In June 2020, the Parliament of the United Kingdom published a policy report with numerous recommendations aimed at helping the government fight against the “pandemic of misinformation” powered by internet technology. The report is rather forceful on the conclusions it reaches: “Platforms like Facebook and Google seek to hide behind ‘black box’ algorithms which choose what content users are shown. They take the position that their decisions are not responsible for harms that may result from online activity. This is plain wrong.”
While preparing this report, Parliament collected oral evidence from a variety of key figures. One of these was Vint Cerf, a legendary internet pioneer now serving as vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google. He was asked: “Can you give us any evidence that the high-quality information, as you describe it, that you promote is more likely to be true or in the category, ‘the earth is not flat’, rather than the category, ‘the…
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Source : fastcompany.com
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