While editors at news organizations debated whether to publish the graphic photos of Saddam’s sons — and whether to post editor’s warnings — one major news site had no such debate: Google News. That’s because the site has no editors and is run entirely by computer algorithms. As a result, since some sites chose to run the photos, Friday the lead image on Google News was one of the graphic photos of the two sons (taken from www.islam-online.net).
This points out one of the pitfalls of having a news site run entirely by computers — computers don’t have the ability to make news judgment calls on what’s appropriate and what isn’t. One could argue that Google News computers are taking the pulse of editors around the world and deciding whether to run the photos based on their decisions — but since we don’t know the algorithms it’s hard to say how accurate that is. Moreover, Google News didn’t put any editor’s warning on the site about the graphic nature of the photo and force readers to click to see the photo — something that many news sites did.
(Yahoo News, by the way, which does have human editors but runs most every wire photo, also led with the photo Friday, with no warning to viewers.)
