Google: we will tell you what is true! (with help from some others)

[albrecht]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530102.600-google-wants-to-rank-websites-based-on-facts-not-links.html#.VPNjOY5MFkj

And wants to use billionaire founded tax-free Foundations and sites controlled by politically active, or linked, members, ,schools, or foundations. And most news coming from corporately owned media companies often just rebroadcasting government and company press releases and talking-points. With the politically appointed FCC detailing the "neutrality" of the internet and the NSA (etc) monitoring and data-mining every facet of it. And our own government now, legally, able to produce propaganda to the US people (Smith-Mundt Act being eliminated with the latest National Defense Authorization Act.) While nobody, at least rational people, want people to get bad information imagine if this cabal of big corporation, tax-free Foundations, schools, and government alphabet agencies instead of being run by Google, Obama adherents or appointees or Czars, or progressive billionaires instead was run by Bush/Cheney, the Koch Brothers foundation, Fox News, and Microsoft (which, I'm sure they would've loved?) Then would you support the "neutrality" and finding/ranking searches based on the "truth?" Or this synthesis into a cabal of corporations, Foundations, and secretive government agencies deeming what is true and what news we get and how the internet should work?

And aside from mathematics and formal logic where truth can be determined by following an accepted set of principals and formal steps: who is determining what is "true?" Or what truth even means? In things like politics, economics, history, and even science "truth" if often not black and white or ever "settled." It is constantly changing, being re-evaluated, investigated, etc. And in things like religion or morality "truth" can simply be due to a certain belief or societal consensus.

[Gd5150]

Apparently rigging which news stories appear first in searches is no longer enough. So 2 weeks before the midterms, Google will do it’s best to influence the election and is now taking after the failed Yahoo and attaching the news stories it wants at the top to their home page.

[Jackstar]

Welcome home, albrecht! Your distinct lack of paragraphs and emoji are a refreshing sight.

who is determining what is "true?"

Nothing is true; everything is permissible.

Or what truth even means?

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[WOTR]

Apparently rigging which news stories appear first in searches is no longer enough. So 2 weeks before the midterms, Google will do it’s best to influence the election and is now taking after the failed Yahoo and attaching the news stories it wants at the top to their home page.

Google has been the devil's spawn for a long time.  "Do no evil" was never in the cards for a company who wants to own you.  And people pay for the privilege of sending them (and Amazon, and Apple) every scrap of personal information that they can Hoover up...

I have alarm apps that suggest news stories to me every morning.  They are usually from one of three sources, and rarely ever give me much "news."  I can only imagine how that will accelerate with the elections...

  (for Jackstar.)

[Jackstar]

  (for Jackstar.)

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[Metron2267]

https://spectator.us/audacity-obamas-lying/
What makes a good liar? It’s a harder question to answer than you might think, partly because it’s a harder and more complex thing to accomplish than you might think.

Let me begin by acknowledging that I do not have a satisfactory answer to the question. Nevertheless, as an aficionado of the sport, I admire from afar expert practitioners. And I was reminded just a few days ago that we have in our midst a grand master of mendacity. In his speech in Milwaukee on Friday, Barack Obama demonstrated once again his effortless, masterly deployment of deceit.

Again, I do not say that we groundlings have been vouchsafed all the inner workings of the mechanism. But one thing is clear from Obama’s performance: brazenness is key. If you are going to lie, don’t be shy. Capitalise on the public’s inherent goodwill â€" and its poor memory.

Another useful gambit: accuse others, preferably in violent terms, of precisely that of which you are yourself guilty.

Watch this: ‘What we have not seen before in our public life is politicians just blatantly, repeatedly, baldly, shamelessly, lying. Just making stuff up.’ Nice!

As in, ‘if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor’?

‘Nobody In My Administration Got Indicted,’ said the Big O, but consider Eric ‘kick ’em when they’re down’ Holder, the only Attorney General in history to have been held in contempt of Congress. Consider also Lois Lerner, the senior IRS official whose shameless ‘I take the Fifth’ performance before Congress was its own humiliating indictment. Or consider Hillary Clinton herself, whose list of possible felonies would have kept the the DOJ busy for years were it not for her best buddy, the disgraced James Comey, another Obama apparatchik who should be lawyering up.

The irony attending Obama’s charge â€" ‘In Washington they have racked up enough indictments to field a football team’ â€" revolves around the fact that most of the criminal referrals and shadowy behaviour concern people who worked for him, as the names Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Glenn Simpson (just for starters) suggest. Those indicted on team Trump were either set up â€" Mike Flynn, George Papadopoulos â€" or were charged with wrong doing about matters having nothing to do with the President: Paul Manafort is the most obvious example.

Brazenness. A habit of accusing others of that of which you are yourself (which I suppose comes under the category of brazenness). The truly accomplished and successful liar needs something else, something that if can influence but not sully control: I mean the cooperation of the Zeitgeist, which potency in our time means the cooperation of the media. Obama accuses Trump of lying. The media lines up to declaim it from the rooftops. He berates Trump for his incivility, his tone, his incitements. But haven’t the media poisoned the atmosphere with their nonstop attacks on the President? He is unfit for office; is ‘literally Hitler’; he, the father of a Jewish convert and grandfather of Jewish children, is an ‘anti-Semite’; he is ‘racist,’ ‘xenophobic,’ ‘Islamophobic.’ And yet it is somehow Donald Trump, not Barack Obama, not the media, that is coarse and rude and mendacious.

How does that work? As I say, I cannot claim to understand the alchemy of this process. I merely call attention to its wondrous and seemingly magical operation.