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Personally, I'm conflicted. Your argument rests upon the idea that people's minds can be "poisoned" with false information. And I understand that. But at some point you have to hold people responsible for believing stuff that is blatantly false. There was a time that, if you believed in Bat Boy [1], most people rightly thought you were a bozo.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Boy_(character)

I too want to believe in individual people having the ability to determine fact from fiction. The problem I see, however, is the power dynamic nowadays. What chance does the average person have in rooting out disinformation when it's being spread by interests using million dollar marketing campaigns and rooms filled with PhDs? The average person can't really invest the time in becoming an expert in all of the problems that affect us even if they want to and you need to rely on other people at some point.

These hordes of extremely naive people that are so easily fooled: if they exist, why should they be allowed to vote at all in the first place?

Blatantly false? The problem is not stuff which is blatantly false. The problem is that if you make a large number of false statements, some of them will not be so obviously false. Also, a large part of the danger of misinformation is not that people will believe false things, but that people will lose faith in journalism as a medium.

If something isn't blatantly false how exactly is Google supposed to moderate it? They don't hire enough employees to even manually review all of the complaints related to their income stream, let alone for voluntary initiatives to police truth.

Besides, the category 'things which are false but that gullible people might be persuaded by' is basically what the political process deals with. Along with 'things that are true but naive people don't believe'. Clamp down on that and you might as well just get rid of elections as there isn't a lot to poll people on.

I think that Google very plausibly has statistical tools already built that will help quite a bit in this arena. Combatting fake news is essentially the same problem as combatting SEO.

You suggesting that Google has statistical tools that can reveal fundamental political truths. That is not true. If it is true, maybe Google could do some good by releasing this information to the rest of us so we can also solve all these pesky partisan issues plaguing the political landscape.

It is possible to draw a vague philosophical parallel between SEO and lying, but in practice they aren't going to be similar. I don't know what similarities you see so I can't argue with them, but dealing with SEO doesn't involve figuring out whether the SEO is done truthfully or not. I'd imagine much SEO is done in the service of truth (sell you X for $Y style arrangements) that just happens to turn up in unwanted places.

Google has convincingly lost the battle with SEO, so forgive me for not being encouraged by that.

Advertisers have a responsibility for truth in advertising, if they can't handle that then their distributors can cut them off. This is as old as the advertising business. Claiming that Obama is a Muslim Cleric and expecting equal treatment with that hogwash deserves to get banned. Same if Trump was claimed to drink the blood of babies (which no one has disproven!) would also be an ad that could be banned. Again I say good for Goog; eliminating targeting of the audience by political affiliation is a good thing.

The core problem being, of course, that only one of your two examples would actually get removed.

This seems more like a signal/noise pollution problem. Which also means that false things are harder to correct.

Showing something that is blatantly false is much harder when all information sources become jammed.

it isn't about poisoning the mind, it's about filling the channel with noise so important facts don't get through. note that fake news are being produced, reposted and boosted consistently and continuously, they aren't one-offs.

It’s called “the firehouse of falsehood” and it’s a play straight out of the KGB’s propaganda book.

> the reality is that the world has a large problem with disinformation and false claims right now that's causing real negative consequences for real people.

Can you expand on what you mean by this? It seems we have more transparency than ever before into how governments are operating (mostly corruption) and that's a good thing. What negative consequences do you see coming from false claims?

I suspect the answer to this question might highlight why people are nervous about Google (or any company) being the arbiter of truth.

false claims are not transparency. false claims are the opposite of transparency. When you allow lies to spread unchecked, real transparency is meaningless because the true information exposed by the transparency can be drowned out by the false information.

Honestly, i don't even know where to begin with being asked to explain why lies are bad

I'm asking what false claims you think are "controlling our political process", and causing a "large problem" in the world?

It seems to me that good old fashioned state/media propaganda are a much larger problem than any false claims circulating on the internet.

The problem is that most political speech is rarely simple facts with true/false values. Political speech is complicated and full of nuance and ambiguities. Just look at the example that AOC grilled Zuckerberg over: "Republicans support the Green New Deal". Which Republicans? Which version of the Green New Deal? Which parts of it?

Ultimately you're just handing control over speech to the arbiters of "true" and "false", who are themselves political creatures.

Sometimes we just have to accept some bad things in our society, because the consequence of eliminating them is worse. See also: The War On Drugs.

Exactly one of the following two claims is a lie:

1) “Vaccines are safe”

2) “Vaccines cause, rather than prevent, illnesses”.

If 1 is true, the antivaxx movement is risking tens of millions of lives and >>billions of disability adjusted years of life expectancy.

If 2 is true, vaccines are a multibillion dollar fraud.

The claim was that false statements are controlling our political process. The antivaxx movement has exactly zero impact on politics.

The antivaxx movement recently had an impact on CDC policy, Department of Education involvement at Federal and State levels on how to handle unvaccinated kids, laws passed by State Governors, and two Senate bills. I'm not sure how you're able to minimize their impact on politics.

There are clear links between false statements, the antivaxx movement and the resurgence of deadly medical conditions.

Antivax has plenty influence on politics. They've been able to push states to allow more and more capability to dodge vaccines when they should be mandatory unless there is a medically compelling reason not to.

Um, my kid caught a disease from a live-virus vaccine and then spread it to younger family members, so if we're being totally honest here...

This is a great example because (1) is not universally true and (2) is a caricature of what anti-vaxxers claim.

Anti-vaxxers are probably incorrect, but you are also the victim of a misinformation campaign. Limiting them doesn't help you get better information.

1 is so close to true that it's a basically harmless statement. 2 is flat out true, anti-vaxxers have no scientific basis for their claims and they are essentially murdering people including small kids. so yeah 2 is just as ridiculous as was states.

“Close to true” is still false. The medical community isn’t doing itself any favours (with regards to their credibility) by espousing false “almost truths”. The fact is that vaccines are not (100%) safe (no medical procedure is) - it’s just that the tiny risk vs huge reward makes them worth it.

It's possible for anti-vaxxers to simultaneously be a net harm to children while having reasonable concerns about some aspects of our current best practices regarding vaccines. Regardless, dismissing them and calling them murderers doesn't seem helpful towards stopping them or addressing their fears.

> 1 is so close to true that it's a basically harmless statement.

It is indeed a very dangerous statement, because it leads the scientifically illiterate to think that they don't need to speak frankly with their doctor for health advice. For example, your 'harmless' statement led to my brother incorrectly receiving the MMR vaccine. You see, he has hemophilia ,which is a contra-indication to receive the vaccine. Hemophilia is relatively common enough (because, according to the CDC, any blood clotting disorder that extends bleeding time, is a contraindication for MMR). He ended up having severe seizures as a child.

Or moreover, neither my daughter nor I should (or should have, in my case) receive the MMR vaccine as infants due to a family history of sometimes severe immune issues. These are also relatively common conditions.

I'm not an anti-vaxxer, BTW. I'm just following CDC recommendations, to the T: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/should-not-vacc.html

Neither of this means that most people should receive MMR. But not everyone should. MMR is not 100% safe. No vaccine is, even if the general benefits outweigh the cons.

Thanks for encouraging me to be more precise in my examples. Looking at the rest of this thread, I can see my mistake.

Ironically, I thought this would be a better choice than a Brexit/the EU example.

> Exactly one of the following two claims is a lie:

No, a lie is a deception carried out by means of an untrue statement. "1 + 1 = 3" is not a lie, but an accountant claiming such in order to embezzle is lying.

> 1) “Vaccines are safe” > 2) “Vaccines cause, rather than prevent, illnesses”.

For the sake of getting at the deeper problem with this argument, I'll grant that a version of these assertions could be roughly mutually exclusive.

> If 1 is true, the antivaxx movement is risking tens of millions of lives and >>billions of disability adjusted years of life expectancy.

> If 2 is true, vaccines are a multibillion dollar fraud.

You've framed this as though it's hard to believe that the antivaxx movement would risk people dying and becoming disabled.

Many positions impose a potentially high death toll if you're wrong, e.g. both sides of the debates on war, guns, climate change, health care.

In an alternate history, Neville Chamberlain could have been the man who brokered "peace in our time." He believed he was right and, correctly, believed going to war would be bloody and awful, and took actions based on those beliefs.

But we typically have little direct influence over policy, so what dominates people's views is the immediate impact they observe. In that "multibillion dollar fraud" you have countless doctors and pharmacists administering vaccines to people they know, watching them get sick, and shrugging it off to collect a paycheck.

Unless medical school filters for people who are profoundly unethical, that's not happening.

I appreciate that you’re giving the benefit of the doubt to what was, in retrospect, a poorly written dichotomy on my part.

However, I can’t follow the point you’re making. If it isn’t too much to ask for an internet stranger, could I ask you to rephrase that?

while i dont believe this to be the case with vaccines:

they can be non-complicit with it and still unknowingly participate in the fraud.

ultimately, the doctors have to trust their data as well, which can - theoretically! - be manufactured in order to sell snake oil equivalent.

its a vanishingly small chance with vaccinations, but nonetheless a possibility which cant be outright denied.

the sad thing about this is that we're almost guaranteed to have a situation like that at some point. it will likely be a significantly less widespread topic than vaccines, but there is too much money to be made with this for nobody to make an attempt. to be honest, i expect that there is already at least some medication like that in circulation and we just don't know about it (nor the doctors which prescribe them).

Because people tend to be cattle and eliminating the echo chamber of targeted political advertising is a good thing. If you want your message out there let everyone see it and call you out for your lies, whatever your party or end game. I prefer twitter's method of just cutting it out, but Goog hit the middle ground I suppose and only let advertisers aim more generic target audience like age and sex.

That's an unsubstantiated claim. Where is the evidence that fake news (as opposed to speculation, which should be immune to censorship) is a "large problem"?

And yet some of the lies will be left and now even protected because the reality will be deemed the false claims.

So, you're calling for a sort of "Ministry of Truth" aren't you.

This relies on the assumption that traditional media isn't the source of disinformation and false claims, which at the best of times is far from true and even worse if you happen to live in a country where Murdoch media has a near monopoly.

Then the question is does political advertising make the disinformation problem better or worse and I'm far less sure of that. It's easy to point to a few crazies but their influence is less certain and traditional media has always had plenty of crazy.

Politicians and political parties have always lied to get elected. Why political ads on digital sites would be different than analogue ones is what interests me.

Can you give an example of a false claim that’s causing real negative consequences for real people?

Difficulty: the claim needs to be one that was made in support of something that you personally agree with.