In the past two years, large language models have replaced traditional information search and delivery systems in increasingly jarring ways. As they become more integrated into our everday lives, it will likely become harder to distinguish fact from fiction. Simultaneously, corporations like Meta have moved away from efforts to stop misinformation under the thin guise of “free speech.” While this will be dangerous for everyone, it offers particularly worrying prospects for groups most routinely targeted by intentional disinformation efforts.

A week ago, I posted a dataset that had been compiling over the course of a year based on a series of RSS feeds I’d set up and mostly forgotten about. After merging the data and sifting through them, I find myself left with far more questions somehow than I had come in with. But most of all, what I can’t get out of my mind is the sheer volume of articles.

At first, I thought it was an artifact of the data collection process. Setting the alerts to any news article using the “as-it-happens” frequency setting means that the second Google indexes a news story, it gets pushed to the feed, and that is understandably a lot given the sheer size of the internet.

A year ago, after noticing an alarming shift in both the number and tone of news articles being served search engines like Google and Bing, I cobbled together a system that would log news stories as they were added to Google News in real time. The project garnered a decent amount of attention, and led to a representative from Google reaching out to check my claims that Google was serving extremist content.

Last night, I reran the code and aggregated a full year’s worth of data which is available for free to researchers here.

There’s a curious talking point that won’t seem to die right now that just got a major boost from everyone’s least favorite author. In shorthand, you’ll most likely see the narrative referred to as “medicalized homophobia”, which posits a conspiracy theory that asserts that gender transition of any kind is an elaborate attempt to convert lesbians and gay men to heterosexuality through hormones and surgical intervention. Despite being baseless on its face, it’s an incredibly popular talking point and certain to come up in any discussion where an anti-trans campaigner wishes to dodge the accusation of being anti-LGBTQ.

Well, I did it. I finally switched completely to a “dark mode” dashboard. I sort of had to, after downloading this absolutely gorgeous RStudio theme. Regardless, there’s something about seeing things slightly differently that affords you different perspective and I’m starting to get the impression that there is something truly, terrifyingly wrong with the way Google serves and curates news items in the index.

When I search for “google news content guidelines” I get the official Google News content policy where they claim that Google will not provide content for hate sites or sites that peddle disinformation (written here as misinformation). But is that really true?