> If Toyn puts up a story about rape or sexual assault, using any of those words, the story will be buried by Google. To ensure his stories remain visible, he has to word many crimes euphemistically. As a lover of language in its specificity and extremity, and as a journalist who believes in reporting what actually happens in society, Toyn finds this outrageous. “What are we going to say, rape doesn’t exist?”
Yeah, the same crap that's been started with Youtube and has exploded on Tiktok... everything must be advertiser friendly, so instead of "suicide" it's "unalive" now.
As societies, we have to force Google, YouTube, Tiktok and all the other algorithm-based rankers to fully disclose their ranking criteria as a first step, and then actually discuss as a society if we want to force the rankers to rank differently.
A lot of the ranking "criteria" is essentially something like "if Alice likes foo and bar and bob likes foo, then Bob will probably also like bar, so show him bar first".
A lot of properties, like the emergence of conspiracy theories or social media fueling political polarization, are a direct consequence of such rules working as intended. One doesn't need an explicit is_flat_earth_related variable to still contribute to the spread of flat earth videos and show them to those who are the most vulnerable.
And how do you fully disclose the ranking criteria? It's a giant pile of evershifting programs. And even if you disclosed them, that wouldn't mean normal people would understand them. Just like barely anyone understands exactly how your favourite filesystem works in the fully disclosed Linux kernel.
> and then actually discuss as a society if we want to force the rankers to rank differently.
Just don't use the services that seem to have rankings policies you disagree with. No need to drag other people in with your own choices 'as a society'.
'As a society' we already make laws about what's legal and what's illegal, and there's also some vague consensus (but not universally shared) about what's perhaps legal but still in bad taste.
But 'as a society' we don't decide on every last thing. People should have their freedom as much as possible, the freedom to make their own decisions.
Do you want to disclose exactly how you make your decisions when you are voting on HN comments? Can you even do that?
A 'society' that makes all the decisions for everyone is totalitarian.
Usually by outsourcing it to some government regulatory agency
> that wouldn't mean normal people would understand
That’s fine, some people would and be able to explain it to others who care (minimizing the likelihood of misinformation since it would be easy to verify)
> understands exactly how your favourite filesystem works in the fully disclosed Linux kernel
Because it doesn’t really matter. Almost all people are entirely unaffected by this and have no reason to care
> Just don't use the services that seem to have rankings policies you disagree with.
Right.. doesn’t work with oligopolies/monopolies. Do you think Bing is much better? No? Well..that’s that.
> Right.. doesn’t work with oligopolies/monopolies. Do you think Bing is much better? No? Well..that’s that.
Barrier to entry have never been lower. Both over time, and also compared to most other industries.
If you don't like any of the offerings on the market, perhaps your tastes are just not wildly shared? (And if they are, but underserved, that's a lucrative niche for a new company!)
No, the barriers to entry in this case are extremely high. Higher or about as high as they ever were.
You’d be trying to compete against products into the development of which two of the biggest global corporations have invested billions over the years. Eve MS itself could barely dent Google’s market share…
Exactly. Many jurisdictions removed it from the books decades ago. Its exact definitions were always problematic. Now it is more often described as one end of a s-assault continuum.
I don't see what benefit the distinction brings. The meaning is inherently identical to the meaning of sexual assault. The fact there's a legal distinction is irrelevant to the meaning of the words themselves. I'm not referring to a legal concept when I use the word "rape" and the legal definition—for polities that even have one—is irrelevant.
> I can't think of a serious reason why rape would have a different colloquial meaning than sexual assault.
It doesn't. But the reason for having two terms is so that there can be a legal term, "sexual assault", which people interpret as meaning "rape" despite the fact that it includes, and almost always refers to, very different behavior. The point of the term is that the actual meaning is unrelated to the colloquial meaning. The purpose is to be uninformative.
It's the same reason that "human trafficking" is legally defined as "prostitution". It sounds like slavery, which is good for the reputations of police and prosecutors, but if you look at prosecutions, they're effectively all made against women who are accused of "trafficking" themselves.
As local newspapers across the country have collapsed, there are almost no dedicated court reporters left. That's a problem because important cases in the public interest aren't being covered. It's not clear how to fix this. The courts aren't streamed (in fact you can't take a photo in one else you'll go to prison), and for fairness we probably don't want that. Citizen journalists exist but have a patchy record at best. There are very complex restrictions on reporting and if you make the wrong details public you can and will go to jail for it. Publicly funded court reporting? Governments aren't keen on that either.
There's a very good database https://www.bailii.org/ that hides itself from Google. But that doesn't have everything, just the most important cases.
> There are very complex restrictions on reporting
These badly need reforming for the 21st century, but, like a lot of the courts system, which is simultaneously inefficient and badly funded, nobody's going to touch it.
It's quite a useful (and fascinating) site and I've browsed it a few times before. But a limitation is that it just has copies of written judgements. Contemporaneous reporting of trials, particularly criminal trials, can give quite a different insight, especially for those cases which are not as high profile as those which go to the Old Bailey.
> Now, said Toyn, there was only one court reporter left in the UK with a conscience: Tristan Kirk at the Evening Standard. Kirk has been running a long campaign challenging the single justice procedure, which fast-tracks low-level criminal cases through magistrates courts with such speed and lack of transparency that the Magistrates’ Association recently called for its reform.
And has just won this year's Paul Foot Award for it:
This article uses the term "court reporter" which in the US may actually refer to a court's stenographer, which does not appear to be the same thing this article is talking about.
Yeah, I would have taken this to mean the court stenographer absent reading further.
This is really just a story about a broader lack of local news reporting because no one wants to pay for it in general. My small town had a rather good local newspaper back in the day (which I subscribed to) but it was a labor of love and the publisher became ill so now there's nothing unless it's sufficient news that it hits the big city paper about 50 miles away or at least some regional website.
Thanks for further clarification - I got downvoted initially, was a bit confusing, and I only made this parent comment because after reading the title I was hoping it would be about the impact of improvements to voice-to-text technology has had on the profession of court stenographers (the ones typing on those weird machines that look like they're straight out of the 80's). This was also an interesting read though.
That would have been my assumption as well just reading the headline. To which my reaction would have been "Good enough for government work" for a court proceeding?
> “People don’t want to talk about this,” the barrister said gloomily. “It doesn’t sell.”
People have long talked about the difference between "the public interest" and "what the public are interested in", but I think it's becoming particularly acute with regard to what the public will pay for.
Social media and lately AI make this worse, too. People will be content consuming only the highest-octane global court reporting (US Supreme Court; I know far too much about this for a Brit) and the rest will just be .. fake news.
We pay attention to the Supreme Court (and Circuit Courts) in the US because those cases set legally binding precedent.
Cases at both levels are well covered in the media with open access to dockets via PACER - and people should be paying attention to the results of these cases because they have real impact on the law.
On the other hand, District Court cases do not set precident.
Friend was doing the journalism course in Darlington in the late 1970s. It included mandatory court reporting. Good training for future newshounds.
Imagine their joy when one of their own was present in the dock, for a drunk-and-disorderly before the local magistrate. Fully reported, blandly, blindly, doubtless to much dismay for the student concerned.
Other people's interests can be boring to you, that's fine.
I mean own interests are "other people's interests" to other people, and I am sure many of them find many of mine boring and perhaps stupid. And I don't begrudge them.
https://courtnewsuk.co.uk/
From the article:
> If Toyn puts up a story about rape or sexual assault, using any of those words, the story will be buried by Google. To ensure his stories remain visible, he has to word many crimes euphemistically. As a lover of language in its specificity and extremity, and as a journalist who believes in reporting what actually happens in society, Toyn finds this outrageous. “What are we going to say, rape doesn’t exist?”