Google’s first all-hands after 2016 election [video]

people have, but who knows how long it'll last

https://ipfs.tube/#QmNPNYTMD95vc6PZtH5QFgLTj22cNkWm6TTCi7YGK...

I may have to do some finagling, since I'm new to IPFS, and never have dealt with files this large on IPFS either.

Edit:

Looks like the highres version also should be working

https://ipfs.tube/#QmX5wjpMyWrtwHQnJ6L8BMAnUGgxwJqnoLbTCJbmW...

No, she wasn't. There are lots of successful female politicians. She was criticized for being a moron.

This is a terrible overstatement. It's not even the first time she has fought against an ump, and not even the worst she has said. End of career lol.

I've read a lot of critique of O-C but never "for being female". Could you quote some critique like that so that it would be clear what do you mean? I honestly absolutely can't even imagine how such thing would look like: "We know O-C is female and thus unfit to hold an elective office..." or what? Name the most hostile press outlet to O-C outside wacko forums and 4chan and it would never dare to print something like that. Sure, there are sexists here and there, but openly and publicly criticizing a major political figure "for being female"? It's just rhetorical suicide. You must mean something else, but what?

Which clearly reveals _your_ bias. Well done.

You can't compare Google to the ACLU.

The ACLU has a track record defending free speech and freedom of expression. As long as the speech and expression does not contravene any laws the ACLU will defend it – it's irrelevant to them what values the speech and expression they are defending promotes or espouses. And, when you think about it, it's very unlikely that the ACLU will be forced to defend speech and expression nobody has a problem with so they are going to be defending speech and expression that gets peoples backs up.

Google on the other hand has no consistent track record of being neutral when it comes to content on their platforms. There's no transparency and insight into their deliberation processes. So if the group-think at Google comes down on one side or the other and they don't have a hands-off approach then that's very worrying. Of course, if you subscribe to Google's version of reality then you're going to be very happy with that but if you don't then too bad for you. If tech companies want to alienate a good chunk of their user base then they better be prepared for the backlash up to and including regulation and migration away to services that do a better job at upholding the ideals of free speech and expression.

What is their product? Sure, if product is Android OS, or some wearable devices, yes, they are not biased anyone can buy and use them.

But are they also involved in filtering news, manipulating search results, tracking phone locations, hosting emails, selling ads, censoring or not censoring youtube videos etc.

Then "products" is not the only way a company like Google is effecting change in the world. They match employee donations to charitable organizations, they lobby the government (more than Verizon, military contractors and Wall St. banks), work with the government on drone AI software. Now they are thinking of moving back into China's market with all the privacy implications there, etc.

I think they are far from a "but they are just making a product and selling it, so leave them alone" type of company.

And of course, we might say here that Google's values match with ours so we'll give them the benefit of the doubt. And even though their executives cry on camera after their political candidate loses, when they turn around and go to lobby the government or to police youtube videos, they'll regain their cool and be unbiased. I'd like to believe that, but sure we can see why others might not.

Surely. But that seems to be a basic assumptions in these quarters - if you hold certain views, they can't but influence who you are and how you do all things, including work. Isn't that the premise Damore and others were fired under? Isn't that the premise people get disinvited from tech conferences under - even if their politics has nothing to do with technology, their presence and others knowing about it can't but influence the interactions with them and the products they create, consciously or unconsciously.

But it can not work only in some cases - if we recognize that these things are unseparable, then it becomes impossible to claim Google being biased hard to the left has no influence on their decisions, including product decisions.

Example: if somebody who is working on search rankings writes an ML model to define what "reputable source" looks like, and by nature of their views they read only left-leaning publications, then the model will be trained in majority on such publications as "reputable", and would likely treat non-left-leaning ones as less reputable. Even without explicit intention of bias, the bias would be there. Moreover, since most of the people in Google would hold the same views, nobody would notice that bias as the output of the model would look exactly like they expect it to look.

I want my search engine to make me smarter and better informed and not baby me with only the content I already know or believe. In that respect, I don’t want censorship. But I also don’t want it to try and feed me just any old information that happens to be sitting around.

Even if they were doing this overtly to promote a political view rather than to address the problem—false information—that the question expressly raises, this would be protected political speech.

> This doesn't seem very neutral to me.

Even if it didn't (and the actual answer to the actual question does not suggest political bias unless false propaganda uniquely favors one side), so what? What corporation, particularly in the business of distributing current events information, is strictly politically neutral? Certainly none of the ones pushing the narrative that this should be considered disturbing.

I learned a lot but I don't think college made me a "conservative". I was mortified to see our University president on TV demanding religious exemption from birth control in employee health insurance.

[0] I do not have a good idea of what such a standard would even look like, and would err on the side of being too lax in this regard.

However, at a meta-level, there is some public information about how Google decides whether a change is making things better or worse. This doesn't tell you how the algorithm works, but it shows the goal they're optimizing for.

Google has "over 10,000 human raters" that rate search engine results. I don't know how they choose the raters, but presumably it's a variety of people in each country. You can read about them here:

https://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-search-qu...

Also, the guidelines that the human raters are supposed to follow are public, and you can read them here:

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...

If you're doing meaningful work, you're changing things in the world.

Changing things in the world is necessarily and inevitably political.

If the workplace appears politically neutral, then one of two things must be true. Either what you're doing doesn't affect the outside world, or there are hidden, unstated political motives at work.

I would much prefer my company's leadership to acknowledge the politics inherent in our work and openly state their motives and point of view.

Doing otherwise is either meaningless or dishonest.

There is almost no such thing as polititcal neutrality. Every site, every piece of media and every search engine is likely to have some sort of bias you need to be aware of. There is an argument to be made that Google is a monopoly and should be reigned in, but coming at it from the stance of 'they have a political slant' seems ill-advised.

I assume you feel it is appropriate for leadership to express dismay about some things, so what makes democratic processes special?

Political neutrality is just political support of the status quo. That is a perfectly acceptable political stance to take, but you should recognize it is still a political stance.

The majority can still be wrong, or make immoral democratic decisions. It is our job as citizens, all citizens (even business owners), to rally against unjust law and public policy.

It is the very rights that US foundational documents express as inalienable that allow workplace leadership to express pain and dismay at democratic decisions.

Isn't this exactly what they do whenever they lobby to change an existing law?

Even in the early days of the internet, there were manually constructed listing of pages. Then, as the internet grew, there were manually curated listings. Then, these manually curated listings started to compete with crappy search engines. Eventually, as these search engines improved, the manual curation was delegated to a smaller niche of the information distribution market.

We could, in principle, go back to manual curation as the dominate method. That has been the status quo for almost all of human civilization. Doing so would destroy the internet as we know it (and would be politically impossible for that reason).

In comparison, Facebook made just 40 billion in revenue, but more people get their news from Facebook today than anywhere else. So really it's Facebook that's let the genie out, and they didn't need to be the wealthiest corporation or a monopoly to do it.

These are large corporations made up of lots of people and represent a wide array of shareholders' concerns. But individual billionaires also own media companies, and thus can have greater personal influence on what is expressed through those companies. https://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2016/06/01/these-15-...

Search results are always going to be biased the same way that any media is always going to be biased. Have the regimes of the 20th century not taught us that it's naive to think we can objectively correct for that without opening the possibility for significantly worse repercussions?

Actually, I don't think that's the case. Google has for a very long time considered a web site's reputation as part of a page's weight among search results.

IMO Google wasn't a primary transmission medium for fake news -- not like Facebook et al. So if you got to a fake news article from Google.com, you probably went looking for it.

To your point -- if you go searching for unique terms from the fake news articles, it seems reasonable/appropriate to show you the fake news websites from whence they came. It would be odd for Google to omit those sources that are likely the best/primary source of those terms. It might be reasonable to highlight the search results as coming from a source known to publish falsehoods. Like the "This site may harm your computer" warnings, it could be a clear flag for people to be skeptical. Unfortunately, it seems like they would be inheriting a morass of subjective or difficult to maintain criteria.

No, it's never been that; it's always been that it's algorithmically selected to promote the best information, whether the best answer to your question or, more recently through some of their mechanism, the information most likely to be useful in the absence of a specific request, considering a wide variety of general, (and, for very many years, location-based, and personalized) indicators of quality and likely utility. “Unfiltered” is exactly the opposite of what has always been Google's value proposition.

> “Hillary Emails” should give you results based on global pagerank

PageRank is the oldest and most primitive of the algorithms used in Google's rankings.

> Silently substituting the pagerank of New York or the subjective judgment of a room of Googlers undercuts the signal.

Neither of those things is suggested in the response given to the question.

> But there should always be some free, unfiltered pagerank available.

Are you seriously suggesting that Google is obligated to offer a version of its search engine using only its 1998 link ranking algorithm with none of the additional filtering and ordering criteria that have been developed I the last 20 years?

There is no solution that scales up to billions of users, and while it's true that AI most likely won't work, it is the best they've got right now. Do you have a better solution? Because Google has hired some of the smartest people and even then they still are having issues with Youtube every other week, so I'm sure you'd be paid a pretty hefty sum if you could solve this.

That's exactly the core strength of AI. It is what differentiates AI from hard coded solutions. Estimations(subjective decisions) based on correlations in fuzzy (qualitative) data.

In your example, you could take a set of data containing the net worths and other characteristics, e.g. birth zip code, spending habits, affiliations, and if there are any trends related to net worth, a properly architected neural network trained on the appropriate data could easily estimate subjectively on what amounts to qualitative data.

As others have said, evaluating trust on the internet using computers (call it AI or not) is literally Google's core competency.

There are like days of lag, in search engine results, unless you eagerly, eagerly, eagerly force your way into strategic points of the existing index for each independent search engine, separately.

Nevermind DNS replication, which is it's own beast. So, from domain registration, to DNS replication, to getting listed, to becoming relevant (which requires all kinds of meta tags and dom restructuring for crawlability, plus roll-your-own-site-maps, and so on), to being recognized as a reliable source of information, such as press releases, before we even get to news possibly going viral?

Well, news actually doesn't even go viral without humans in the loop. I mean consider how viral a high karma rank gets you on hacker news? It's just enough to get 10K eyes on a site in unison, to overwhelm a non-load-balanced server. And that's the voting of users doing all the work.

And then to include heavier social sites like reddit, twitter and facebook in the mix? That's almost purely human opinion performing the ranking factor. The attention of the users closes the feedback loop, and the chain reaction can strap a booster rocket to notoriety.

So, I'd almost say the really real time (like viral real time) stuff is almost only humans doing the work, and the robots are just there for the chatter threshold tripwires.

Simply getting computers to understand the statements is one of the holy grails of AI research; let alone determining if they are true.

The public at large has never been particularly well connected to truth. One difference now is that, in the past, the public at least respected and trusted scientists, academics, etc. Nowadays they're scorned.

Look into the fields of epistemology and the philosophy of science, in particular the works of Karl Popper such as The Logic of Scientific Discovery. The "truth" has always been an elusive concept. Outside the realm of mathematics, it's rather difficult to objectively prove most things "true".

That, in essence, is how we got here. There are plenty of loud, vocal defenders of "truth" out there, it's just that the loudest and most vocal of them define "truth" to mean "what our side believes".

Votes for women, emancipation of slaves, equal rights for women, for blacks, for gays, for the transgendered, worker protections, abolition of child labour, mandatory paid leave, maternity leave, environmental protections etc.

The list could go on, and in each and every instance we have had conservatives and traditionalists fighting them tooth and nail, and losing the battle every single time.

While the comment the person you replied to is short and lacking in substance, I do think there is truth to it.

What's that old Buddhist maxim?

Change is the only constant in life or You cannot change the wind, but you can adjust your sails.

Change is a certainty, but conservatives and traditionalists have made it their life's work to resist it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaul...

(Or worse, lumping any positions into support for whatever they're doing.)

When the left talk about toxic and destructive masculinity and suggest policy to address it then that is using clear language and decisive action about a structural issue in society.

We could be making sensible policies based on each individuals own merit and it would be great. No more women vs men, immigrant vs nationalist, white vs black. It is the future I would like to have but what I am getting is the choice between two ideologies who each ascribing negative traits to their own set of races and gender, with policies to match.

As I mentioned, several conservative Googlers have already talked about internal matters with Breitbart. Damore's memo was an internal-only document that was leaked on the liberal side. There were leaks about Project Maven and the censorship program Google's developing for China.

Though I would have to wonder how much easier this leak would be to catch. Google would "merely" need to identify who has somewhat-recently accessed this video file, and as an older recording, the number of viewers has certainly tapered off significantly.

To be honest, I'm seriously curious, are you saying your employment with Google is more important than what you think is right or good? While personally, I wouldn't leak from an employer I felt was doing bad things, I also wouldn't need to be terminated: I'd walk out the door.

As a Canadian I don't have a strong opinion on the content of this video, though I remember the event. But I do have a strong opinion about leaks/leakers.

It's not that I want what we do to be 'secret' -- it's that I want an internal work culture that is open and I want to know what's going on across the company and have issues discussed out in the open.

Finally, no I am not surprised people leak even with risk of termination. There's lots of jobs in the valley for people to switch to.

This is not even a Google owned platform just some external forum. So they think someone will scour the web, find their comment, take down their name, head over to Google's HR / thought-police dept., report them and they'd face retaliation. Seems on point with discussion at hand to me.

I actually think it contributed a lot to the discussion, hence why I upvoted it (even though it still looks grey to me now). More to the point, the OP seems to be a conservative Google employee who feels his/her job is threatened by the internal company culture at Google, internal company culture which can be seen in the the video itself.

I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt by staking the claim that they are doing this because they are a bunch of cynical bastards. You are making things worse for them by claiming they really are that stupid, and while I can't rule it out 100% it borders on the unbelievable.

But if you want to go down that route, be my guest, I do believe Robert Mercer knows what he is doing (just like Rupert Murdoch) and that the damage they are doing is intentional. It's pretty easy to mess with people's heads and there is an awful lot of that going on, if the visitors of those sites sincerely believe in the various levels of BS that are being peddled then some sort of shared blame would be appropriate.

I have similar feelings towards religious people and the perpetrators of religion: a failure of critical thinking skills leading to significant damage to the world, with a larger portion of the blame apportioned to the guys in charge (why is it always guys?).

You say that like fascism didn't exhibit these characteristics as well.

That said, fighting against things you claim to have no preference over you're also partaking in the same control/power trip shenanigans. That's when things really go off the rails.

What obligation do you think that a company should have to respect the political leanings of its employees? While it might be in a company's self-interest not to alienate talented employees with minority political beliefs, do you believe it should be forbidden for the company to "choose sides"?

I'm not sure why you think politics doesn't effect Google and the people who work there or why concerns shouldn't be addressed in an all hands.

Cheers! I wanted to back you up from my side of the aisle. I've seen some pretty shabby behaviour from my own and I'll help you call it out.

> It's already getting downvoted unfortunately.

Well, you were pretty salty. :-)

> The most absurd thing to me is how is this kind of rhetoric acceptable at a company sponsored event? It is obviously politically motivated and totally biased. One speaker nearly started crying about Hillary losing.

Well, it was a very strange moment. Yosemite Sam had just been elected, proving that we're definitely stuck in Timeline XX7J5, the really shitty one, and emotions were raw. Judgement faltered.

I myself nearly wound up sitting in the middle of the street wearing nothing but an adult diaper and sign around my neck that read "Give me food or kill me."

> How is that fair to employees at Google that are conservative?

It's not. It's actually pretty gross. And again, I'm saying this as a left-leaning person who was appalled by the election results. All it takes to understand how messed up this is (if you don't already) is to try to imagine a bunch of right-wing people doing the same thing if Clinton had been elected.

We were talking about this exact subject one day in our cubicle farm and someone pointed out that there were no doubt people in the room who had voted for Trump. I piped up in my best Michael Palin voice, "A witch! Burn 'em!" and we all had a chuckle, but there was nervous edge.

No one admitted to voting Republican though.

Tribalism sucks.

(But Trump makes me miss Dick Cheney.)

Even CA is mostly a "red state" outside of the cities.

Speaking to hypocrisy, I haven't watched the video (yet) but I'm sure the "lower classes" of Google will not be represented in the attendees. The service staff at Google are largely made up of a different proportion of races than the technical staff. Fraternizing is discouraged and, in fact, the service staff can get in trouble for it. It's the kinder, gentler racism of the well-to-do left.

The idea is that speech should be tolerated even if you disagree with it, and that societies that make room for controversial speech are better off, in the long run, than societies that do not. As a corollary, it espouses the view that individuals should be free to speak their mind and should be tolerated even if their speech is controversial. Because we cherish Free Speech, we created the first amendment. The first amendment is not the sum total of free speech, nor is free speech merely a governmental issue. For example, the California labor protections that protect employees from being fired for what they say in their private time is an example of the principle of free speech at work, and has nothing to do with the first amendment.

The principle of free speech is why there are many processes, both private and public, in which the public is invited for individuals to air their views, whether they be question and answer sessions in companies, or local government hearings. It's also the principle behind movements to build public libraries that stock controversial books. Almost every institution, whether public or private, tries to give some room for dissenting speech in its operations and tries to create a space for people to air their views. Thus the attacks on these spaces, even if they are not attacks on the first amendment, are of concern to those of us who value free speech. This includes opposition to efforts at censorship, both public and private, whether these be the circulation of blacklists of communists during the cold war, or any other kind of punishment, both public and private, merely for speech.

You may not agree with these values, but merely saying "well, the first amendment doesn't prohibit it, so it's not an attack on free speech" is a wild misunderstanding of what free speech is.

I hope this view becomes more mainstream soon. Regardless of outcome, it's something that people need to consciously think about.

Just after his Senate hearings, Mark Zuckerberg made some statements about preventing further election interference (obviously), and then went on talking about implementing new content-filtering policies within Facebook such as "community driven governance", an "appeal process" and even a "supreme court" and some sort of "due process" (Paris Vivatech 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp0BnrHn6cA around 34:40)

Zuckerberg and his peers are not elected individual, they cannot be removed from office, etc. While not disputing his intentions, using tools traditionaly used within democracies doesn't make up for a democratic process. Substituting laws by terms & conditions, courts by a privately-owned justice system, is a slippery slope to say the least.

    The distinction between government and private groups is 
    not a clean as you might think. At a large enough scale, 
    private groups can start to take on a role in society that 
    resembles that of a government, should we not then expect 
    them to be held to a standard that resembles that we expect 
    of governments?

In this case we're talking about Google's all-hands discussion about weeding out bad-faith actors. They weren't trying to silence people who simply thought Trump was the better candidate, they were talking about something very close to spam filtering. "Silence Republicans" is something that (even as a liberal) is something I'd be absolutely opposed to; filtering out outright fraudulent news sources (from any part of the political spectrum) is something we should all support.

We've been doing something similar as a country for many years. Notice how tabloids like the National Enquirer aren't typically lumped in with "real" news sources at the newsstand.

Should google have held the same weeping festival in case Hillary won, and someone was personally threatened that she would start a new war in Syria or lead to war in Russia? Which could lead to a nuclear war? Of course not. That would be as ridiculous as what happened now. You don't cater to those kinds of views in the workplace.

The correct response is not to hold a company meeting about how threatened anyone feels in an election, but to talk about the new products being rolled out and what you expect from your employees in their business life. And there are lots of blogs and opportunities for Google employees to express their political views outside the company. No public weeping of executives is required.

And it wasn't completely overblown, there were many Googlers trapped inside or outside the US immediately after Trump took power; one, for example, had no way for her parents to meet her newborn baby as they were all banned from travel. [0]

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-google-employee-on-trump-or...

Alt right conservatism is not a mainstream ideology anywhere in the world. Nor will it ever the way things are going.

Second, in a free and modern society it is ok to have diametrical oppossed views to any other Group. Which is an integral part of Democracy.

Funny enough, there are always people, mostly with pretty radical views, that are severly infuriated by contrarian views. The other way round it is just fine.

Also, you are forgetting it's a two way street. The other side is calling for the destruction of the press as well.

The only difference is that CNN and NYTimes have the power to destroy other press. Smaller companies like Breitbart and Infowars cannot.

How about we protect free speech and free press?

> Hard to deal in good faith under those circumstances.

Exactly. It's why nobody trusts media anymore. It's a real concern for society. And nobody in media appears to want to address it. Rather they are doubling down and making the situation even worse.

Google executives and Google as such have the Constitutionally protected right to attempt to influence elections by lawful means, and regulatory retaliation for such activism is exactly what the First Amendment exists to protect against.

(It's kind of ironic that the people arguing that Google should be regulated for advocating against the current administration and the Party behind it often think that the rules preventing churches from retaining their tax-code subsidy while actively campaigning for candidates should be abolished, as they assume those would be likely, on balance, to advocate for that party.)

https://www.fec.gov/data/disbursements/?two_year_transaction...