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Comment by eric_cc | Hacker News Reader

> Is it hard to determine the difference between The National Enquirer and Nature?

Try Fox News vs New York Times.

> It's ultimately nuanced, but it's not rocket science. The challenge is not really with institutions, there are not that many of them, but rather with social media, individuals, commenters, state actors posing as 'regular people' etc..

Scoring how much you trust an entity to determine the truthfulness of information they are generating is flawed.

In no way does this properly verify information’s truthfulness in and of itself.

Even scoring “Information.Source.Trust Score”, which is just a single aspect of information, is still far more difficult to do than you apparently realize. How can a human build such a score with no bias?

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Truthiness and bias are different.

Also, 'editorial' vs. 'news' are actually different categories and we know what they are.

'Fox 5' - their evening show is pure gossip and innuendo - it has nothing to do with reality or the truth. Their nighthime 'personalities' are editorialists. But they do have regular news segments as well.

All of that can be categorised.

Also, the source of their bias can be roughly identified. Mostly they are a corporate entity playing to an American audience. They have some relationship with the White House on some occasions.

We can delineate.

Because it's a fairly established institution, we can also look at the other kinds of bias. And of course, each personality is different.

They are not owned and controlled by the Kremlin, or the Canadian Government as is, the CBC for example. We can delineate there.

It's really not that hard.

And FYI it's not as though there is hard censorship - you can retrieve Putins' own 'Mein Kamp-ish' rants any time with fairly easy searches.

What we don't want is bad misinformation seeping into the top of arbitrary searches etc..

If someone wants to read 'My Pillow Guy' that's fine, but his opinion on Putin is not going to come up up first when I search 'Putin', unless there's some other, factual, direct relevance.

> If someone wants to read 'My Pillow Guy' that's fine, but his opinion on Putin is not going to come up up first when I search 'Putin', unless there's some other, factual, direct relevance.

Not for you, perhaps, and probably not on DDG (the original subject here). But AIUI the Google algorithm takes into account not only your actual search terms, but your browsing and search histories. So if you're a poor deluded MAGA dupe who's read too much of Mr. Lindell's rants before, it seems utterly plausible to me that at least Google would be only too happy to feed you more of his ravings. And it feels quite likely that Bing, f. ex, would work the same.

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