Infowars

[supergee]

Haters gaming the search engines to tell us Jews, women, and Muslims are evil.

Thanx to Metafilter

Comments

[weofodthignen]

1. People who frame their searches as questions are a subset of searchers, or I suspect at least two subsets: older, less search-savvy people, and less educated people (the ones Yahoo Answers goes after, who think there is probably a Right Answer to every question). Hence the surprise at this: I doubt most of the litterati even see that autocomplete starting to happen, partly because they rarely start a query with verb + subject.

2. As someone wrote on Wikipediocracy concerning the Fake News for Rump phenomenon, the newspapers have taken themselves out of the game by paywalling themselves. Duuuuuh fewer mutually reinforcing links. At a minimum they require registration. It took effort to figure out how to comment on that story - and it requires registering with them specifically. Bzzzzt. Fuck that. Look at yourselves, you arsewipes.

3. "It took investigative journalism." Newspapers don't pay for investigative journalism any more. Instead they want us to read the likes of Thomas Friedman. I don't cry any tears for their ruined financing model - that columnist hasn't even figured out the readers are all installing ad blockers and aren't seeing the targeted ads. If they would employ real writers and researchers, I'd be happy to subscribe. Even happier if they'd lift their noses from their backyards. In the electronic age, I can subscribe to newspapers from thousands of miles away (though my dad would turn in his grave if I subscribed to the Grauniad). But they have to be worth reading. They aren't. A couple of days ago, someone left most of the A section of an NYT issue from last week on the floor of the bus. I used to love that paper. I subscribed to the Sunday paper when I could; I drove 90 miles one way to buy it in Houston; I was one of those who snapped it up as soon as possible on Saturday night when I lived in Manhattan. It ain't worth loving any more.

[bibliofile]

Holy crap.

My initial response was to think that maybe I should start typing counterquestions into Google, and clicking on a couple of links per page of results. But then I finished the article and realized that that won't be enough. Maybe a tiny start? Dammit.

It's shit like this that I have to keep reading, even though it's so depressing. Thanks for the link.