Headline Dec. 16/ ''' FAKE NEWS FIRST '''

''' FAKE NEWS FIRST '''

THE PATH WE CHOOSE determines the good, bad and ugly of technology. *Technology is a useful servant, but a dangerous master: Norwegian historian and political scientist, Christian Louis Lange*.

In the days after the election, the top Google search results for 'final election' vote count 2016'' was a link to story that wrongly stated Mr.Trump, who won the  Electoral College, had also defeated Mrs. Clinton in the popular vote.

In the search that led to the creation of Project Owl, Google found that a small fraction of its search results -about 0.25 percent of daily traffic -were linking to intentionally, misleading, false or offensive information.

For a company that aims to deliver most relevant information for all queries, that constituted a crisis.

Google said it had added more detailed examples of problematic pages into the guidelines used by human ratters to determine what is good search result and what is a bad one.

Google said its global staff of more than 10,000 raters do not determine search rankings, but their judgments help inform how the algorithms performs in the future.

Google has often said that it cannot reveal too much or people would use that information to try to game the rankings. 

The opacity around Google's algorithms has given birth to a cottage industry of search engine optimization experts who dissect the company's comments.

To assuage criticism about the lack of transparency, Google made public its guidelines for search quality in 2013. Paandu Nayak, a Google fellow who focuses on search quality, said disclosing the guidelines is more meaningful.

''The actual algorithm is not as important as what the algorithm is trying to do,'' said Mr. Nayak. ''Being completely transparent of what you're to achieve is the central goal because how you accomplish that can change.''

Google said hundreds of factors go into search algorithm and the formula is also constantly evolving. The company said it conducted 150,000 search experiments and implemented 1,600 changes last year.

This is why it's hard to pinpoint exactly why search traffic plummets for a site like the World Socialist Web Site, which calls itself the 'online newspaper of the international Trotskyist movement.'' 

Mr. North, the site's chairman, said traffic coming in front search is down 70 percent since April, citing data from Alexa, a web traffic analytics firm owned by Amazon.com.

In an open letter to Google last month, Mr. North traced his site's traffic decline to Project Owl. 

Mr. North said he believed that Google was blacklisting the site, using concerns over fake news as a cover to suppress opinions from socialist, antiwar or left-wing websites and block news that Google doesn't want covered. 

In mid-April, a Google search for ''socialism vs capitalism'' brought back one of the site's links on the first results page but, by August, that same search didn't feature any of its links.

''They should be asked to explain how they're doing it,'' Mr. North said. ''If they say we're not doing anything, that's simply not credible.''

Mr. North said that Google has not responded to his claims. Google declined to comment on the site's complaints.

Mr. North argued that the drop-off in traffic is the result of  Google directing users towards mainstream media organizations, including The New York Times.

The World Socialist Web Site claimed that search referral traffic had fallen since April at a variety of other left-wing. progressive, socialist or antiwar publications like AlterNet and Consortiumnews.

The New York Times could not find the same level of traffic declines at all of those publications, based on data from SimilarWeb, a web analytics firm.

Traffic coming from search engine for the World Socialist Web Site was down 34 percent during the months of May to July, compared with the preceding three months, according to SimilarWeb. 

Traffic that did not come from search was up 1 percent during the same period.

Mr. North said his site provides critical analysis for current events and it has nothing in common with sites peddling blatantly untrue stories. But he said he is opposed to any actions taken by Google under the pretext of stopping fake news.

''I'm against censorship in any form,'' he said. ''It's up to the people what they want to read. It's not going to stop with the World Socialist Web Site. It's going to expand and spread.''

As a whole and on the whole, in a very broad perspective, we can go on with a long list of the negative effects of technology.

But as it has been reiterated, technology isn't the culprit, evolution and innovation of technology will continue. It's up to us to manage and use technology wisely and direct it to a good and positive dire action.

The solution is quite obvious as everyone of us owns the responsibility to choose how to put technology to good use.

And in another incident the world has only just recovered from the WannaCry ransomeware attack in May this year, only to be hit by another one named Bad Rabbit that spread to a few European countries in July.

Since it was relatively on a smaller scale, it didn't get much attention until it hit a Ukrainian international airport and three Russian media outlets in October.

Bad Rabbit literally caused all the airport information systems to stop functioning causing major chaos for travelers.

These crimes that leverage on technology increase each year, and pose a big challenge for enforcement agencies to nab the culprits who always seem to be one step ahead.

We certainly didn't see all these coming when the Internet came into the picture. In fact, many had wished the technology had come one or two decades earlier, for all the conveniences it brings.

And to add one more example, Malaysia recently experienced one of the largest data breaches when approximately 46.2 million mobile phone numbers with local telecommunications and mobile virtual networks [MVNOs] were said to be compromised.

These are personal data that can be misused to initiate multiple attacks to users, and can cause very real consequences to privacy such as identity threat.

Good Luck and best wishes then.

With respectful dedication to the Technology giants, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW! -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW! -the Ecosystem 2011:

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Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless