Comment by wutbrodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wutbrodo | Hacker News Reader

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> Schmidt seems to want to suppress such ideas, helping to suppress these unflattering stories so that the Al Frankens, Donald Trumps, and George HW Bushes of the world can stay in power. As an aside, Schmidt is the ultimate establishment opportunist, so of course he would do this sort of thing. He cares only about making Eric Schmidt powerful.

If you think that Schmidt and Google are the forces motivating viewpoint moderation and it's something they're foisting on the rest of the world, you clearly haven't paid even a second of attention to what's been going on.

Liberalism (in the classical sense) is _incredibly_ unpopular right now. There's been a constant drumbeat of articles (including all the ones that make it to HN's frontpage) about how modern-day content platform giants like FB and Google are being and make sure that legal but "bad" things like "fake news" need to be controlled and removed on their platforms. It hasn't been coming from inside these companies: it's been coming from journalists, politicians, and a host of other random (though sadly often influential) empty-headed loudmouths on Twitter.

> Note to Google: We do not want you to be an information censor or a moderator of the ideas that we are exposed to. Please stop.

Dude. Seriously. Read the news every once in a while. Half the country has been screaming at Google for not fulfilling _exactly_ this "responsibility". _You_ may not want them to be a viewpoint moderator/censor (and neither do I), but you're grossly misunderstanding the situation if you think this is a path that they're motivated to do by anything other than intense public and political pressure.

My take on it is that once a few non-techie people realized that Donald Trump's provocative statements were actually a strategy for controlling the news cycle via social media outrage, the focus turned to social media companies in the form of "how could you build a system that let this happen?"

So Facebook had to figure out a way to seem relatively innocent. It had been the major vector by which 10 minute wordpress articles with Times New Roman font face hosted on $10 fake news domains got thousands of shares. So it tabulated the amount of ad spend that had occurred in Russian currency and admitted that $160K of ads had been purchased by Russian actors.

Twitter realized that rather than reveal that a massive percentage of its accounts are bots, it ought to follow Facebook's lead, so it did a similar thing, canceling a small percentage of the fake accounts.

Yes, Google may have felt some pressure, but Google has a much better alibi. Pagerank is based on linking behavior which is much slower than social media, and is not designed simply to promote virality.

Imagine if pagerank worked like Facebook's algorithm, search would be useless but people would stay highly engaged while trying to search amid distracting and emotionally potent items turning up that they weren't actually looking for.

You are making the defense of Schmidt that some people make about IBM's selling equipment to the German government pre WW2.

Are articles that pull cheap punches & empty-headed loudmouths on Twitter a good metric for what's actually popular, though?

Having been inside places like Google: yes, in the ways that are relevant. These people may not have as much effect on (e.g.) national elections, because they don't have nearly as much influence. But for places like Google, their press coverage and employees/candidate pools are disproportionately affected by said loudmouths. Again, anyone who's paying attention can't but have noticed that corporations have had to bow to demands from these lunatics.

I guess you have observed the reasons for this firsthand, then. I was left guessing at incentives for those at the helm of said companies.

You don't need much inside knowledge to see this in action: the ability of a trending topic to change corporate behavior has been established for years at this point. And as I said, for tech, this problem is particularly bad.

For a very recent example, consider the Damore memo as a recent example. Leaving aside what action you think should have been taken (_really_ not interested in that discussion right now), there was a marked shift in Google's reaction to the memo once it hit the idiots of the twitterati and blew up. PR matters to companies.

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