Trump Accuses Google of Burying Conservative News in Search Results
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There’s a couple of things at play:
Google does control (unbiased or biased) a significant portion of what internet users see
This control has the potential to sway public opinion, direct discourse, and economically make or break businesses (even those that extend beyond media)
Personally I believe gigantic internet companies like Google require more regulation because they can’t be trusted to act responsibly indefinitely.
However I do not believe the current administration has shown thoughtfulness and care for the republic in a way that I would trust them to enact this regulation.
I trust Silicon Valley a hell of a lot more than I trust our government...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2018/0...
Although I find it quite troubling that I often feel like I have to hold my tongue when visiting Silicon Valley when discussion turns to politics.
I’m slightly right of center politically but range quite broadly issue by issue, including a couple issue where I Lean to the left.
I feel incredibly uncomfortable discussing most anything right of the political center based on common narratives and what I perceive to be the local/cultural group think average.
I’m decidedly a non tech founder, but tech conversant.
I’m trying to learn more about algorithm fundamentals and design and have been reading an article or two about bias in algorithms.
Would there be public service value in auditing/monitoring commercial algorithms?
I would never wish to hinder the velocity and quality of commercial innovation, but a few algorithms at a few companies have a massively outsized influential impact on our lives.
The non-poaching agreements make me disagree with you.
If google fails its userbase they can switch to a different search engine in 30 seconds by opening a new tab.
How fast can you change governments?
If their userbase can actually tell that they are _being_ failed. I don't know that this is deliberate and not just a result of SEO and ranking algorithms, but if what we see is being influenced, how would we know, and how would we generate enough energy to actually have a significant number of people digitally uproot themselves in order to force Google to respond somehow?
> they can switch to a different search engine in 30 seconds by opening a new tab.
Individual users can switch search engines, but what about switching away from Gmail, Youtube, etc. that are all tied together? It's pretty difficult, especially considering you can't bring your network of viewers/friends/etc with you.
> How fast can you change governments?
Happens every 4-8 years and takes a few months. Fairly well-oiled process, at this point.
Last time I recall the candidate that would likely have done well for us was cheated in the primary and then the minority elected a criminal with dementia. Before that we had an authoritarian who at least seemed to want to help the country even at the expense of our rights for 8 years. Before that we had an incompetent drunk for 8 years.
Hows that hope and change working for us lately?
Better than your hyperbolic rambling.
They tried, but he was victorious in the end, in a triumph of democracy.
Wait, who are you talking about?
- Google never promised you to give you truth all the time (for most of the things people search for there just is no truth). It's meant to direct you to the most "relevant" contents. Everyone will always think that they are more relevant than search engines believe.
The media has been squawking that Trump is wrong (CNN: "Media says Trump search is rigged. It's not."). Wrong or right, in shedding light on this, Trump has forced Google to be more careful not to bias search results if in fact they were.
If Google were unbiased in its search results you would search for tigers and get random results having nothing to do with tigers because maybe that's really the page you wanted and you don't want bias in your search results. Even allowing that every search result has to have the word tiger in it, there's a vast difference between getting the Wikipedia article on tigers vs some random MC Hammer fan-fic that mentions one time that his pants had tiger stripes.
An example to drive the point home: Where are my keys? A biased search would look first in the places I think they are most likely to be, and those places will be biased by me according to what I normally do with my keys, where I normally go, where I normally use them, etc. My keys are more likely to be in my pants pocket than, my wife's, and certainly more likely than some stranger's (though there is non-zero percent chance it could be in any of those). But an unbiased search for my keys would say that any place is equally likely. Even reducing it to all places that a human could have traveled to in the time since I last saw them biases the search by supposing that advanced life-forms with faster-than-light travel took my keys to Alpha Centauri overnight. Plenty of people believe this could possibly be the case, and a search for my keys that doesn't take that into account is biased against these people and their beliefs.
I agree with your last statement, though. Rightly or wrongly, this may cause Google to change which direction they are biased in. It could also just be an opportunity for others to try different search engines to see which bias they prefer, whereas previously they had never considered it.
The truth is Google results should not exist for anything and everthing. Especially ambiguous subjects. Who does anyone think wins these arms races that are being set up?
It is as retarded as having the supreme court pumping out decisions in real time. Why does that not happen? The tech exists. The bench can sit on twitter and keep pumping out their mid process thoughts on anything and everything. Imagine if they did that trying to constantly optimize for more like and follower counts rather than optimizing for outcomes that serve justice.
The current architecture to address ambiguity is pure shit. Where people need to be pushed into slow deliberate thinking or where they need to be signaled they have a second graders understanding on a subject, Google is playing a huge role in signalling the opposite.
It's doing a whole lot of unintended evil by setting up these arms races around ambiguous issues.
Alex Jones is advising Trump about this very topic.
https://www.newsy.com/stories/infowars-alex-jones-says-he-s-...
Relevant:
Trump's Razor - the heuristic of discerning the most likely scenario by discerning the stupidest possible option.
> “This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!”
Wonder what makes Google different/worse from an ISP.
For me, "there are literally zero black", was not true. predominately not black, but Washington was in the list. I don't mean to be pedantic, but I take 'literally' seriously
I don't think there is any overrepresentation in the result set, though there does seem to be a small cluster at the top (the top 5 and 9 of the first 12, but then a sudden drought.)
George Washinton Carver, Elijah McCoy, Madam CJ Walker, Lewis Howard Latimer, and Garrett Morgan
How many of those do you suppose are actually in the "Top 10" of US inventors
Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel Morse, Eli Whitney, Nikola Tesla, George Washington Carver, Charles Goodyear, Lewis Howard Latimer, Henry Ford, George Eastman
... which does corroborate OP's "American inventors" hypothesis.
Secondly google search results are a best guess based on prior search history and other data about you about what you want to read right now given a term.
You wont anywhere find a universal fact about what google themselves thinks about anything without reading material written BY google and not generated results from its search engine.
If you Google search "African American Scientists" and "African American inventors", you get almost the exact same photo list as "American Scientists" and "American inventors".
The original article claims something similar albeit on a different search result.
the underlying idea is that google is not just using pagerank and algorithms to show us the current state of the internet. But rather is adding their own bias to push up / down certain results.
One thing I've wondered with stuff like this is why we assume Google is the root cause here. Mind you, I've switched all my products away from Google, so I'm not defending them, BUT;
Reddit users frequently take part in manipulating Google search results for the sakes of memes. To put someones picture up on a specific search, for example. Yet other search results we believe to be hand crafted by Google.
Now, I think it is more likely that Google is manipulating data here. However, I never see it discussed why we don't think someone else could be manipulating it?
That is unfair. This result is very different from a search like "USA inventors" which is semantically similar and it is an interesting discussion to have, why that is. I make no claims about what the results 'should' look like from a societal perspective.
And ultimately I agree with your criticism, it was too hasty on my part to claim google did this purposefully. Some of the ideas in the sibling threads offer very plausible alternative reasons which could have caused this difference.
Is this bad? Should they have done something different? I don't know. I guess it comes down to what you expect when you search for those terms, who is searching for those terms, and if these lists have proven to be helpful to those searching for these terms.
As someone else already insightfully said results for American Scientists results a result set an awful lot like African American Scientists whereas US scientists or United States Scientists returns a results set more like you would expect.
In 2015 google photos was classifying black people as Gorillas that wasn't on purpose either.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go...
Trump is just living it? Why did you add that part? I pointed out that the results looked odd. When I opened up the comment section, every other comment was saying nothing was odd. Those comments you're referring to didn't exist yet. Now that I've seen them, yes, they do bring up an interesting point.
I'm not a Trump supporter. I'm not a republican. And nothing I said indicated that Google was out to get conservatives. There was no reason to bring up the Google image story or say anything about Trump in your reply.
"Google Attacked by Trump With Claim It Is Burying Conservative News" I was referring to the subject of the entire discussion not you or your politics. I was trying to be clever by replying to your statement AND the topic simultaneously.
Google images misclassifying black people as gorillas, as well as google instant answers providing erroneous and prejudicial information are examples of situations in which we could discover meaning where none exists in data generated by an algorithm.
It seems vastly more likely that the words american inventors appears many times in documents that begin african american inventors than google specifically tweaking that query to increase diversity the same way I don't think google meant to convey that black people were like gorillas or that Obama was king of America
Wherein they try to provide actual answers to questions more complicated than 2+2 or what is the weather like they have ended up with interesting results drawn from the nonsense that is the internet.
"Instant answers have attracted criticism for years. In 2014, Google results highlighted a Breitbart story saying Barack Obama was the king of America, and the next year, Google got flak for providing an excerpt from a creationist website saying dinosaurs were tools of indoctrination in response to the question, "What happened to dinosaurs?"
Conspiracy-mongering instant answers drew attention in March after the website Search Engine Land pointed out that Googling "Is Obama planning a coup?" displayed an answer from a website called SECRETS OF THE FED saying Obama was indeed planning a coup with the help of "the communist Chinese."
https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/google-instant-ans...
Imputing bias from search results may be a mistake. Especially when in some cases it might even be a correct guess at what the searcher actually wanted to read.
Shocking.
If you lay out the game theory brining this up in this context you are implying that this is part of some vast liberal conspiracy. That is the problem.
If the article is on Trump claiming that Google politically biases search results, Google having a history of returning suboptimal results in a way that is "stereotypically liberal" would be some decent supporting evidence - someone having done something before increases the prior probability of them having done so again. If that's actually accurate, of course.
Now, it seems pretty clear to me that this was a bug (and one I see in other, non-political search results) and that lowers the credibility of the criticism. I'd still rather have both sides make their strongest arguments though, and that includes pointing out prior occurrences that might suggest a pattern.
OTOH, I'll bet there are websites that talk about, say, "George Washington Carver, an American scientist you have never heard about."
That said, the quality of curation seems rather poor.
Oddly, when your search isn't a substring of "African American Inventors" you don't get weird results.
It's almost like the search algo isn't perfect.
Furthermore, to be honest, this “organic” search has largely been used to debunk racist claims. And the search has been used for over a decade.
Jk. Money talks, and outrage sells better than dry facts.
[1] - https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-search-results-show-perv...
"96 Percent of Google Search Results for 'Trump' News Are from Liberal Media Outlets"
https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-search-results-show-perv...
Google supported Clinton and threw resources behind her campaign:
"However, one can't help but be skeptical considering that just before the 2016 presidential election, among the many leaks published by Wikileaks as part of its Podesta email campaign was Google's "strategic plan" to help democrats win the election and track voters." from
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-28/google-responds-tr...
More at
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-01/wikileaks-reveals-...
I fail to see how that does not continue today.
IF (a big IF) Google was actually biased, you could go to their competitor. But if there's no other real competitor then IMO the solution isn't to regulate Google, but to fix root cause problems which led to there only being one company controlling all search (AKA breaking up monopolies)
So while doing something to spread out eyeballs among various search engines would make this argument moot because there is no longer a single entity you can pressure, I think it misses the heart of why people complain about bias. Despite a wide variety of media outlets, conservatives regularly complain about liberal bias in the media - there's just no single entity they can pressure.
Maybe that's for the best, but I think it's important to realise that this is not really a good faith argument.
- Facebook's short-lived 'trending News' came under fire after employees admitted to routinely suppressing conservative news stories.
- Every newspaper endorsed Trump's opponent so any news source is potentially anti-Trump. Some, like CNN, aren't even trying to be objective (every article reads like an editorial with a little too much snark), while others like the NYT released a post-election letter that just fell short of admitting their bias ("we believe we reported on both candidates fairly").
- Twitter was found to hide many Republican politicians from autosearch results.
None of this makes Trump's accusation true, but it highlights that there is a precedent.
> Mr. Trump’s criticism appeared to be inspired by a segment last night from Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs. During the program, Mr. Dobbs highlighted an article by a conservative website, PJ Media, that said that it had conducted an unscientific study in which 96 percent of Google search results for the word “Trump” were articles from “left-leaning sites.”
Oh boy: an "unscientific study", whatever that is.
Otherwise known as an "anecdote."
The UK has such a regulation still, for TV broadcasters only. It also has the BBC which is committed to such fairness and neutrality in its charter.
In practice it is not enforced. For example the senior management of Channel 4 news have routinely made tweets that indicate they hate the Conservative party. And I mean really hate.
Their head of output retweeted a message that said, "Writing from America & I can assure you that conservatives will absolutely keep needed medicine out of the hands of those who require it, if you let them"
One of their most famous and senior journalists (Jon Snow) went to a music festival, someone who partied with him claimed he shouted "fuck the Tories" and "I'm supposed to be neutral". He claims he can't remember if he said it or not.
The chief editor of C4 News liked a tweet that said simply, "Boris Johnson is a cunt". Johnson is one of the most well known conservative politicians in the UK and was a cabinet minister until he resigned quite recently over a policy dispute.
You can see a pattern - journalists who are supposed to be neutral by law have no problem with broadcasting to the whole world personal insults against conservative politicians on Twitter. They get away with it because the regulator stands by and does nothing.
The FCC fairness doctrine is unlikely to work out much differently. The USA is right to avoid it.
In response to "Writing from America & I can assure you that conservatives will absolutely keep needed medicine out of the hands of those who require it, if you let them"
Wouldn't it be a greater crime to ignore this? It seems as if the only reason you don't want a fairness doctrine is not because its a terrible idea but because it wouldn't be effective enough at distorting reality to the peasants.
In theory journalists should be able to separate their personal opinions from their work. Many other professions do, most notably defence lawyers. You sound like you don't believe it's possible, which should put you in agreement with me that a fairness doctrine is a silly thing to have.
As for your final comments: do you really believe conservatives - all those hundreds of millions of them around the world - are Disney villains who hate the sick and will block medicine shipments just for the sheer hell of it? That quote is obviously extremist nonsense. People refuse to sell each other medicine all the time for all sorts of reasons but it's never to do with just a blind hatred of the sick, as that quote implies. The fact that the head of a major news operation apparently believes such a statement is worthy of being repeated says everything one needs to know about the state of modern journalism.
How many sides are there in every multidimensional issue. Who decides which sides should be represented and how? Do we force every piece of content in the universe to have an unmoderated comments section filled with racist invectives and conspiracy theories? How "fair" will it be when nobody reads it.
Implementation aside the internet is already as fair as can be expected. It has never been cheaper to set up a site and have your voice heard. This of course merely guarantees that you can be heard not that you will have an audience.
Edit: US inventors never did show such results you are mistaken or misleading
I suspect the "problem" is just that people enjoy reading these negative articles. Google is trying to point people to what they're likely to click on.
> Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of....
>....results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/17/trump-idiot-...
Also, you should try it. Its remarkable really, search for idiot in google images.
Google should be able to blacklist every conservative (or liberal) site if they feel like it. They're a private business, and we have a Constitution that prohibits would-be tyrants from interfering with free speech. Trump should be run out of town on a rail for even hinting that he'd like to undermine freedom of speech.
Looking at the bigger picture, this may be a case of big tech companies not caring about political diversity while hiring, creating a cultural bias in their products. Just like the Usenix talk by the Harvard professor citing a study that facial recognition developed by a Japanese company had trouble recognizing non-asian faces, if a company's culture is mostly homogenous and leans heavily toward one end of the political spectrum, the developers could be adding an unconcsious bias to their algorithms that ranks people and websites at the other end of the political spectrum as untrustworthy or malicious. Normally political bias doesn't matter when it comes to products, a chair functions the same whether a liberal or conservative made it, but when the product is a list of relevant and trustworthy sites in response to a query, political bias can be very evident in the product.
An example I've seen of the news bias was shortly after Trump was elected, their was a covert raid on an Al Qaeda compound in Yemen. On CNN, the headline was something like "Trump authorizes covert raid that results in multiple Navy SEAL casualties." The Fox headline was something like "Trump authorizes covert raid of Al Qaeda stronghold that results in trove of intelligence data". Both are true, but the focus and tone of the articles was wildly different. If Google's algorithm results in only sites with a negative bias against Trump being pushed to the top of search results, I don't see why it shouldn't be investigated for the same reason that pro-Trump Russian influence is being investigated on social media sites. I think everyone can agree that covert meddling in politics, whether intentional or not, is a threat to democracy and fair elections.
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentat...
I see google as a mirror that reflects what the world says about you. Of course, they moderate results but I don’t think that they do it to such an extend that only negative results will show for a person seen as positive in the world.
Trump is denying his reflection in the mirror (Google search). He doesn’t want to accept that Google’s result is how the world sees him now.
Google does not write the negative content
This has been a conservative talking point for a while. I'm surprised it's taken him this long to publicly complain about it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858874
Perhaps this story will also get flagged - it seems there's a lot of people who don't like discussion of political bias in Silicon Valley companies on HN.
It's pretty easy to see why Trump thinks this. Just go to Google News and search Trump, then look at which news sources are selected. Or just look at this helpful pie chart:
https://static.pjmedia.com/trending/user-content/51/files/20...
The way News selects and ranks sources is even more opaque than web search. Web search at least has some papers describing how it works, but News searches only over a subset of the web selected by humans.
What policies do they use to decide what gets to be included?
https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/6204...
They state:
We do not allow content that sends messages intended to harass, bully, or physically or sexually threaten others.
We do not allow sites or accounts that engage in coordinated activity to mislead users
We do not allow content that promotes violence or harassment against an individual or group based on ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, sexual orientation or gender identity.
Well, that's going to be a problem for Google because by now everyone got the memo that the student generation that Google has been hiring extensively from for years now is willing to define almost any kind of viewpoint that isn't extremely liberal as "harassment" or "hate". Including fairly anodyne policies Trump has, like there being limits on immigration.
How will Google credibly argue they aren't biased when their inclusion policy for Google News reads like a list of guidelines to a university safe space?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-cas...
Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, Hillary Clinton.
I'm guessing Infowars Fox Breitbart. The problem for people on the far right is that their perspective is so profoundly distorted that even moderate news articles are written off as liberal rags.
Imagine if you were a young earth creationist wouldn't you be shocked to search for fossils and find page after page of honest scientific discussion and almost no pages talking about how the devil hid them to test peoples faith?