Bing’s Top Search Results Contain an Alarming Amount of Disinformation
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:
Bing's Top Search Results Contain an Alarming Amount of Disinformation:
It is something of a problem, then, that Bing appears to be returning an alarming amount of disinformation and misinformation in response to user queries - far more than Google does, for instance. Bing's somewhat irregular results and hands-off approach to topics like suicide have attracted users' attention before, even earning the distinction of becoming a meme. And while researchers have written about Bing's troubled record on abusive content, specifically with regard to how it has handled autocomplete suggestions, there have been no broader studies of the prevalence of disinformation and misinformation in Bing's top search results. (Google, for what it's worth, has also struggled to rein in autocomplete's tendency to turn up objectionable speech).
Google, which has been the focus of intense media criticism for its failures to combat abuse on its platforms, including the gaming of its algorithms by Holocaust deniers, has made it clear that it will take new steps to "tackle the propagation of false or misleading information." As a result, Google is, for better or worse, the closest thing we have to a standard point of comparison for how search engines handle disinformation and misinformation. Thus, when we say Bing shows its users a lot of disinformation, we mean specifically that it shows a lot more disinformation than Google.
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