It took nearly an entire geologic relative to the contemporary light speed news cycle, but software behemoth Microsoft has finally placed a substantial bet at the Texas Holdem technocratic poker table of identifying potential fake news sites for the hope of a lucrative profit and the buoyancy of relevance.
The Redmond, Washington based corporation has been virtually silent in hurling accusations across the vast digital construct as to the chief purveyors of egregiously biased content, while holding steady developing the familiar brands of Windows, Bing and Edge, and Explorer. It was not a matter of if, but a matter of when the company developed a software add-on capable of processing information from the daunting amount of electronic news sites and evaluating the quality and accuracy the writing, and warning the end user of possible conflicts with the concepts of truth and reality. Of course, individuals should be aware by now of the axiom which dictates the proliferation of information across the digital universe, “Regardless of a trusted marketplace, the major player of the tech world always possess and ulterior motive brandishing a specific agenda.” In the case of the Bill Gates empire, the breadth and scope of forwarding ideology is not yet apparent, as the organization has just now joined the polarizing tug of war between the Facebook, Twitter and Google, against the rest of the Silicon Valley in the fight for transparency. It will be interesting to see on what side of the ledger Microsoft emerges, as the chasm continues to fracture the software community.
Now that the latest iteration of coded accountability rolled into a marketing ploy is reaching Edge and Chrome users in the form of the watchdog app NewsGuard, reports Business Insider, content generating sites labeled with a news tag, are subject to the smart bot tendrils of the program scoring the overall accuracy and validity of an informational platform’s construct. In a direct onscreen display evaluating “Transparency” and “Credibility”, the software clearly lists the pros and cons of the performance of each entity in disseminating news. A final determination of “Trustworthy” or “Not Trustworthy” is shared with the end user for each specific site, and separates the brand from the convoluted hemisphere and loaded definition of “fake news”. The controversial term “propaganda” is even tossed around, suggesting that the ratings could be swimming in subjectivity.
Ironically, Business Insider published a top-29 listing of major internet news outlets and the NewsGuard diagnosis of each, with the notable absence of CNN within the context of the article. As Ted Turner and Jane Fonda derive innovative methods to bash the military the findings from the Microsoft source code yield some intriguing results.
Trustworthy (according to NewsGuard)- Fox News, Bloomberg, MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, among others.
Not Trustworthy- Breitbart, Russia Today, The Daily Kos, Al Jazeera, among others. Notable absences include the aforementioned CNN, along with reckless incredulous prevarications of Snopes.
Time will tell if the massive data mining project and public awareness campaign will lead directly to a redesign of the slumbering giant Bing search engine franchise and the possible inclusion of insidious features which deliberately target a specific political viewpoint, a practice which Google continues to refine in toeing the line of ethics and integrity with a continued systematic attack on conservative content, thanks to AI bots influencing informational queries. The company insists that human moderators are responsible for the final evaluations, however the pervading ideology of leftist dogma is no stranger to the majority of the main Microsoft campus and global satellites, and one gets the sense that this is the calm honeymoon before the retched tempest of pointed political diatribe swarms as the 2020 election nears. Of course, Mark Zuckerberg and F***book attempted an ill-fated brush with a flesh and blood editorial team and with tragic results.
Internet users should be very aware that CEO Satya Nadella hold the reigns of a looming sleeping corporate giant, a beast capable of the entire breadth of digital indiscretions with just a few simple keyboard strokes.
Read the Business Insider story here.