Google won't add fact checks despite new EU law

1/16/2025 at 4:53:12 PM

Who decides what is a fact? The company? The twitter and Facebook disclosures show how easily that can be gamed by corrupt people in power.

by bn-l

1/16/2025 at 6:17:37 PM

> Who decides what is a fact? The company?

Government-selected "trusted flaggers":

Nonetheless, under the DSA, the status of trusted flagger is awarded by the "Digital Services Coordinator," which is a national authority responsible for supervising the services of online platforms. The DSA allows law enforcement agencies or profit-seeking industry organizations to apply for the status of a trusted flagger, the notices of which must be treated with priority. - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/02/enforcement-overreach-...

Oh, and executive-branch agencies can order take-downs, without a court signing off:

Article 8 empowers national judicial or administrative authorities to issue mandatory takedown orders directly to “intermediary services" such as social media networks. In its recent vote, the Parliament rejected EFF’s suggestion and the proposal by the Civil Liberties Committee to limit these powers to independent courts. Instead, the Parliament followed the Commission’s proposal and allowed a broad category of non-independent authorities to exercise this power.

by like_any_other

1/16/2025 at 9:58:03 PM

That is unbelievably scary, anti-democratic, ripe for abuse, and a push towards authoritarianism. How many times has the government convinced people something horrible is fine? I'd rather people just be suspicious of everything.

by exabrial

1/17/2025 at 11:14:42 AM

>That is unbelievably scary, anti-democratic, ripe for abuse, and a push towards authoritarianism

Brussels in a nutshell...

by coldtea

1/16/2025 at 6:24:03 PM

that seems to be a roundabout way of saying gov moderators will decide

by rolph

1/16/2025 at 8:18:34 PM

Roundabout? I thought it was quite direct.

by like_any_other

1/17/2025 at 12:53:20 AM

How is it decided if a medicine is effective or safe? How do we determine if an advertisement is truthful or not? How is it determined if someone committed a murder or not?

Finding of fact is a function government carries out thousands of times a day.

by HeatrayEnjoyer

1/17/2025 at 11:16:09 AM

A medicine being effective or safe is not a matter of politics, or opinion.

A court (deciding who commited murder, etc) is not a government.

As for advertisments, we decide for ourselves.

by coldtea

1/16/2025 at 6:08:32 PM

> He said a new feature added to YouTube last year that enables some users to add contextual notes to videos "has significant potential." (That program is similar to X's Community Notes feature, as well as new program announced by Meta last week.)

It's hard to imagine this isn't what ultimately happens. It seems to be a tall order for an EU court to compel speech from an American company in a political sense. In this case, Google can and I believe will stop offering youtube in the EU until the EU says that Google's proposed "fact-checking" system is Good Enough.

(Not to mention how gross it feels to insist that someone has not stated the correct facts and must do so or face a penalty.)

by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF

1/17/2025 at 8:05:45 AM

The EU is the second largest economy in the world. They are never going to drop it. A bit of hardball, some extended litigation, sure. Leaving the EU to Vimeo, I don't think so.

by isaacfrond

1/17/2025 at 5:02:05 PM

That's a good point. I guess it will be interesting to see how it shakes out.

by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF

1/16/2025 at 8:10:26 PM

It’s google’s job to return results when users search, not to verify the claims made in found content. If google search results show you someone else’s lie, thats the liar’s fault, not google’s, and they should not be held accountable. It’s ultimately up to the users themselves to distinguish truth from lies, surely, the onus must lay on the reader, not the indexing software.

by mock-possum

1/16/2025 at 8:31:09 PM

When google started summarising and presenting the summary as fact rather than just returning results, is when they started acting like they were making truthiness decisions about the information.

by NikkiA

1/17/2025 at 11:01:55 AM

Yup, IME people repeat Google AI or Chatgpt output as fact.

by aitchnyu

1/18/2025 at 1:07:26 AM

They've been doing it with Wikipedia for years.

by nailer

1/16/2025 at 4:53:34 PM

How, in practice, would you even go about fact checking every we page for ranking? Judging by my own observations of their Ai search results they certainly can't do it with that, it will confidently lie a huge portion of the time

by thatguy0900

1/16/2025 at 6:06:24 PM

Any article that doesn’t put ‘fact checkers’ in quotes at this point is implicitly biased.

by nailer

1/16/2025 at 9:18:14 PM

And any article that does it is explicitly biased.

by intermerda

1/18/2025 at 1:08:21 AM

No. Fact checkers have absolutely been proven to have lied and manipulated results. They have not been proven to tell the truth.

by nailer

1/16/2025 at 8:12:09 PM

[flagged]

by idunnoman1222