Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesn’t Like
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
As I've cited often:
> "We predicted that our manipulation would produce a very small effect, if any, but that’s not what we found. On average, we were able to shift the proportion of people favouring any given candidate by more than 20 per cent overall and more than 60 per cent in some demographic groups. Even more disturbing, 99.5 per cent of our participants showed no awareness that they were viewing biased search rankings – in other words, that they were being manipulated."
Ref: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...
What scares me more is when organizations claim to be impartial, like Google, Facebook, or the Times. Claiming to be impartial is claiming to represent absolute truth.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/06/10/google-s... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3785801/Is-Google-ma... http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/google-denies-manipulating... https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2017/05/30/google-gave-hill...
I checked it myself during the time and Breitbart article is entirely correct.
because "Biased" isn't really the term that Breitbart deserves. "liars", "frauds", "propaganda" are closer.
1. He's tried this claim before - http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/google-2016-e...
2. He has previous with Google which makes him egregiously biased against them - https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/one-mans-fight-wit...
3. Sputnik News is a Russian government controlled news agency and therefore somewhat unreliable in the best of cases
etc. etc. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Epstein's institute turned out to be Russian funded.
Disclaimer, as a European I only loosely followed the election and our local media was very much pro Hillary. I had the image everyone concluded her presidency was in the bag and the election was a mere formality, in fact Trump's campaign was described as an elaborate trolling attempt until winning the republican nomination.
However the results (with a good deal of hindsight) seems to show the internet/media's ability to influence opinions is much smaller then they predict.
On the contrary, it shows that it can swing an election even in just the last few days - witness the orgiastic coverage from the press of Comey's -complete- non-announcement about Weiner's laptop. That swung a significant number of undecideds to Trump in the days following.
(And this is ignoring the previous year of "BUT HER EMAILS" coverage that was complete bullshit whilst ignoring the actually important things that Trump was saying and doing.)
(Also ignoring the Russian troll army promoting Trump on Twitter etc. because we don't have enough details on what they did yet.)
On the contrary. The internet & media's ability to influence opinions was on full display this last election. Trump won because of the internet, not despite it.
https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebook-won-trump-election-no...
https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-the-trump-campaign-buil...
Yes in some circles Clinton was viewed as a foregone conclusion, but those weren't the circles that voted for Trump.
They were wildly successful at influencing opinion, just not in the directions assumed. The media narrative doesn't attempt (or refuses) to acknowledge the non-reductive motivation and positions of people that disagree with the implied national status quo of their coverage.
I still maintain that the major news organs would have stopped Trump's candidacy in it's tracks if they had focused campaign coverage around concepts of governance, civics and leadership instead of the horse race and clickbait hot topics.
Or any of the many times he stiffed his suppliers. Or when he defrauded hundreds of people with Trump University.
Or, y'know, any one of a hundred times they should have reported on him properly rather than ruffling his hair and calling him a playful scamp.
[Edited to clarify that Trump didn't start the Birther bullshit since that was 2008-09 and he didn't get involved until 2011-12]
> A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.
Please note that the study I cited was about search results and not the media coverage. I'd suggest that the media has shot themselves in the foot with the wild coverage of trivialities over the past couple decades. When every Republican is a racist/sexist/*phobe/bigot, then the terms lose meaning. Seriously, before McCain was "honorable" this year, he was a warmonger in 2008, and the savior from Bush in 2000.
Now we have the media flipping out because Trump has two scoops of ice cream (back in May) and because Melania wore high heels (this week).
At this point, most of the media has the attention span of a meth-addled chipmunk.. and too many of them have the depth to match. Serious discussions are behind them.
Not an SEO guy but think I remember reading something on that.
So why would giving points for including links to their own social network (that ultimately didn't go anywhere) be unsavory if it's treated essentially the same as others?
My guess is this more the tone of what was implied rather than "If a publisher didn’t put a +1 button on the page, its search results would suffer." (Although substantially the outcome may be the same).
Go to google, get google's view on things. Go to facebook, get facebook's view on things. Go to X, get X's view on things. Powerful companies using their influence on the media is business-as-usual. Regardless of the moral position in this incident, journalism has always been under such pressures - it's not being 'chilled'.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias
The whole article is worth reading.
A good example would be the New York press. Most of their papers, of which there were many, were owned/operated by political parties - according to the documentary series called, simply, New York.
I suspect your vision of these principles is subjected to some sort of bias? I'm not sure what it is called. It might be survivorship bias, or maybe confirmation bias? I don't want to speculate, as that's not my domain. However, I don't actually think those principles have ever really existed - as a general rule. Again, there are examples of such, but it doesn't appear to be the norm.
If you get bored, go down to your local library and have them dig you out some old microfiche. This is nothing new. Censorship and biased reporting have been a known problem and already is the norm.
To be clear, I agree it is a problem. It's a horrible problem. However, it's not new and it's aleady normalized. That's why I constantly speak out to support the freedom of expression. That's why I recently, in HN, spoke out to support the Nazis right to express themselves and why I decried Google taking away their domain name. I don't like Nazis. I like free speech. Nazis are pretty deplorable, after all.
As for censorship, it comes in various forms. Soft censorship is most common, in the Western world. I can relate a time when it happened to me, if you want. I was a freelance journalist back in my university days.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/civikowl/clbbiejji...
It does make me question this, however. How are you certain you're not introducing your own biases with it? Or, perhaps not even biases of your own?
Sometimes bias exists simply by virtue of externalities. An example might be that, when differentiated by economic ability, black people don't actually do more drugs than white people - though crime stats would indicate otherwise. The difference is their neighborhoods are policed more heavily and the biases in enforcement. Notably, even black officers may be biased in their enforcement.
It really seems like a tough nut to crack. I'm a mathematician, not a social scientist. I don't actually have any idea how to fix this.
We may introduce some bias through our algorithm, insofar as the weights we assign various factors favor one type of article over another. But we haven't used a training set yet (which is where ingrained biases would be factored in) so the algorithm is fairly simple for now.
I agree with you this isn't an easy problem to crack. We wanted to see if (a) there's interest in a solution and (b) reservations about our approach before investing more. So this is exactly the kind of feedback that's helpful. Thank you again.
I'm not heavy into the soft sciences. I'm a mathematician (complete with Ph.D.!) if that'll help you? I'm not sure if you're open source. To be truly objective, I may actually need to see that.
I'm very much retired - and willing to sign both an NDA and a non-compete, if you want. If you don't want, I'm not sure how much I can offer other than observations. It will also take a bunch of research to the methodology, but I'm not actually doing anything better.
I'm going to approach this from assumptions, and then thoughts based on those, and you can correct me if I'm wrong.
* It grades based (purely?) on linked sources.
* It grades those sources based on their host's bias and credibility ranking (sourced by mediabiasfactcheck.com?).
Given those, the extension's rating of an "objectively good" outlet and an "objectively bad" outlet referencing themselves in a followup article would differ only based on some databases credibility ranking?
If the user only trusted this extension, I could as an outlet easily trick it by linking in external sources such as quackblog.biz and truthiness.zone, while decrying a link from biasedrag.com to present the veneer of offering counterpoints.
I applaud the effort, but I don't think looking at sources for news works, as outside of science news, they are usually the first to post on things, and thus the only "news" linking to sources, are second-hand outlets or blogs.
The first reuters article I tried for example didn't get a rating: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-amazon-mining/braz...
Without transparency, you as the extension author becomes the central arbiter of news, which is IMHO more dangerous than a status quo of outlets.
A lot of news that is factual, unbiased, etc don't require a counterpoint or opposing views as a fact at its core is a fact. A lot of topics are of course aggregates where things get muddy, and statistics involve a lot of assumptions.
I like the idea, but I'm unsure of the possibility of the venture.
Your initial assumptions are correct on the inputs to the algorithm.
>the extension's rating of an "objectively good" outlet and an "objectively bad" outlet referencing themselves in a followup article would differ only based on some databases credibility ranking?
I may not understand your question. But there's an algorithm that factors in count of sources, diversity of sources, political leaning of sources, credibility of sources, and (soon) author depth of experience in that topic. So it's more than simply referencing a database. Does that give you more confidence in what the rating or not enough?
>If the user only trusted this extension, I could as an outlet easily trick it by linking in external sources such as quackblog.biz and truthiness.zone, while decrying a link from biasedrag.com to present the veneer of offering counterpoints.
True. You'd have to link to sites that are rated by Mediabiasfactcheck (MBFC) so you can't link to random stuff and get a high rating. And if the author was trying to game the rating at least they did decry the points from an alternate viewpoint; that's better than what happens with the news today.
MBFC is not perfect of course but their methodology follows the Fact-checkers’ Code of Principles developed by Poynter Institute so is generally consistent and high quality.
>I applaud the effort, but I don't think looking at sources for news works, as outside of science news, they are usually the first to post on things, and thus the only "news" linking to sources, are second-hand outlets or blogs.
Fair point on breaking news. We wanted to first solve for non-breaking-news (i.e. issue centric), which do have sources and those range widely in quality. i.e. most things discussed on HN are not breaking news but deeper news. On breaking news we plan to have some calculations based on source info like tweets/posts/videos as well as author's expertise in that topic. What do you think?
The Reuters article has no links hence we cannot rate it. Not great but maybe helping people to get accustom to looking at sources, or lack there of, is good in and of itself?
>Without transparency, you as the extension author becomes the central arbiter of news, which is IMHO more dangerous than a status quo of outlets.
Agreed. I'll update our FAQ to be clearer on how we do the rating. (Just rolled out yesterday so a bit slow on the documentation; sorry). I hope we can make clear that there is no objective arbiter of bias but rather such tools can help you get smarter about evaluating the news you read.
>A lot of news that is factual, unbiased, etc don't require a counterpoint or opposing views as a fact at its core is a fact. A lot of topics are of course aggregates where things get muddy, and statistics involve a lot of assumptions.
Agreed on both points, though I might counter that there's no such thing as unbiased news just because of topic selection and language used. Anyway, our algorithm doesn't require that counter-points be considered though it does evaluate that. So an article with high quality sources that lean one way politically can score ok but we'll notify the user of this lean preference.
We are unlikely to be able to say a claim is true or false, or that statistics are selectively being used to prove a point. That's pretty tough to do with an algorithm. But maybe the counterpoint sourcing can at least hint at if the author has considered this?
>I like the idea, but I'm unsure of the possibility of the venture.
We wanted to see if the idea has merit and your sentence is exactly what I was looking for. So thank you and thank you for all the feedback. As for the venture... I hear you, we have more to do. Please let me know of any other comments. I'm at amoorthy at civikowl dot com.
I'm not particularly fussed over nazism getting a raw deal in the free speech debate. It's not the 'thin end of the wedge' when an ideology that caused the deaths of over 50M people in a mere half-decade is verboten. That's not a particularly 'slippery slope' to slide down. Nazism has had its run, and it proved to be the single worst ideology in the history of humankind. If someone thinks that perhaps the Nazis had some good ideas, fine, argue for those... but grab a new name. After all, if it's the ideas that matter, then losing the branding shouldn't be a problem.
I don't like what they had to say, and I'm not white so they pretty much hate me, but the freedom of expression extends to even stupid people. Freedom of speech shouldn't be about just the absolute barest considerations of legal protections, it should be a social ideal.
Yeah, the Nazis hate me. Yeah, they pretty much suck in every way. I kinda like being able to say they suck and I really don't care that they think the same about me. I care when it becomes a credible threat. Well, slander is not acceptable so long as truth is an assertive defense.
We are probably not going to agree about this. That's okay, I know I hold a very strong view. It doesn't bother me that they speak. It just makes them easier to identify.
That is, in my opinion, the key point.
These days it's mostly "racist" views, which may or may not actually be racist. For instance, the old leftist view of isolationism and protectionism as a way to defend workers rights worldwide is repressed as racist because it advocates closed borders (for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with ethnic or religious differences, but to prevent worker competition from crushing wages).
But various ideas that have somehow acquired protected status are being censor-protected against criticism as well. From religions, quite a few individuals, and even events. In some ways quite successfully.
Since I regularly stay in Paris, for instance, I can tell you that the constant riots and car burnings that were reported for a short while in 2011 are still going strong and it is almost absurdly normal for riots to occur in all the large cities in France, with constant violence, victims and all you'd expect from riots, except it's now a constant part of life. I even hear that the same happens in large neighboring cities, like Brussels. It's beyond absurd how this is reported, reminiscent of how anti-government actions are reported in places like the middle east or Africa. The issue is that, as absurd as it sounds, there is a large-scale mostly-immigrant uprising against the French state constantly happening in France. Reading French or international press, I find this idea absurd, and yet, you can easily go out and see this happen near where I normally stay (as long as you're male).
But this is obviously the new normal, and it mostly makes you wonder what is happening. The government, for it's part, has actually published that they're indeed doing this. Again, it's utterly surreal that this is normal in Western Europe.
My question is, I can't tell what your views are by your post. I tried, and I can't really tell. I can't truly infer them, either. So, do you support this way of thinking? What are your personal views on the freedom of expression?
For those not from the area, the ACLU has gone to bat to ensure that people representing the Nazi Party (of America, I think) had the right to march down predominately Jewish neighborhood roads.
I don't think it is clear, but I really don't like Nazis. I do, however, like the freedoms to speak, assemble, and believe - I like those more than I dislike Nazis.
(This is kind of hard to articulate.)
That said, I see how it's being used. And I was fine with that actually, until I really saw for myself it's being used to mask a lot of human misery in western Europe. And why ? Only reason I can come up with is political reasons, politicians attempting to "prove" that they're doing (a lot) better than they actually are.
As in I would be fine with censorship of some extremist viewpoints, by responsible parties. Unfortunately if you cannot trust things like West European governments with this power, who can you trust to censor ?
So no, I am very much against almost any censorship. It is not reasonable the way it's being used and we shouldn't have it.
This opinion is not widely shared in Western Europe.
... why in hell not? Google is not a government-supplied service. They're a private company. How can you be for blanket freedom of speech, yet restrict a private party from expressing themselves? Google already curates your experience for you - see the 'google bubble'. How come blanket-freedom-of-speech advocates don't complain about that? It's not like Google's decisions jail anyone or impound cars or similar.
For that matter, why don't blanket-freedom-of-speech advocates complain about Apple's 'walled garden'?
> that's a matter for the courts
That's a terrible way to go for social justice as a first port-of-call. The courts are not particularly available for poor or uneducated people. And in the US, public defenders have to be extremely careful about not touching political cases or they can lose their funding. The courts are overloaded, slow, expensive, time-consuming, confusing, and often enough don't 'get it right'.
Freedom of expression is more than just a matter of meeting the barest legal requirements. It's an ideal, to be aspired to and inspired by.
Google didn't just curate content they linked or hosted, they took a domain name away without due process. It's obvious that you're okay with that. I'm not.
Party X then willingly signs on to a business relationship with corp Y, who has terms of service that have an entire line item stating that they can reject applications at corp Y's sole discretion. Right here, this is your due process. Corp Y then exercises their rights as per the ToS - they didn't lean on anyone (which is what this thread was originally about), they were exercising the rights granted to them by the business contract. Party X agreed to these terms. Party X is at fault here for not doing their due diligence with their business partners - something they really should have paid attention to, given their situation at the time.
Regarding the 60 days, this is not corp Y applying extrajudicial punishment. It's a matter of 'falling between the cracks'. ICANN rules set this 60 days[1], not corp Y, and this 60-day limitation info is also available in the ToS.
Google offered a service with terms, Stormer accepted it, Google exercised their rights as per the terms, and the 60 days is an accidental by-product of interaction with the overseeing body's rules, not a 'fuck you' from Google.
A marker of a chilling dystopian future, this domain cancellation ain't.
[1] https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/text-2012-02-25-en
I'm not sure you understand what freedom of expression really is. I'm not sure that you value it like I do. I'm not sure if you have the same views of the right of the individual as I do.
That's okay. I accept your views. I think you're fundamentally wrong, as I've demonstrated in this sub-thread. To put this in perspective, I still respect you - even though we fundamentally disagree.
That's the root of freedom of expression. You'll note that I don't tend to refer to it as Freedom of Speech, or the First Amendment. I speak of it as a social goal. I speak of it as something to aspire towards.
If you're curious, the EFF and ACLU both agree with me.
I need to be very, very clear. I don't like Nazis. I like the freedom to express myself, and any infringement on that is an infringement on my future liberties. Some things, such as credible threats of violence, are worth suppressing or penalizing. Others? Not so much.
Sort of related, I am sorry that your comments have been moderated so poorly. I had nothing to do with it and, though I don't agree with you, I respect you, as a human, enough to pay attention to what you've said and to respond in kind.
Without the liberty to express ourselves, most other enumerated rights lose value. In all but the rarest of cases, I will support the ideal of liberty.
If you want to disagree further, this is not the place for it. I'm freely available at uninvolved@outlook.com - or we can pick a site of your choosing and keep it public.
If we're being honest, then frankly, this is patronising. Just because I don't 100% agree with you is no reason to claim that I don't know what I'm talking about. This is a cancer in American political dialogue, that everything is 0 or 100%, and everyone can be split into two camps, for and against.
> I'm not sure that you value it like I do.
This is more accurate. I'm actually strongly for freedom of expression. The difference between us is that I'm not a purist that thinks freedom of expression trumps any other human right.
The problem with the 'even the nazis!' stuff is that people end up acting on their beliefs. We know how nazis treated people, and have painful, painful evidence of that. And as I've said time and time again, if you think some of the stuff nazis had ideas about were right, then argue those ideas. Just don't use the brand.
Here's a clear example of where freedom of expression oversteps the bounds[1]. Bananas with nooses around them, directed at a black sorority at American University. "Let the courts deal with that" is nonsensical; blacks have a long tradition of the courts not working for them, particularly in the context of the lynchings that this action is supposed to invoke memories of. And even if you could find the culprit and eventually get it to the courts, all the culprit has to do with your ideal is show that they weren't threatening to actually do something, instead just making a joke. So even though the banana-hangers never actually intended to lynch someone, they've gotten entertainment from making other people scared. The problem with free-speech purism is that it pretends that dog-whistle politics[2] doesn't exist, that there's no subtextual threats - something has to be an actual threat before action is required... but of course people are not that stupid. The banana-hangers here are analogous to the nazi protestors - they're referencing earlier atrocities to make people scared and get their way, while not openly directing threats at specific individuals.
Basically, the ideals you should have for your culture should include "don't make other people miserable just for your entertainment". Freedom-of-expression purism is a simplistic ideal that requires throwing out a lot of common sense. And look at it - even the country that has in its constitution that the government can't restrict freedom of speech... has lots of restrictions on freedom of speech. Classified information. 'Free speech zones'. Private details of others. Medical records. No hiring limitations based on race, gender, or religion. No sexual harrassment.
Similarly, the EFF and the ACLU should support Google's decision to reject Stormer's application[3]. Google hasn't stopped Stormer from expressing themselves outside of google's network. Yes, there's the 60-day issue, but as I explained and referenced above, that's a 'slipped through the cracks' problem, not vigilante justice. In any case, a 60-day abeyance is nothing compared to the waits required for "take it to the courts". If someone has your stuff, it's going to take a long time to get the issue to a court, and often longer still until you actually get your stuff back.
In short, freedom of expression is an ideal, but it's not the only ideal. Managing a complex human society requires more than simplistic ideals. And as a simple proof of that, the denizens of the Stormer wilfully engage in tactics to silence other people with fear. They are working against this ideal of freedom of expression that you are so passionate about, and have an effect in real terms, not philosophical ones. By protecting their expression (and protecting them from the consequences of their actions) you enable them to suppress others' expression. An own-goal.
Re: the downvoting, don't worry about it. I know it's not you because you can't downvote responses to your own comments. But even if it was, it's just a few downvotes. The real problem is with the way HN ghosts your comment if you get just a single disagreement on balance. But it's been that way forever and it ain't gonna change.
> If you want to disagree further, this is not the place for it
I don't really understand this point - HN is a general interest forum, where political debate is welcomed. I prefer to keep these debates public, but don't really see the point of moving to a different forum.
[1] http://defendernetwork.com/news/national/akas-american-unive...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics
[3] In fact the EFF does support Google's right to choose, but then talks about the dangers of it philosophically. I couldn't find any ACLU opinion on the Stormer issue. SPLC, another civil rights outfit, isn't a fan of the Stormer though.
How many deaths were caused by religion? People simply believing that God plainly told them to do certain things (It's God's will).
Shall we ban "climate deniers" too? Imagine the death from climate change? Animal rights activists?
slippery slope. Been dealt with it by SCOTUS perfectly
Note also that communism is an ideology that is broader than the Soviets or the Chinese of the 50s and 60s. Modern-day communist activists don't go around trying to relive the 'glory days' of that era; they don't wave the hammer-and-sickle flag. As I said elsewhere, if you think that the ideas of the nazis are worth pursuing, then argue for the ideas. Just get a new name. After all, if it really is the ideas that are important rather than the branding, they should stand on their own.
You can argue for fascism without specifically identifying with the Nazis, just like you can argue for communism without specifically identifying with the Soviets.
As for modern-day, pro-Communist activists being violent you need look no further than Antifa. According to the Washington Post, Antifa consists of "predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists" [1]. While Antifa is not exclusively Communist, a large portion describe themselves as such. And they are violent regardless of their self-justification: the Atlantic, "The Rise of the Violent Left" [2]; BBC, "Antifa: Left-wing militants on the rise" [3]; Politico, "FBI, Homeland Security warn of more ‘antifa’ attacks" [4].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/the-ris...
[3] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40930831
[4] http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/01/antifa-charlottesvi...
The only difference with the way society treats neo-nazis and antifa is that libertarians don't run around saying "I defend antifa's right to freedom of expression". Referencing antifa here isn't much of a counterpoint, because they don't get treated any better.
> While Antifa is not exclusively Communist, a large portion describe themselves as such.
This is a categorisation error. When Antifa commits their violence, they're not doing it to promote communism, nor are they primarly communist.
And as I said above, communism is a broad ideology - you can be for communism and still despise the hammer-and-sickle flag. Not to mention that modern-day communists don't think that Stalin 'got it right', whereas modern-day nazis do think that Hitler 'got it right'.
> I must have missed the part where Antifa gets a free pass. Antifa, like nazies, is a label used like a bugbear. Most often it's seen by ideological opponents who use it to discredit gatherings of protestors: "Oh, there were $LABEL there, therefore everyone there is $LABEL". Every time Antifa is mentioned in the media, it's as a negative. No-one seriously gets an Antifa onto talk shows to discuss their views, and they're painted as thugs and professional miscreants.
If you believe that antifa mentions in the media are negative then you clearly are not watching CNN, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, CBS or PBS or reading mainstream press. At most a couple of writers/contributors tip toe-ed into "we should not really be encouraging antifa" over last week or so just to be met with screams of "False equivalency".
I'm not, however, talking about traditional media here. Instead I'm talking about Google, CloudFlare, GoDaddy, Twitter, etc. Youtube demonetizing what Google considers right wing while letting communist garbage stay up.
And yes, that includes Nazis. Once you say "OK, but not them!", you no longer have a principal. More like a strategy.
So, maybe there is hope? Maybe it isn't hopeless, so much as it is a battle that can't be won, merely sustained. They say the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. I suspect they are right. Also, I might just be imagining that quote, come to think of it. If they don't say it, they should.
I've been the lone voice (of reason, I'd like to think) in many a crowd, and unfortunately a social environ wherein the immediate reaction is basically an immune response against the errant ’fool’ is both typical and deeply sub-optimal.
I dispute that he was "pushed" since his views were already in that direction (and the MRA overlap therein.)
Have you heard of a man called Rupert Murdoch?
"Owners don't bias news reporting" is an ideal, not an expectation. Pointing out an ideal case isn't appropriate for describing the common case. Biased news in newspapers have been with us for as long as there have been newspapers. Pretending it's something new, and that influence from outside the paper is something new, is just naive (perhaps 'wilfully ignorant') to the extreme.
Second, why isn't this an expectation. Obviously we can't make news orgs be completely unbiased, but we can push for more transparency. Heck, even breaking up monopolies would allow for more owners with more nuanced points of view getting prime time in each smaller organization.
For comparison, consider what Clearchannel Media did to US radio stations. (basically it turned everything into a homogeneous top-25 repeat station)
Second, where did I condone biased news? Where did I say it was okay? I explicitly specified that I was talking outside the moral dimension on this in my first comment.
It's rather annoying that someone who is linking me to fallacy websites is themselves putting words into my mouth, creating a strawman to attack instead of dealing with what I'm actually saying.
It was this line that got to me:
> s/chilling/humdrum/
Bias is pervasive. Has been forever. Maybe always will be.
But I still refuse to consider it "humdrum".
Perhaps I just have no sense of humor ;)
It's about using their market share in two businesses (search/news and ads) to force their way into social networking. ie the threat that if Forbes didn't play ball with Google+, search placement (ie traffic) and hence ad revenue would dry up.
And honestly, we should not trust something funded by X to be unbiased towards X anyway, that's just common sense.
Unless you have not noticed a lot of news are being censored systematically on HN when they touch certain topics, some of them is giving SV/IT a bad PR, or poor work conditions in IT , political POV...
references: http://hckrnews.com/ (use all button) http://hnrankings.info/
There's definitely solid evidence of censorship, at some point I'm going to collect the main points into a blog post.
It's generally considered bad taste and hypocritical to preach something and not abide to what you preach yourself. In my country a lot of media people are for example writing about embracing immigration and slander anyone who disagrees but studies have shown that the people who work in these media outlets does not live in areas affected negatively by increased immigration to a large extent.
There is a reason why people hate that kind of shit and that's because it stinks and is used by people in power to shit on people without power.
Can you provide some examples?
What would be bad is if he had specifically asked or funded them to make that post. But you can't blindly assume malintent and hypothesize that Google has been funding New America so they can bash on other monopolies.
There is no proof of that, that's just you assuming the worst.
Lots of people who dislike immigration also do not live in areas affected negatively by it. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't consider their views, although it may influence how much weight we want to put towards them when making policy.
Unless, they of course, create their own media organisations which is happening in every western country and is the core reason for all this "fake news" which is a term ironically often most used by old mass-media that themselves heavily rely on half-truths at best.
(And that article was about Google effectively threatening to lower search rankings on publishers who didn't add +1 buttons, which is a similar complaint.)
I'm glad that gizmodo is covering free speech (I believe they're left leaning in general). Just make sure to verify all the claims made in any politically biased publication.
> The text of the post is reproduced in full below, with some minor formatting modifications. Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted.
Now that I check back, I notice that the gizmodo version also changed all of Damore's bullet-point list items to be singly-indented, where in the original many of them were doubly-indented. It's hard to imagine any motive for doing that intentionally, but it's what one would expect if Gizmodo got the text without its original formatting.
Dude... no. The "most parsimonious assumption" when someone says they are reproducing something "with modifications" is that they are perfectly well aware what modifications were made, and they most likely made it themselves.
Like when someone tells you "don't open that box", a sane person doesn't conclude "ah, chances are good he has no idea what's in the box".
I strongly suspect I saw this happen in realtime in late 2013 and early 2014 when Snowden's documents were being disclosed every few weeks by The Guardian, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, etc.
I was curious how the story was being reported on and interpreted by the traditional (non-technical) media. I wanted a general sense of how well the "slow drip" strategy was working, if the original disclosures were being reported on with a reasonable accuracy, or even if anybody even cared at all. For about 8-10-ish months I made a habit of spending a few minutes each morning skimming the results of basic searches for "nsa", "snowden", etc on Google's main search as a simple /search?q=$term request, and again with the "Past 24 hours" and "Past week" features. I would also check the same search terms on Google News.
Most of the time it there were no surprises: e.g. The Post publishes an important document from Snowden's archive in a detailed article that attempts to explain the underlying tech to a general audience. The other large players in the traditional media quickly followup with articles that add a layer of indirection, cut out all the technical explanations that don't fit into a sound byte. It didn't take long for that process to devolve into lots of clickbait headlines for articles that generally lacked technical - or legal - details. My point here is that this process generally followed a fairly consistent process as the original disclosure diffused into clickbait.
However, on two (perhaps three?) occasions, I noticed a story still early in that process. I know at least one of those involved Google specifically. While chasing pointers back to the original disclosure article and opening a new browser window for for the usual test searches, I noticed Firefox was becoming annoyingly slow and leaking memory like it always did. After restarting the browser and reloading the test searches... every trace of the story was gone. The articles themselves became 404s a few minutes/hours later.
Unfortunately, I have no useful evidence. I was "just" informally skimming headlines to get a general sense of the reporting, so by the time I finally realized I should have been recording everything I had already missed the interesting stuff. It's hearsay, but I am very certain I saw articles suddenly vanish from Google search and Google news after restarting Firefox and pressing F5 on several tabs.
The good news is that strong brands are now dumping google Ads for more trustworthy sources, if Google's trust continues to erode they will eventually turn into a flea market for advertisement.
You heard it here first folks.
We actually had quite a nice thing going, and were indexed well in Google and other search engines. The community was growing and becoming vibrant.
Then, Google Places came out. Not only did they put their places listings at the top of all organic search results, they removed all traces of our site from their index. We couldn't even find our homepage by searching for it! Not even our company name --- it would literally come up no results, even news articles and content not hosted on our site was removed from the index if it had our name in it.
What really put salt in the wound, though, was the fact that it appeared Google had stolen our user data for their own places product. That's right, they actually took our information that we had painstakingly collected, cleaned, and verified (we had our own call center and would take updates from customers) and passed it off as their own.
How did I know this? Well, I had a few test accounts that were of completely fake businesses that accidentally made it to prod. They had funny names that would be impossible to exist in the real world. These businesses showed up in Google Places. I checked a few other listings that I knew had been updated by customers, one with a typo, and sure enough they were in places too.
Before this we had a good relationship with our Google rep because we used adwords on our site, and Google Analytics. Literally, over night they just stopped responding to us by e-mail and phone. We were cut off, and e-mails and requests to the company went to some robot customer service queue and were closed without being able to speak to anyone.
Our search referrer traffic was reduced to almost nothing, our Adsense account was closed, and the business eventually had to close. We considered trying to fight it legally, but after meeting with a lawyer and realizing the reality of the situation I left feeling completely defeated and jaded.
How many of these stories are out there? How many people have been silenced by Google, and won't or don't talk about it? You only hear about big time scandals in the news, but I can guarantee there's a huge long tail of destruction in their monopolistic wake.
The sad part is I'm forced to use Google products because they are just so big there aren't good alternatives. They are so far ahead. But whenever I do see some Google ad, or post by Larry or Eric about how they are doing god's work over there, curing cancer, working on self driving cars, guarding the world's information or resisting authoritarian, communist governments, I ask myself: are they really that different? Who are they kidding? Maybe they are just so out of touch with the realities of what really made their company successful they can afford to live in such a fantasy land...
Is Google evil? Yes, indeed.
Google: Billions of dollars to piss away on stupid ideas.
Yeah... he's not going to win.
See Microsoft versus the poor sap who trademarked "Internet Explorer". He had a black and white ownership of the trademark. He sued MS, and we all know what the result was: they're still using the name "Internet Explorer"
Why? They buried him with lawyers. Then, offered to pay his legal expenses if he stopped the lawsuit, and turned over the trademark to them.
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/02/business/microsoft-settles...
If anyone thinks the justice system is about justice, you're deluded.
Us: Gullible
Edit: Downvotes please explain why I should believe everything I read on the internet.
Angry pitch fork Internet mobs don't like skeptics. They probably would have been superstitiously burning witches 1000 years ago but now there's a different work of Satan to get all frothed up about. It's ridiculous. Google has done an immeasurable amount of good in the world by bringing knowledge to millions of people. By helping cross cultural barriers and disseminate ways of thinking. Unlike most "startups" Google really has changed the world. But hey, a professor got fired and some opportunistic journalist is making un-evidenced spin, so fire the torches up. If you don't get with the mob you are obviously a witch as well.
What it boils down to is that when an attorney sends an accusation to your legal team, your legal team has to respond. The bigger the company, the more nonsense requests they can afford to send to your team which drives up your legal expenses in terms of billable hours. They can't not-respond.
The old "get 50 boxes of files" when requesting an single paper trope is a thing that actually does happen.
The bigger the opposition, the more of those requests will come across and the more things your team will have to respond to. If you had a $2000 dispute with a huge company, if they wanted to they could ensure that your legal bill was hundreds of thousands of dollars, which increases your personal level of risk if you lose the case. If you lose, you're bankrupt.
The only way you can afford to get in a court battle like that is if you have that type of money to risk.
Source: Friends with a lot of lawyers for some reason
I don't dispute that. I think it's common knowledge, particularly among techies who are all too familiar with patent trolls.
Lawsuits aren't the only option. He could also go to the press. Unless this guy settled a suit, he's not legally bound to be vague. As it is, it's another unverifiable claim on the internet from an anonymous source. Too many to count.
As for Google Places results being listed higher, if they were search results being artificially boosted, that's one thing; however, showing callouts that provide the information immediately is pretty clearly better from a user perspective, which makes it hard to show harm to the users.
Of course, you can sue over anything, but whether it makes sense to win is another question.
The same thing happened to Yelp [1]. I'm sure the EU and FTC would like to hear your startup's case.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8354655/Google-is...
if you didn't get a second opinion, you should have found a new lawyer
Two days later my site disappeared from Google SERPs with no ostensible reason. I later found out there were Googlers in the audience for my talk.
Correlation is not causation, so no proof, just suspicion.
The exact same thing happened to the company I worked for, which was active in the online local business market (i.e. putting small and medium businessed up on the map, with descriptions, ratings and everything). I was in charge of Information Retrieval, as in half of the data was collected by my colleagues physically going from door to door and collecting info, and the other half was inserted by me in the DB from a set of diverse publicly available data (mostly some Excel files collected from the ministries' websites and formatted by me for SQL INSERTs). Not a year passes and Google Places is launched, and another couple of months later almost all of our businesses are in there, with errors and all. At least they didn't take us out of their SERPS, they figured we were too small for them to really matter (Eastern-European country). At least I'm happy I'm not paranoid, I had thought about this ever since my company was forced to exit that business space.
Websites like yours clog up search results with useless garbage. Millions of auto-generated pages from official listings that pretend to have reviews and such but never actually do. I am happy Google moved it down the result list.
But this is categorically bad behaviour.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Stick+Google+Plus+Buttons+On...
... is just now this 2011 article ...
https://raventools.com/blog/forbes-reports-that-google-plus-...
... so Google hasn't done a very effective job of quashing.
Perhaps it's questionable that Google wanted the article taken down in the first place. It's hard to know the legitimacy of that request without knowing the specifics of any NDAs applicable to the meeting. But at the least, the article would damage the relationship between those two groups at those two companies.
No manual intervention doesn't mean that the algorithm was not planned to work in a criminal way.
I doubt my little project is a threat to Google, but this seems strange?
That doesn't appear to be the case with OP's original complaint about not seeing their own company in their searches.
External links are validation for a fledging idea/startup. If someone searched "restfender" they would be more likely to learn more if they see a discussion that may or may not help them...
Without organic traffic the right to be seen shifts to an increasingly small number of judges/players.
It use to be that if you knew your topic and put a lot of effort into writing an article you could post it any place, even on your own website. Its audience would take notice of it then at the very least tell you they didn't like it.
I'm not trying to complaint or express a desire to get back to the good old times. You could argue there was no money in freedom. Digital slavery was just more profitable and those who could/should have defended the freedom sold us out in stead. (made a handsome profit at that) It is a kind of "you don't know what you have until it is gone" type of situation.
While I don't want to promote the 99% meme either, the thing is, if you exclude 99% from "collective" opinion making you will have the 1% doing it. Thats just how basic logic works.
What kind of shape or form this takes is not very interesting imho.
What is interesting is the growing opportunity it represents.
You could say the proverbial Google has a million points of trustworthiness left. At some point they will find ways to sell it for a price that is right to them. When enough of these entities sell enough of their trust there will be room for new innovations.
If Google does evil, it is evil. So if the slogan is "don't be evil", then "do no evil" is a natural, logical consequence of that. I don't care what your personal religion says, I don't think you can be a good person if you do bad things, and I don't think you can say your organization is not evil when it can crush individuals and small businesses, such that they have no realistic recourse or means of redress.
Google is using its temporary position of power as strength to be wielded against the weak. While it is debatable whether that qualifies as "evil", it is certainly predatory behavior. Google's size would make it a top predator, and anyone smaller should be extremely wary. When swimming with an orca, one never knows if it will play with you, or whether it will drag you under until you drown.
But since we are looking as deeds rather than words, it doesn't really matter what Google's motto is or was. All that can tell us is how hypocritical they are. Just look at what Google does, and ask yourself whether you would feel comfortable actively supporting that activity. If the answer is "no", then you probably shouldn't be passively supporting it, either.
I have already switched my primary search to DuckDuckGo. HN will never be my only aggregator, because I know it censors certain topics. I never took Slashdot off my launch page, even after Dice took over. You really have to spread your sources out, and not give any one person or organization enough editorial power to sway you by controlling the information you see, and that includes yourself. Get someone else to recommend a news site to you, and force yourself to use it sometimes.
The only way to counter centralization on the network is intentional decentralization. What Google is doing is the equivalent of a 51% mining pool attack on Bitcoin. And the solution is the same. If you are part of the pool, leave it. If you are dependent on Google, diversify as quickly as you are able. If you are not dependent, you might want to just suspend using any Google-branded service for a while.
I see this time again when I'm searching for politically hot topics like Charlottesville, both of the riots in Berkely, BLM protests, ANTIFA activities, etc.
I started doing multiple searches when I googled, "ANTIFA is a hate group". On the first page of Google were several articles and blog posts titles, "Why ANTIFA is NOT a hate group."
Doing the same search on Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo returned a combination of articles, with several at the top talking about why ANTIFA should be labeled a hate group and a few other blog posts about why it shouldn't. The interesting part was all the pro-ANTIFA blost posts on other search engines weren't in the top ten results on Google. There were very specific authors in the top results in Google that didn't show up in other SE's. It was obvious to me the Google results were being manipulated to push a different narrative on the notion ANTIFA should be labeled a hate group. It was a real eye opener that I've been able to repeat with some success for other political topics when I'm searching.
Bottom line is that I can't trust them anymore; for either political or non-political searches. It makes me wonder what else they're manipulating to push a certain narrative that if I don't actively compare with other SE's, I won't know is happening.
For the record, I wasn't logged into my gmail account when I made the searches.
Throughout this thread there seems to be a theme of "my Google search for X returned Y biased, disturbing results" and yet in all cases Google seems to have corrected their results to make it appear that nothing was ever out of the ordinary. Funny how that works.
What about the Uber scandals that predate Waymo's existence?
I'm guessing it's possible to hide our own data from ourselves as well.
[1] https://raventools.com/blog/forbes-reports-that-google-plus-...
http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-prs-dirty-little-secret/
https://www.cultofmac.com/255618/how-apples-blacklist-manipu...
> I don’t have any hard evidence to prove that that’s what Google did in this instance
Okay
This article is written by Kashmir Hill, describing how a story she wrote in Forbes six years ago that was unfavorable to Google was suppressed.
The article you linked to is by Barry Lynn writing in the Washington Post about how he was forced out of the New America think tank in June of this year for writing in support of the European Union fining Google for antitrust violations.
They're not.
They're private organizations that corporations go to and pay them to write a research paper that aligns with their corporate interests. That's what think-tanks are. That's their business model. They're not academia.
Google is this think-tank's customer. And when it fired the guy, the think-tank is basically making themselves more customer-friendly. Calling them "evil" is like calling a customer "evil".
When I saw the title, I assumed it was another article on the Open Markets thing too. But the article is a totally different story.
Platforms come and go. Google couldn't even get a decent social network off the ground and has had too many failed projects to count.
Monopolies built on infrastructure, like ISPs, are the ones that stick around without intervention.
I suspect all this news about Google and Facebook being the big bad wolves are meant to distract from net neutrality and ISP monopolies.
I've seen plenty of articles talk about ISP monopolies and net neutrality. In fact several of the articles around these recent events have tied things to net neutrality as well.
All the ones I see are slanted, for example [1],
> "In their net neutrality fairy tale, internet service providers (ISPs) are the ‘big bad wolf,’ bent on creating paid ‘fast lanes’ and blocking the websites of entrepreneurs (who invariably work out of their garages). It sounds like a frightful tale, except that ISPs have never offered paid fast lanes or blocked small business owners’ web sites (run out of garages or otherwise). Meanwhile, the biggest baddest wolf the world has ever known — Google — swallowed the internet ecosystem whole and spit out its bones."
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/fredcampbell/2017/05/03/the-tru...
Edit: Please explain your downvotes, thanks!
But here's an article that mentions Google is a monopoly and also mentions net neutrality: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/30/16226616/b...
> New America eventually emerged as one of the most forceful voices in favor of “net neutrality” — a key progressive advocacy goal that also aligned with Google’s corporate objectives.
It's not surprising it mentions net neutrality because New America was focused on it (as was Google).
The article is also critical of telcoms,
> And, indeed, for years it was common to hear telecom industry lobbyists complain that it was inappropriate for journalists to take New America’s policy expertise on these subjects at face value — arguing that the think tank was basically just a cut-out for Google. Telecom companies, too, have their own favorite think tanks.
It's not rare to see think pieces that support net neutrality and/or oppose telcom dominance, so it's not surprising there are articles talking about Google's dominance that also mention those.
Nope, not at all. I said articles that mention Google/Facebook monopolies never mention ISP monopolies. That's true, they don't, including the vox article you link.
> The article is also critical of telcoms
Perhaps you misread the quote. That is reporting, not criticism. From the same article, this is criticism,
<< Google, like any other giant company, is going to sometimes find itself in the regulatory crosshairs, throwing its weight around to try to get away with things that maybe shouldn't be allowed. “Don't be evil” was a nice idea while it lasted, but business is business and politics is politics — no exceptions. >>
> they would mention ISP's broadband monopolies and net neutrality
I thought you meant they never mention either. Now it sounds like you meant they never mention them both together.
It seems odd to expect an article focused on criticizing Google to also criticize a bunch of other things at the same time. I don't think the lack of that proves anything.
It's not just about this one article. It's that none of those critiquing Google mention the ISP monopolies that everyone knows are there.
If I were going to rage about tech monopolies as a journalist, and I believed both of these were monopolies, I'd mention both.
> I don't think the lack of that proves anything.
No sweat, I don't expect everyone to agree with me. I often see Google critiqued as left-leaning, and NN critiqued as leftist policy. I noticed a pattern in recent news. It's fine if you don't see it the way I do.
Consider the fact that Google is, bare minimum, as evil as Comcast. But if you grab a handful of people and ask what their opinions of each company is, they will be vastly different. The fact that Google is so good at manipulating the press, as seen in this very story, is why they are such a massive threat.
That's right. ISPs have regional monopolies. Google competes on a global scale.
Google's biggest competitor may be Baidu and China.
> Consider the fact that Google is, bare minimum, as evil as Comcast
No way. There is tons of evidence of Comcast acting evilly. They constantly underperform in their quality of service and costs. Google outperforms. You just feel they are evil because of their success.
Google has gone to great lengths to give back to the world on whose infrastructure it was built. They give tons of services for free to non profits [1], they publish a lot of their most innovative research, and they use patents for defense rather than offense. That's just naming a few things. Comcast does none of this. They just hold out their hands for more money without providing additional value.
They collect patents because patents are good for threatening competitors like any good corporation does. Google even has a patent shakedown scheme to get startups to pay to license their patents.
They give away free services sometimes because its good PR. So do ISPs.
Heck, in terms of charitable giving, Google is batting a zero against Verizon this week. They initially offered to match some employee donations up to $250,000 for hurricane Harvey relief, added a straight $250,000 donation on top of that, and later did another matching thing to bring it up over like a million.
...Verizon, a company we can all agree is evil as sin itself... Straight up pledged ten million dollars for hurricane relief with no strings about needing matching donations attached. Makes Google's gesture seem like a footnote.
The difference in evillness between Google and ISPs is simple: Google also suppresses the media.
The rest of your claims are unsourced.
(Especially when you consider that today Michael Dell offered up $36 million... and Google is still in that $1 million range.)
http://paxlicense.org/ is a great example of how Google uses patents as a latent threat. It's "open to anyone", but requires you be shipping Google's proprietary malware on your Android devices to qualify.
You might also note that things like Samsung moving closer to stock Android was coupled with the announcement of a Google patent agreement. While Google's terms with different companies are strictly confidential as part of the terms (Microsoft's patent extortion only became public because some parties refused to pay), they operate very much in the same space.