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Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

Why has the title been changed from the original "How the Trump-Russia Data Machine Games Google to Fool Americans"?

OP here. I didn't submit this because of politics, but because the validity of Google's search engine results is something that may concern the community. The takeaway here might be that until Google does something about this, you are being overtaken by the competitor with more recent updates, spread through a number of online properties. For instance: Hashicorp could try to improve traffic by moving all their product blogs to their respective domains. I'll add that despite Google's attention to Black hat SEO throughout the years, identifying these types of affiliations is an open problem, perhaps not that critical for a functioning search engine (until gaming starts to skew the results). So maybe that's somehing we'll have to take into consideration for years to come.

Fair enough. Underneath the political slant it sounds like there is a good SEO article trying to get out.

Because it implies that Trump and Russia are somehow parts of the same evil rightwing-shilling machine. That meme is getting ridiculous.

Given that it's under active investigation, "meme" might be wrong word.

Like WMDs were under active investigation, with agencies checking on them, the NYT, CNN and other "serious" outlets informing the public about them, and even a whole war (and tons of lives lost, not to mention a trillion dollars spent) was justified on their presence?

Yeah, "BS excuse of large part of the establishment for their own incompetence and disconnect" would be a better moniker.

Which investigation?

Oh you mean the investigation that hasn't found one shred of real evidence after spending untold millions basically as a Trump witch-hunt?

there sure are a lot of very vocal people who seem to wish it was a meme.... hmmm....

Yeah, I've flagged the story.

It was ridiculous to begin with.

How about accepting that a good 20% of the population are religious republican nuts, and a good 20%+ were not particularly feeling like voting for the established candidates once more (because of lost jobs, prospects, the feeling of a country changing in ways the don't like, etc), but rather vote Trump and see the world burn? And that they were distributed in a winning way, even if some "full democratic" states had a few million more Clinton supporters?

Whether Russians leaked the emails (which is quite unlikely), that is inconsequential as far as the vote is concerned. The momentum was there from a year before, and Trump had marched on and on already (not to mention few even heard or cared about those).

Now, if Trump's circle tried to make some bucks with Russian deals (like e.g. Bush Jr. made with Saudi deals and connections before and after the elections), that's something else.

The most hopeful thing from a Trump presidency (since obviously in internal affairs he would be a republican wrecking ball) was whether he would stop the warmongering and interventionism that's been a constant for decades. And of course, established Democrats and Republicans only push him towards not doing that, to keep the military machine going, and even applaud him whenever he puts his marching boots on.

There doesn't have to be an organized conspiracy between them for there to be a problem. There is a suggestion that both have used similar tactics to gain power [1] and that this is the kind of thing showing up in the Google results.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation#A_World_Wit...

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