Trump attacks 'left-wing' Google search results | Hacker News Reader

Trump attacks 'left-wing' Google search results

bbc.co.uk

63 pointsSmkyMt47 comments

Fox News features prominently, but other than stoking the fire why would anyone be surprised that a global news outlet like CNN features prominently?

Even though I don’t personally watch CNN it’s usually the first site I visit when I hear some major event has happened globally because I can usually be certain they will have it covered.

One thing I find bizarre about FoxNews.com is how prominently they tend to feature stories that would normally only be shared on Facebook, like crazy cat stories or what this cute animal did.

This immediately comes to mind as relevant on multiple levels.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/old-man-yells-at-cloud

But this old man being the President, I am honestly concerned about an effort being made to "balance viewpoints" of Google results in a similar way to how media tries to present both sides of the given argument as deserving equal consideration, which leads to some interesting results when one side is represented by flat-earthers.

I heard a discussion on NPR about this. One of their prominent hosts (I forget who) said that they had decided not to run a lot of the newsworthy but negative things they had on Trump during the campaigns, because Rubio, Kasich, Cruz, and the rest did not generate anywhere near as many negative things (and same for Clinton during the general election campaign).

If they just ran all the newsworthy items on all the candidates, they might appear to be biased against Trump. So, to avoid the appearance of bias against Trump, they ended up without realizing it introducing actual bias in favor of him.

It's disgraceful, obviously, but it's an entirely predictable pattern on some level. He embarrassed himself and was forced to take an action he didn't want with lowering the flags for his adversary, McCain. He's now lashing out to distract people and to raise his own self-esteem.

The idea that there is a left/right divide in Google search results probably says more about differences in today's American left and the right, rather than anything about Google.

Whatever trump may say, no one knows what Google's algorithm do because there is basically no way to check they haven't been gamed.

I'd even bet that most of the folks who work there don't have a clue themselves.

[Edit] And the fact that Google is a leftist company with strong ties to the democrats is a basic fact of life. It's therefore easy - or at the very least tempting - to add two and two.

It's quite easy to add a penalty to some sites and, maybe, whitelist others though?

Politics aside, it's hardly the first time that search neutrality has been questioned?

I could see a SERP neutrality act in the near future, like net neutrality I expect it would be proposed but not passed.

> it's hardly the first time that search neutrality has been questioned?

True, but since last year and the giant mess around FB, people are really starting to realize how deeply a site like Google can sway opinions, and without being noticed at all.

T'is a huge power that goes entirely unchecked. All we have is hollow-sounding "don't be evil", "we would never do that" type things.

The search engine needs to become decentralized.

I went ahead and tried a search site I never use (DuckDuckGo) to search "Trump News".

I got results from:

1) trump.news

2) politico

3) huffington post

4) the guardian

5) cnn

6) donaldtrumpnews.co

7) dailymail.co.uk

8) nbc news

9) fox news

That's insane. What are trump.news and donaldtrumpnews.co? The idea that obvious SEO targeting made the top 10 is a bit alarming, let alone the top result.

I don't think there is any deep critique of the way Google operates here. If the majority of the "MSM" is against Trump then, wow, look at that, there's a lot of articles that critique him. Surprise surprise. Trump is whining that some people don't like him, as usual.

Google is one of the main data pathways in our society and the public has literally no idea what algorithms they're using to curate content. So, as per usual, Trump is the only politician touching on foundational social issues in his own dumb, self-serving way, while partisan hacks in the media completely miss the point and try to make it out like Trump is the crank.

see this is the difference between being a skeptic and a contrarian. The contrarian will call everything wrong and sometimes by pure happenstance they have a point. The opaqueness of google is immaterial given the same source decries a dozen things everyday as fake (irrespective of if its true)

I suppose the same can be said for DuckDuckGo. Not sure if there is an easy solution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance

Very much what I had in mind.

Climate skepticism was largely created by media attempting to balance out the point of view of nearly-everybody-including-everybody-who-had-studied-the-topic with that of that-guy-over-there-who-thinks-otherwise.

Showing the other point of view is generally good. Skewing the perspective to show things as balanced isn't.

I just wanted to thank you two for pointing me in the direction of the concept. :)

Google don't provide neutral search results. Everyone knows that.

Neutral search results is not possible!

True, but what is meant by "neutral"here is "search results that haven't been tampered with from PC POV". Google has been heavily criticized for NOT messing up with the results, so they finally did. Whatever they do, they'll never make everybody happy.

https://www.distractify.com/trending/2018/05/14/16jlb1/googl...

Perhaps he got caught in someone else's filter bubble.

I had to laugh when I heard this.

I had to, because if I didn't laugh, I would cry.

Of the 100 largest newspapers in America, 57 endorsed Clinton, and just 2 endorsed Trump.

Google search results rely heavily on those top 100 largest newspapers.

I believe this is the original news story that trump picked up on

https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-search-results-show-perv...

I'd be surprised if he wasn't seeing more left leaning results from his presumably DC area IP than from his Florida IP. Google tries to make results somewhat location based and the DC area leans lefter than Florida with the exception of a few particular cities.

If this is true, this has the deleterious impact of making red areas redder and blue areas bluer and increasing the disagreement and conflict between red and blue. This is one of the huge problems with Facebook.

He probably spends so much time looking at negative press on him that his own search results are skewed as such. I.e. for a guy who constantly says all these companies like CNN and NYtimes are failing and fake news he seems to always up to date on what they are saying

Even if someone believes Google is biased, they are free to use another news aggregation service. However the President publicly stating that they might be breaking the law seems to me an clear example of a chilling effect.

Why was this flagged?

Neither https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858906 nor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17859353 were flagged.

It takes in many factors (as we know). If it has profile of Trump it would have him as a senior citizen who prefers right-wing media.

He's right.

How do you know?

How do you know he's not?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying he is or he isn't - my concern is that I don't see a way to prove or disprove either position.

Meanwhile, the entire firearms community is having trouble being demonetized, suppressed, and outright banned from YouTube - a Google product, obviously - for content that is legal and in most cases quite uncontroversial.

With no way of knowing for sure if Google is manipulating News rankings and firm evidence that they are using their power to harass and deplatform based on politically-charged issues elsewhere, why would you trust that they're not?

There is a big difference between "he is right" and "You can't prove he is wrong". Is there any evidence he is right?

That's what I'm trying to say - the problem is that I don't see any way to disprove either assertion: "Google is manipulating News" or "Google is not manipulating News"

There is evidence that Google has acted in a partisan† way in other areas, though, which is what makes the assertion worthy of consideration.

†: "partisan" might not be the best word here. "Ideologically-driven" might be better. Google has acted in its capacity as a content host to suppress content that it finds inappropriate, even though that content was benign. Example: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-21/youtube-b...

This right here is called "Muddying the waters" you're making an assertion without proof but claiming that the lack between what we know and what we don't know is evidence enough that we should believe the accusation without proof. That's plainly absurd.

I had a conversation with family member yesterday who also took this story and ran with it. I tried to explain to them that the google algorithm is a giant, multi billion parameter organism that is changing in real-time as it continues to spider new content and update it's weights as new content is posted on the internet. The training takes place across multiple countries, timezones, and data centers. I think it is safe to say it would be impossible for a team of evil liberals scientist working at google to surreptitiously bias the algorithm to only yeild liberal results, and penalize conservative content at the same time. The person said I was wrong (they have no experience in CS/Stats/ML, etc). I am not sure where we go from here, it seems like a nice example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

It’s really difficult to convince someone they’re wrong, especially when it’s coming from their trusted source and something they’d like to believe anyway.

I can’t tell you how many times these last two years I’ve pointed out that what someone said or posted regarding politics was incorrect or completely untrue and their response was “well it seems true” or “I could see them doing that though”. Even presented with contradictory evidence from a source they trust, they still want to believe it.

What makes you think your family member is wrong?

I used to work for Google, worked there for years. I am very familiar with how it works internally.

For standard web search the algorithms are indeed very complex and the core PageRank concept is pretty democratic. It wouldn't be easy to bias it politically without it being widely known to employees.

But Trump isn't talking about generic web search results. He's talking about news.

News is treated specially by Google. News-relevant queries trigger the Google News oneboxes (well, universal search mixins). Google News does not use PageRank to rank news sources. News sources are whitelisted and I believe it's not documented anywhere how it decides how to rank stories.

A simple test to decide whether News is biased or not is to look at its front page and see how often stories from Breitbart show up. Like it or not, Breitbart is (or appears to be) a popular and prolific news site:

https://media.breitbart.com/media/2016/06/newswhip-may-june-...

I have never, not once, seen News rank any story from Breitbart anywhere.

I just search [trump] on News. Here are the story sources it selected, in order:

The Guardian, CNN, CNN, WashPo, CNN, CNN, The Guardian, CNN, CNN, Business Insider, CNN, Fox News, NBCNews, Fox News, New York Times, the Independent, CNN, WashPo, CNN, New York Times.

Do you think that it's at least understandable, why a family member who observes such result lists might conclude that Google staff have an agenda? And do you agree that explaining this conclusion as stupidity (the Dunning-Kruger effect) is unnecessary given that neither you nor anyone else outside of a small team at Google actually knows what their news ranking algorithm is?

I am saying my understanding of page rank is that it is basically impossible to bias - i do not work at google, but i have a background in math.

maybe its not page rank, but as far as i can tell it is public information: https://www2007.org/papers/paper570.pdf. also, my family member was not talking about the news site, they were talking about google searches themselves being biased, as well as google search autocomplete being baised in favor a clinton (see this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcvfNExG8kw)

That paper is talking about user recommendations, not ranking.

Your family member was without a doubt talking about Google News even if they weren't aware of it because results from News are mixed in to generic search results. If you search [trump] on web search then the top part of the page is dedicated entirely to results that come from News, not generic web search.

The idea that Google News is unbiased is unsustainable, simply because humans whitelist news sources. It's not like web search where basically any web page can appear at any location automatically. There is no algorithm for deciding if a website is "news" or not. It's a human judgement.

Google employees have literally cried in company meetings when Trump was elected, only someone very naive would believe these people are going to be neutral about what sources they allow and how they decide which sources are more authoritative than others. Do you believe it's a coincidence that Breitbart never ranks, despite having an Alexa rank essentially the same as the Washington Post, given how Google employees are reported to have acted lately?

Your knowledge of maths is I'm afraid not very relevant to this topic because mathematics is simply a tool. Your family member is evaluating humans and their likely actions, not algorithms, and that is the correct thing to do because it's ultimately humans that control the algorithms. Google employees are perfectly capable of biasing its results and then lying about it to the public, without even being aware that they're doing it.

so your stance is 1) neither of us know if this is the case, (and thus this convo is pointless) or 2)i am universally wrong and google is biasing the new results ?

The conversation isn't pointless! It started with you stating your belief that your family member is stupid (Dunning-Kruger effect) and that your knowledge of maths means you "know" that Google's results are unbiased.

Well, honestly that concerned me because family relations are quite important. If the outcome of this conversation is you realise neither of you two know for sure then perhaps your view of your family member will go back to what it was, or even you may take their concerns more seriously and listen to them more closely. That would be a healthier family! Certainly, knowing maths is irrelevant to the debate you would have with them because maths has nothing to do with whether Google News is biased or not.

i stand by my original statement that, mainly that

1) i was not talking about google news, i was talking about google search results

2) (1) uses page rank which you need to understand basic linear algebra to understand the paper (aka maths)

3) its not possible for a team of internal engineers to bias it nor would it be in googles interest to do it

Ok, so your argument seems to show that Google News has a bias towards generally accurate sources. I think it would be stupid and dangerous to rank Breitbart higher given its frequent inaccuracies. When Google is essentially curating this content, they've got their own image on the line.

CNN has frequently published news that is factually false in the past. What makes you so sure there's a big difference in accuracy?

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