Stalinist Stanford “Visiting Scholar” Wants Search Engines to Warn People About Websites 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 potential—rather than existent—members.
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 red—perhaps, 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 science—a challenging goal that projects like “Dispute Finder” are tackling head on.
The second—and not necessarily mutually exclusive—option 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
Oh, great. “Caution, this site may express opinions that may not align with mainstream views, and may contain information that is not available from conventional news sources.”
Nah, it wouldn’t read that well. It’d probably say “Use caution, crazy people wrote this. Remember, they are nuts, and are wrong. Check Fox News for accurate reporting.”
Maybe they’d be kind enough to flag Fox’s pseudo-news too. Nah, that wouldn’t happen.
…and so the grand global mindf**k continues.
It was hard enough to read “outside the lines” when I was of school age in the pre-Internet era. And what information I was able to bring back, from fellows like Eduardo Galleano and Howard Zinn, was — shall we say — less than welcome in the classroom.
Naturally, the Net is a virtual Library of Alexandria on my desktop, for which I remain intensely grateful as a life-long explorer of dissident ideas.
Yes, I would agree that strong filters are required when swimming in a gyre sea filled with plastic refuse. And the ones I’ve constructed myself over the years will do nicely, thank you very much.
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aaaaaaargh!
This censorship thing really wouldn’t be necessary if you’d just take your microchipped pills as ordered to.