One True Baud

“Many of Google’s direct answers are correct. Ask Google if vaccines cause autism, and it will tell you they do not. Ask it if jet fuel melts steel beams, and it will pull an answer from a Popular Mechanics article debunking the famous 9/11 conspiracy theory. But it’s easy to find examples of Google grabbing quick answers from shady places.” We talk a lot about fake news, but but fake search results might be a bigger problem. The Outline on why Google’s featured snippets are worse than fake news.

+ “Obama’s planning a coup? Women are evil? Several presidents were in the KKK? Republicans are Nazis?” Danny Sullivan (who knows search as as well as anyone) explains how the problem is directly tied to Google’s migration from being a search engine to being a place that provides one true answer. “It’s a problem because sometimes these answers are terribly wrong.”

+ Buzzfeed: “Welcome to the corner of the internet that’s hell-bent on convincing you that GMOs are poisonous, vaccines cause autism, and climate change is a government-sponsored hoax. The message is traveling far and wide.” Inside the anti-science forces of the Internet. (We always thought the internet would bring us together and make facts and truth more accessible. How’s that going so far?)