It¡¯s pretty clear by now that social media struggles with a fake news problem. However, it seems guys like Facebook and Twitter may not be only ones struggling. Apparently even Apple isn¡¯t too great at the job, as a recent investigation of its Safari browser revealed.?
Buzzfeed, in a piece this week, looked at Safari¡¯s ¡°Suggested Websites¡±, which pop up in response to a Siri query. Unfortunately for the tech giant, things are looking pretty ugly. Apparently Apple¡¯s browser has been linking users to a laundry list of disreputable websites.?
Suggested websites allow people asking Siri a question to link to a result directly from the Search bar instead of waiting for the results page to load in Safari. So that means a lot of users have been directed to websites of the calibre that calling them disreputable is actually conservative.?
According to Buzzfeed, these include a calibre conspiracy video (a US-focused conspiracy theory that¡¯s not worth your time googling), and anti-vaccination website (which is a dangerous falsehood even offline) and even a loathsome Holocaust denial website.
To be clear, all of these results were suggested in response to direct queries like ¡°Pizzagate¡±, or ¡°the holocaust didn¡¯t happen¡±. However, it¡¯s still expected Apple should have done more to police these kinds of results being actively pushed to users, as opposed to, say, intellectual discussions on the conspiracies. At the very least, Apple has since banished these links since the report surface a couple of days ago.
The strange thing is, Apple relies on Google for its Siri search results, ever since it abandoned Bing in 2017. However, when the same search terms were compared in Google search, the offending links were nowhere to be found. Instead, Google linked articles from reputable sources like The Washington Post and Snopes, which both discuss these conspiracy theories and debunk them. That means Siri¡¯s internal algorithms, or perhaps its human search curation, are at fault here, something that¡¯s fully on Apple to fix.