Trump Can’t Tell the Truth About Violence at His Rallies

If Trump’s campaign was actually built on uncomfortable truthtelling, his obvious dissembling and disregard for facts in these cases might be damaging. After months of violence at Trump rallies, and after he strategically stoked the anger, Trump now insists it’s someone else’s problem. But blaming outside provocateurs while refusing to acknowledge any internal flaws is in keeping with the Trump campaign. Trump’s candidacy is, like his famously over-the-top resorts, essentially an escapist exercise: It promises people who are angry about the state of the nation that there is a simple solution and they don’t have to change anything. The problem is always somewhere else, someone else.

Googling Is Believing: Trumping the Informed Citizen

Rubio’s Google gambit and Trump’s (non)reaction to it, reveals an interesting, and troubling, new change in attitude about a philosophical foundation of democracy: the ideal of an informed citizenry.

.. Plato argued in “The Republic” that the fact that democracies couldn’t control that flow and point it toward truth was one reason they often dissolved into tyranny. In a different vein, Noam Chomsky argued in the 1980s that consent was being “manufactured” by Big Media — large consolidated content-delivery companies (like this newspaper) that could cause opinions to sway one way or the other at their whim.

.. searching the Internet can get you to information that would back up almost any claim of fact, no matter how unfounded. It is both the world’s best fact-checker and the world’s best bias confirmer — often at the same time.

.. Search for “what really happened to the dinosaurs” and one of the top results is likely to be from a site called answersingenesis.org — not, I suggest, a good source of information on the T-Rex.

.. We no longer disagree just over values. Nor do we disagree just over the facts. We disagree over whose source — whose fountain of facts — is the right one.

Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links

Google’s search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.

A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page.