From our SLIS pres:
Here's a story that's making the rounds. Rock the Vote wanted to commemorate Martin Luther King Day on its website. Unfortunately its webmaster chose to highlight one of the top-ranked Google search results without evaluating the website. The website, MartinLutherKing.org, is actually hate literature from white supremacist group StormFront.
The authors of this blog post do discuss what they call Google's "democracy algorithm," the idea that we vote with our clicks. But aside from advising "hate-opponents" to avoid "misguided links," the authors largely ignore the information literacy issue that supercedes the Google issue.
2 comments:
Right now your link to martinlutherking dot org is boosting that site's pagerank. If you deactivate your link or add the rel="nofollow" to the anchor tag, you'll stop doing that without changing the meaning of your post.
The FLIF blog is all about freedom of information. This means that we promote the idea that you can read what ever you want for whatever reason. However, upon further investigation, it was decided that some of the views of the website in question may promote the censorship of the truth by promoting false notions about non-white people. Because of this, it was decided that a middle ground needed to be found: we did remove the live link, but we encourage people to visit the website if they want to learn more about what the white supremacists groups are saying.
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