim that has been thoroughly discredited by modern science.




While the anti-vaccination movement itself is not newreligious concerns about vaccination date back to the early 18[SUP]th[/SUP]centurythe ease of self-publishing and search afforded by the Internet along with a growing skeptical stance towards scientific expertisehas given the anti-vaccination movement a significant boost. Thus, Jenny McCarthy, an actress who has become the public face of the anti-vaccination movement, boasts that much of her knowledge about the harms of vaccination comes from "the university of Google." She regularly shares her "knowledge" about vaccination with her nearly half-million Twitter followers. This is the kind of online influence that Nobel Prize-winning scientists can only dream of; Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most famous working scientist, has only 300,000 Twitter followers.


The Vaccine article contains a number of important insights. First, the anti-vaccination cohort likes to move the goal posts: As scientists debunked the link between autism and mercury (once present in some childhood inoculations but now found mainly in certain flu vaccines), most activists dropped their mercury theory and point instead to aluminum or said that kids received "too many too soon." "Web 2.0 facilitated the debate of these new theories in public forums before their merits could be examined scientifically; when they were studied, the theories were not supported," notes the Vaccine article.


Second, it isn't clear whether scientists can "discredit" the movement's false claims at all: Its members are skeptical of what scientists have to saynot least because they suspect hidden connections between academia and pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the vaccines. (This, in itself, is ironic: In 2006 the British investigative reporter Brian Deer revealed that Andrew Wakefield, the British scientist who famously "showed" the connection between vaccination and autism in a now-retracted 1998 article in the Lancet, was himself handsomely compensated by trial lawyers who were readying to sue the vaccine manufacturers.)


In other words, mere exposure to the current state of the scientific consensus will not sway hard-core opponents of vaccination. They are too vested in upholding their contrarian theories; some have consulting and speaking gigs to lose while others simply enjoy a sense of belonging to a community, no matter how kooky.



Thus, attempts to influence communities that embrace pseudoscience or conspiracy theories by having independent experts or, worse, government workers join themthe much-debated antidote of "cognitive infiltration" proposed by Cass Sunstein (who now heads the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House)won't work. Besides, as the Vaccinestudy shows, blogs and forums associated with the anti-vaccination movement are aggressive censors, swiftly deleting any comments that tout the benefits of vaccination.


What to do then? Well, perhaps, it's time to accept that many of these communities aren't going to lose core members regardless of how much science or evidence is poured on them. Instead, resources should go into thwarting their growth by targeting their potentialrather than existentmembers.


Today, anyone who searches for "is global warming real" or "risks of vaccination" or "who caused 9/11?" on Google or Bing is just a few clicks away from joining one of such communities. Given that censorship of search engines is not an appealing or even particularly viable option, what can be done to ensure that users are made aware that all the pseudoscientific advice they are likely to encounter may not be backed by science?


The options aren't many. One is to train our browsers to flag information that may be suspicious or disputed. Thus, every time a claim like "vaccination leads to autism" appears in our browser, that sentence would be marked in redperhaps, also accompanied by a pop-up window advising us to check a more authoritative source. The trick here is to come up with a database of disputed claims that itself would correspond to the latest consensus in modern sciencea challenging goal that projects like "Dispute Finder" are tackling head on.


The secondand not necessarily mutually exclusiveoption is to nudge search engines to take more responsibility for their index and exercise a heavier curatorial control in presenting search results for issues like "global warming" or "vaccination." Google already has a list of search queries that send most traffic to sites that trade in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories; why not treat them differently than normal queries? Thus, whenever users are presented with search results that are likely to send them to sites run by pseudoscientists or conspiracy theorists, Google may simply display a huge red banner asking users to exercise caution and check a previously generated list of authoritative resources before making up their minds.


In more than a dozen countries Google already does something similar for users who are searching for terms like "ways to die" or "suicidal thoughts" by placing a prominent red note urging them to call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. It may seem paternalistic, but this is the kind of nonintrusive paternalism that might be saving lives without interfering with the search results. Of course, such a move might trigger conspiracy theories of its owne.g. is Google shilling for Big Pharma or for Al Gore?but this is a risk worth taking as long as it can help thwart the growth of fringe movements.


Unfortunately, Google's recent embrace of social search, whereby links shared by our friends on Google's own social network suddenly gain prominence in our search results, moves the company in the opposite direction. It's not unreasonable to think that denialists of global warming or benefits of vaccination are online friends with other denialists. As such, finding information that contradicts one's views would be even harder. This is one more reason for Google to atone for its sins and ensure that subjects dominated by pseudoscience and conspiracy theories are given a socially responsible curated treatment.


This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.