this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, MSN is just a portal and I doubt there's much behind it besides what domains are popular. MSN "published" this the same way Google News published articles. It sounds better to say Microsoft did it, but it's from some news site called Race Track and it was simply scraped by MSN.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, but that's a key part of the problem. The media had already automated a lot of the news curation into Google News, MSN and other portals, getting people used to not paying much attention to the particular source of news. The news is now moving to generating the actual content in an automated way, rather than just the aggregation step.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But it still isn't MSN who did it. The key part of the problem is entirely glossed over in the article.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

"The full story is that back in 2020, MSN fired the team of human journalists responsible for vetting content published on its platform. As a result, as we reported last year, the platform ended up syndicating large numbers of sloppy articles about topics as dubious Bigfoot and mermaids, which it deleted after we pointed them out."

MSN is not blameless for publishing bad content without supervision. And we are due for a wave of bad AI content starting now. So this problem is going to keep getting worse.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Thats a different problem and not even new. It's not even the same problem you referenced as the "key" part of the problem. Algorithms providing content is behind every mainstream platform ever.

I didn't say MSN is flawless. Just that people are really bad at determining responsibility for an issue.

They're also really bad at delineating the nuance of different root problems apparently.