What’s Wrong With Google? Letting Go of SEO

What happens if you search Google for African American authors.

[sc name="voicefemlower" ][/sc] I’m not going to mince words. Everybody knows what’s wrong with Google now. There’s lots of speculation and also lots of actual information about why and how it happened, and lots of debate about this, but everybody’s clear on the results: Google is no longer a reliable way to find the most relevant…

William Davies · The Reaction Economy · LRB 2 March 2023

The Reaction Economy
William Davies · The Reaction Economy · LRB 2 March 2023 by William Davies (London Review of Books)

The quest for authentic joy or shock – or best of all, joy and shock at the same time – which drives reaction…

It is an infernal riddle of digital culture that ‘authenticity’ is constantly breeding its opposite: the ‘spontaneous’ event that proves to be no such thing, the ‘surprise’ that turns out to be staged, the emotional outburst that has been practised. TikTok is awash with apparently ‘authentic’ clips of humorous reactions (often based on pranks), the…

How AI Trains Humans on Transphobia

How AI Trains Humans on Transphobia
How AI Trains Humans on Transphobia from YouTube

What happens when capitalism, AI and gender-critical transphobia meet? You get a TERF app. And it’s… also racist?

Sign up for our “Identiteaze” Kickstarter pre-launch at www.kickstarter.com/projects/identiteaze What happens when capitalism, AI and gender-critical transphobia meet? You get a TERF app. And it’s… also racist? SUPPORT Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jessiegender PayPal: https://paypal.me/jessiegender

Meta has profited from over 200 ads using the anti-LGBTQ “groomer” slur, even though the platform claims it prohibits the term | Media Matters for America

Meta has profited from over 200 ads using the anti-LGBTQ “groomer” slur
Meta has profited from over 200 ads using the anti-LGBTQ “groomer” slur, even though the platform claims it prohibits the term (Media Matters for America)

Meta confirmed last July that use of the word “groomer” to baselessly describe LGBTQ people violates its hate speech policies, but Media Matters has identified over 200 ads that Meta has profited from that contain the harmful messaging — including 63 new ads that garnered nearly 1 million impressions.

 Right-wing media’s misuse of the term “groomer” has helped fuel a recent rise in anti-LGBTQ sentiment and coincided with a conservative push to enact legislation that strips away the rights of LGBTQ people, especially transgender people. Meta publicly confirmed in July that, as The Daily Dot explained, “baselessly calling LGBTQ people or the community ‘groomers’…

How Much of the Internet Is Fake?

Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites
How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually. by Max Read (Intelligencer)

Some were sent to browse the internet to gather tracking cookies from other websites, just as a human visitor would have done through regular behavior. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites — the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet, where the only real things were the ads.

How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was…