i just did that in Chrome. I only use it for the rare site that Firefox won’t load so there’s no browsing history.
The Straight Dope didn’t come up in 15 pages.
When the ratio is like 1/1000 I’m not sure what the worry is. The only problem I see is lack of self control. I posted my few times in that thread then I was done. I don’t need a moderator protecting me from threads I don’t like if the threads are following the general rules of the board.
The money is better spent elsewhere. Honestly, the target audience here is low and skeptical. With regards to propaganda in society that’s a problem that shouldn’t be fixed via censorship. That’s a problem of some combination of poor education, low intellect, and lack of critical analysis skills. How that problem is solved or mitigated in society would be a worthy debate.
I’m pretty sure you’re right. I knew that Google customizes searches based on past search history, but I didn’t know that it took browsing history into account.
Anyway, I had an immediate chance to test this theory since I just installed a VM a few days ago and the browser has hardly been used except for a few tests. In this new browser on a brand new virtual machine, the same Google search that turned up the SDMB thread in question as #8 out of 17,300,000 this time turned it up as #25 out of 17,100,000. Not quite as impressive, but really not all that dramatically different.
This is getting to be kind of a side issue, but I don’t know how to explain that. Chrome pissed me off a while back for several reasons and I don’t have it to try on any current machine I can think of. The last test I’m describing was with Firefox on a VM in which I don’t surf the net or do much of anything except run apps for compatibility or testing reasons (the OS there is Windows XP). Firefox had a few links to SDMB in its history from a few days ago but I deleted those (“forget this site”) and the results are the same – the SDMB thread in question comes up on the third page. It’s entirely possible that there’s something I’m not understanding about where Google gets its clues, or maybe your search terms were slightly different.
I’m guessing that Google knows that someone at that IP address regularly visits the Straight dope. It will rank the Straight Dope high on searches from that IP Address. Even on a new computer.
But I’m not an expert on how Google works, though.
I have yet to see an answer to my question way back in the beginning about how exactly content (postings here) can be “weaponized.”
Person A (a legitimate conspiracy theorist with a bugaboo about 9/11) posts a thread asserting that 9/11 was really a [insert your desired conspiracy theory making the rounds]. What ensues is fifty pages of stupid “argument” as a subset of people who are “members” here (by which I mean regular posters, since “membership” on this Board is a bit weird) who cannot just simply let go, but MUST convince the OP that he is WRONG.
Person B (a person paid to try and destabilize America’s democracy by posting weird shit to stir us up) posts a thread asserting that 9/11 was really a [insert your desired conspiracy theory which destabilizes us as a society if believed]. What ensues is fifty pages of… well, you get the idea, I think.
How is B any worse than A?
If all of a sudden we find our Board inundated with WCTs (weird conspiracy theories), we might want to re-think filtering OPs. But otherwise, what real harm comes?
There seems to be more of an infestation of first time posters telling very personal stories about themselves and/or asking weird legal questions. (The latest.)
Random conspiracy theories might end up as noise. But a deliberate attempt to affect Google searching could help spread lies. Deliberate lying, assisted by Facebook bots etc., did affect the recent election.
And recall that some of the anti-Clinton Facebook lies weren’t directed from Russia, but caught on when some village in Albania(?) discovered that certain #FakeNews stories maximized ad revenue. We have indeed reached a point where #FakeNews, spread by propaganda channels and social media, is a real threat to political and social integrity. Because it gets strong Google scores, SDMB may indeed be targeted as a #FakeFact conduit.
Since this thread is about SDMB policy and concerns that’s what I’m talking about. What happens on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit is a different discussion. I don’t care if Russians or Chinese or whoever use those platforms but that’s not here.
However, the probability of a meaningful impact on the US elections due to paid Russian propagandists targeting this message board is low. So, I wouldn’t be fretful.
My interest is not so much that the paid vandals would use SDMB to influence the public at large and thereby Rule Ze Vorld! I’d rather they not, but as octopus correctly says, we’re but a chip in that windstorm.
My primary concern is that we are so small, and they are potentially so big that they could wreck this place just by showing up and stomping around a lot. Which might attract a lot of their followers. Many online media outfits have had to curtail or terminate audience participation because it simply got too hard to keep all the 4chan-style sheer ignorant nastiness under control.
I like this place as a place for us to hang out. Our existing *laissaize faire * or more accurately reference octopus, “What me, worry?” attitude towards keeping the vandals affirmatively at bay leaves us at some risk of being overrun. Is that wise or foolish?
But don’t you think it’ll be really obvious when and if it does happen, and we can decide what to do then? What should we do now to guard against something that is unlikely to happen, but if it does, we can deal with it easily enough?