Google News Does Great Harm by Promoting Slopfarms as Legitimate News Sites
Helping the Web recover? Undoing the damage? That won't be done by Google. Google is in fact trying to become a "market leader" in slop, hence it is an active participant in this problem. It has a conflict of interest.
Slopfarms are sites which are 100% LLM slop or 'mildly edited' LLM slop. Pretty much every new page in such sites (or domains) should be presumed "fake", i.e. something spewed out by some machine that lacks comprehension of what it spews out, i.e. it lacks any real value.
Here are a couple of slopfarms that Google News is promoting today when one looks for "Linux" news:
This is the sister slopfarm: (notice similarity; the image is also slop)
Any such slopfarm contributes to "webspam" - not a new problem. It helps distract from the real articles on this topic. By doing so it also lessens the incentive for future such (original) articles. It's basically an attack on Linux-centric journalism.
We've also just noticed this real news site saying "according to GBHackers News."
It's not the first time we see real sites citing slopfarms actively promoted by Google News.
Here's a slopfarm that Google News isn't promoting but Google Search does:
It's just more of the usual scaremongering and it's likely generated by a Microsoft LLM.
Slop on the Web is a real problem. One way to make it go away (faster) it to call out the main culprits until their morale sinks and they quit operating. We don't feed them, we just take screenshots of them. █