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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

This is an absurdly inaccurate headline. From the article:

> The email traffic, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, shows that employees proposed ways to “leverage” search functions and take steps to counter what they considered to be “islamophobic, algorithmically biased results from search terms ‘Islam’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Iran’, etc.” and “prejudiced, algorithmically biased search results from search terms ‘Mexico’, ‘Hispanic’, ‘Latino’, etc.”

So, employees saw that the existing algorithm was inappropriately prioritising prejudiced results, and discussed tweaking the algorithm accordingly. I don't see what's controversial about that, unless your understanding of Google is so basic that you really think results are calculated by a magic computer program in the sky. It's always been programmed by humans, within various parameters. It isn't objective and it never has been.

Now, is it worth discussing the enormous power Google has over people's perceptions as a result of their market dominance? Absolutely. But using a headline like that just plays into conspiracy theory.

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> So, employees saw that the existing algorithm was inappropriately prioritising prejudiced results, and discussed tweaking the algorithm accordingly.

I can well believe that those employees believed those results were 'prejudiced' and 'inappropriately prioritized', but I would point out that you are merely redescribing the WSJ's claims in different words and at no point have you offered a counter-argument or shown evidence that their discussed tweaks would have been non-partisan.

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> The Google emails were written on Sunday, Jan. 29, two days after Mr. Trump signed the first version of his travel order, which generally restricted immigration to the U.S. from several majority-Muslim countries. One of the emails, from an employee of the Search Product Marketing division, explained that there was a “large brainstorm” going throughout the company’s marketing division over how to respond. “Overall idea: Leverage search to highlight important organizations to donate to, current news, etc. to keep people abreast of how they can help as well as the resources available for immigrations [sic] or people traveling,” the email says.

> “Can we launch an ephemeral experience that includes Highlights, up-to-date info from the US State Dept, DHS, links to donate to ACLU, etc?” the email added.

> Several officials responded favorably to the overall idea. “We’re absolutely in…Anything you need,” one wrote.

> “To the extent of my knowledge, we’d be breaching precedent if we only gave Highlights access to organizations that support a certain view of the world in a time of political conflict,” the public-affairs executive said. “Is that accurate? If so, would we be willing to open access to highlights to [organizations] that…actually support the ban?”

I can well believe that those employees believed those results were 'prejudiced' and 'inappropriately prioritized'

I personally find it hard to believe that the average Google employee doesn't know and didn't, by that time, know, that Google's algorithms -- which introduce a selection pressure for content that causes outrage (in the name of greater "engagement", and that's been pretty thoroughly demonstrated) over content which contains facts -- were promoting awful things.

I find it very easy to believe that the average Google employee simply didn't care about that up until the moment it started affecting their friends and colleagues (the "Muslim ban" would have impacted some Google employees' ability to travel). Up until then, "politics" was something that happened to other people, and so they didn't have to bother about it.

Exactly. I used to think of myself as apolitical. But there's no "outside" the system.

I could ignore politics because the existing political dynamics worked for me and the people I cared about. This was tenable for me because the US was for decades controlled by centrists who agreed on a lot. But as XKCD graphs nicely, the era of centrism was basically 1940-1980:

https://xkcd.com/1127/large/

After that, the center-right block in the House steadily diminished, and was extinct by 2008. As many of the Republican Never Trump folks make clear, their party has become unrecognizable to them. Previous conservative standards like balanced budgets, rule of law, and personal virtue have become irrelevant there. It has shifted from a positive-sum game to a zero- or negative-sum game of pure political dominance.

As much as I enjoyed my youthful obliviousness and above-it-all sense of superiority, those are dead. The post-war political infrastructure has broken down, and restoring it is the work of decades. However much we want to ignore politics, it has stopped ignoring us.

Wow! So basically Google employees were using what most people believe is an apolitical search engine to push their particular political view?

Maybe not so surprising after the TGIF post-election video.

It sounds a lot more like Google employees were trying to remove overtly political content from apolitical search terms, but you do you.

One of their ideas was to place banner ads for non-profits who were fighting against the ban.

It sounds like adding political content to the search, not removing it.

Yes, that post has been edited quite dramatically from when I replied to it, unfortunately I'm not able to edit mine any more.

To put this into perspective, these algorithms, especially for autocomplete, have always been fiddled with by humans. Why? Because algorithms often produce terrible results, and few engineers want to stand behind an algorithm that coughs up bestiality results for vanilla queries about animals.

Terrible?

The autocomplete results were too honest. Sexual terms are more popular and that bestiality result has been proven to be the more popular site.

Popular is not what you want in a search engine. Precise interpretation of your query and retrieving relevant results is. Sometimes that's the most popular; sometimes it is an obscure journal article discussing exactly what you were after. In neither case should a vanilla animal query return bestiality.

I'd argue that an algorithm which is only able to do a search for 'most common query starting with" ignoring all context is a terrible algorithm.

Why would an obscure link come up first for a simple word? Perhaps you are logged in and it relates to your profile but for generic searches it shouldn't but if it did the link would quickly lose the obscure label anyhow.

Maybe the vanilla term isn't so vanilla if those terms are being used that way on the most popular sites.

What's inaccurate about the headline?

> the existing algorithm was inappropriately prioritising prejudiced results, and discussed tweaking the algorithm accordingly

This, to me, is perfectly described by the headline. The only difference is that you're applying the value judgments to the results by calling them inappropriate and prejudiced (which is fine). But if Google employees feel that results that support the travel ban are inappropriate or prejudiced, well then, yeah, they were discussing tweaking the algorithm to counter the travel ban. And it seems they were well aware they were doing this, and that it was fraught with peril, and decided against it, which I applaud them for. I don't see how you can describe the headline as absurdly inaccurate though, it's completely accurate.

> Now, is it worth discussing the enormous power Google has over people's perceptions as a result of their market dominance? Absolutely.

There was a TED talk covering this titled "We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads"[1].

It talks about how the same ad serving infrastructure that can segment populations into whether they are likely to buy X, can also segment people by political affiliation. Then you can simply target them and remind them to vote on election day (and it actually works and statistically affects voter turnout/results).

It is kind of crazy to think that the next election might be won by whoever can make a deal with Google/Facebook to target the precise swing voters they need. Facebook/google might even do the kingmaking themselves if they can figure out how to do it without backlash/leaks.

[1] https://youtu.be/iFTWM7HV2UI?t=820

Great idea.

On election day run get out and vote adwords ads for terms that target favourable voting blocks

Did you miss the part where that’s exactly what they did last election? (see leaked memo from Eliana Murillo)

Or did the sarcasm fly right over my head?

Sarcasm seems to be lost these days.

So many people seem to have this weird misconception that there can be no right answer to something just because one political party disagrees with another on it. I wish people would entertain the possibility that either side might actually just be wrong about things sometimes (often trivially). (hypothetically) It would not be "bias" to talk about one side being wrong much more than the other if that was actually the case.

I think a lot of people use this fallacious call to "give both sides an un-'biased' chance" to derail discussion in a very intellectually dishonest way when we should be reasoning about things without turning them into political arguments.

There are some subjects where this is correct and one side is definitely correct while the other isn't, global warming being the first subject that comes to mind. Global warming is real, there is scientific evidence of this, and anyone who doesn't believe in it is ignorant of this evidence.

However, there are many subjects where there is no single correct way to do things. How do we manage our culture? How does our society handle immigration properly? Should we promote certain ideals or family values? For these issues, if you _don't_ give both sides an un-biased chance, then you are picking sides.

Your motte and bailey arguments on global warming are not the way to approach this. Global warming is not the phrase used in nomenclature anymore, it is climate change because the worry is that humans are throwing the climate out of stability. However, where true disagreement occurs from those arguing against climate change is the level of impact humans have on the climate. The various models have to make a determination on the feedback loop of carbon dioxide into the overall earth system; it varies from model to model. This leads to the issue which an honest debate can be had: If anthropogenic climate change is occurring that will cause real damage to the planet, what is the range to adjust to and what should be done about it? If you believe strongly that the damage is occurring, would you be willing to wage war on countries who disregard the globe's needs and bring them to heel for their non compliance? China is throwing out massive amounts of air pollutants, getting them to compliance means shutting down the electrical means of them bringing themselves out of poverty.

The end result still remains: introducing bias.

Google is nothing but a collection of biases. Even in the early days, PageRank meant that Google was biased towards sites that get linked to more than others. That was a value judgement they made about what best served their customers. This is no different.

And in those early days, everyone knew that "citation clubs" were a way to attack Google's algorithm... just like how you attack academic citation indices or "impact factor". Then google defended against that, and then...

It only became a problem after the rise of unwanted political opinions.

It became a problem almost immediately. PageRank had issues because people got wise and formed link farms to cheat the system. So Google added more tweaks. Repeat this x10000 and you get to 2018.

The diversity of quality results has gone down. Page 2 use to have a few gems. Now one or two words will dominate and you see the same results for different queries that share two terms at the beginning.

This is a dangerous general-purpose justification which allows mega-corporations to manipulate global information flow in any way they like.

Now Google leadership doesn't just get to be wealthy, they get to manipulate how everyone else sees the world, with no limits or accountability, because hey everything is biased right?

It may sound good because they agree with you on this particular issue.

But this justification applies to any other government or corporation who can manage to seize the reins of technological power. You're making a memetic weapon that, soon, will be turned against you.

No. Neutrality is a real thing and it should be upheld as a serious goal and principle. Especially when we're taking about a group with such insane amounts of unjustified and undemocratic control over other people. We need to do everything we can culturally to make that influence less unequal.

You’re not wrong, but at the same time what’s the solution that isn’t just a matter of the people complaining manipulating global information flow in the way they like? Most of the time behind the flashlight-under-the-chin tales of potential doom, the solution seems to be a shift to whichever political pole the speaker prefers. I’d like a less restricted flow of information, but I don’t know how to get it, and no one seems to be offering good ideas. The best I can offer is that it’s important to fight for freedom to access any source, so you can compare and contrast and draw your own conclusions. Google can dominate convenience, it they don’t actually stop you from checking other search engines. A media outlet can have a major bias, but in a free country that doesn’t censor non-state media you can pick up other sources for comparison.

It’s messy, it’s work, but what are the alternatives that respects the 1st amendment? Just hand-waving some claims about “de facto monopolies” is a non-starter imo. How do we improve the situation without pretending that a given social medial or advertise company has to be regulated to death, and in a way that doesn’t just amount to, “Keep it biased, but it needs to be my preferred bias.”

I think this is a weird view of how bias works. statistical models are imperfect models and are always going to have lots of bias or variance. We typically want to bias models using domain expertise or other external factors.

This is like being mad at a company for using L1 regularization

The difference is how much practical diversity we'll have in models. With enough effective choice, the severity of biased models goes down, at least somewhat. Models biased in different directions can provide a variety of perspectives.

These are different uses of the word "bias". In the statistical sense there is an objectively true right answer and "bias" refers to the difference between a model's average answer and the average true answer. It has little to do with the lay use of the word to mean the application of an inappropriate subjective value judgement in a situation with no one true answer (unless you take an extremely anthropomorphic view of statistical formulas).

>Now Google leadership doesn't just get to be wealthy, they get to manipulate how everyone else sees the world, with no limits or accountability, because hey everything is biased right?

I'd argue the same thing about political parties that directly benefit from less educated citizens, defunding education. Or, political parties that directly benefit from less minorities voting, passing voter restriction laws.

Considering that the same party participating in both of the above is precisely the same party arguing for... Well I'm not sure exactly what, some kind of "fair time" thing for Google and Facebook? When we can't even get that for our talk radio shows anymore? Forget about it.

If we go capitalist free market, we go full fucking capitalist free market. If conservatives are worried Google is biased against them, they should make a conservative Google.

> I'd argue the same thing about political parties that directly benefit from less educated citizens, defunding education.

Where does that come from? America does not have a problem funding education. It loves to invest in education. It's the return on investment that seems to be missing.

>Under SALT, income that paid for public schools went untaxed at the federal level. Current law allows states that raise taxes to better fund public schools to receive a deduction through SALT. The Senate bill ends that ability. As states struggle to lessen the impact of the tax bill on citizens, there will be an outsized amount of pressure on the taxes that typically help public schools.

https://thinkprogress.org/taxes-schools-public-private-d89e5...

> The administration’s new “America First” budget, released Thursday, follows through on this promise by slashing funds for the Education Department by 13.5 percent, or $9.2 billion.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/03/trumps...

Education funding at local levels can be pathetically bad. So sure, someone can look at the doe and say "that's a bloated budget!" But the local politicians sure aren't helping. Why do teachers have to buy notebooks for their kids out of their own pocket? Why do so many teachers scrape by with 30, 40k/year salaries in places where that's definitely not affordable? These problems are real and they are happening in this country. Time just did a great piece on it, I highly recommend it.

Right. We collect plenty of taxes (and private spending and donations besides) for good education. Some of the highest funding levels in the world. But we're not spending it on education or teacher salaries. The problem is elsewhere. At all levels.

I never mentioned taxes, I said education is underfunded, and it's mostly the fault of local politicians, and it's typically republicans that contribute to this issue.

Really, I recommend the times peice. A good fix would be to stop tying school funding to property values.

> Google is nothing but a collection of biases.

That's not the problem, we know it, they know it, everyone knows. What is upsetting people is the pretense of them being unbiased. Now in this case they just discussed and it seems never implemented these measures.

Come to think of it maybe they should have implemented those measures. Maybe they should stop pretending to be unbiased and embrace the bias. It's not like anyone would be surprised by it. People were shocked about that leaked meeting video where Google executive were crying after the election results and referred to the loss as "we lost". But it shouldn't have been that surprising, it was exactly what I expected would be in the video.

> This is no different.

They took a political issue wanted to insert themselves in the middle of it by manipulating what facts people see regarding that topic. Now most here agree here with their position, so this doesn't bother us too much. But I don't really this as "the same as PageRank".

I guess just sort results alphabetically then? Or what's your idea?

Google's job is to return the result that the user is looking for. Certainly not results that come from manipulating the algorithm.

I'm guessing that users searching for "Mexico" are not overwhelmingly interested in diatribes of racial inferiority. An algorithm that heavily returns such results is obviously broken.

Yes. And I'm surprised by Google's insistence that they did not change their algorithm even though there appeared to be some algorithmic bias effect against Muslims and Latinos.

Wouldn't Google want to study that possible source of bias and fix it, or if not, explain it to the public or to the Googlers who saw it in the first place?

What about girlsinmexico? It's the most popular site related to Mexico. Should it come up first?

Google's job is in no way to provide you with the results you are looking for. If showing you sites you are not interested in, keeps you engaged longer/sells more ads they will.

There have been a number of complaints that Google has racially/sexually inappropriate results (i. e. people have reported that searching for "Jews" returns anti-Semitic results), so this could be seen as a way to balance the scales rather than introducing further bias.

Source: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/found-out-about-jew/

I’m sure they also are “biased” in de-prioritizing content from fringe conspiracy theory sites too, is tha a problem as well?

>So, employees saw that the existing algorithm was inappropriately prioritising prejudiced results, and discussed tweaking the algorithm accordingly. I don't see what's controversial about that, unless your understanding of Google is so basic that you really think results are calculated by a magic computer program in the sky. It's always been programmed by humans, within various parameters. It isn't objective and it never has been.

sorry, you're straight up wrong here:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/found-out-about-jew/

> “We find this result offensive, but the objectivity of our ranking function prevents us from making any changes,”

the results were not manually massaged for political reasons in the past. i don't have as much confidence in that remaining the case these days, though.

> I don't see what's controversial about that

Really? You don't see what's controversial about a pro-life employee seeing pro-choice results and deciding to alter the search results? Or what if a republican employee decided to scrub prejudiced anti-republican results and pro-democrat results? What about a chinese employee seeing prejudice "tiannamen square" results and deciding it needed to be removed? You don't like prejudiced results but you are okay with prejudiced google employees creating prejudiced results for you?

> It isn't objective and it never has been.

Actually it was. Google of the 2000s was nothing like what it is today. Google used to be fairly agnostic and served the results honestly when they were desperate to gain market share. Now they are intentionally altering results for a political agenda. That is very dangerous.

But you are right. The headline is incorrect. It should be "Prejudiced Google Workers Discussed Tweaking Search Function..."

Google used to be an honest representation of the internet. Now it's just a prejudiced representation of their prejudiced employees.

> Absolutely. But using a headline like that just plays into conspiracy theory.

Stop it. It isn't a conspiracy theory just because you don't like the truth. We have actual video footage of google leaders and their employees openly talking about manipulating the public. We know they tried to manipulate the 2016 election. They are pretty open about their agenda.

It's one of the reasons why I use duckduckgo. Better search results and less spying and less data collecting.

  > What about a chinese employee seeing prejudice "tiannamen square" results

Facts that you don't agree with are not prejudice.

Exactly. Imagine the uproar if the first result of “holocaust” was a site saying it is a hoax

> Facts that you don't agree with are not prejudice.

Who is disagreeing with facts. It's the interpretation that people disagree with.

"Tiannamen square massacre" vs "Bringing order to tiannamen square"?

I believe all interpretations should be allowed. You believe biased google employees should get to choose.

So you are for biased chinese employees altering google search results then?

That it is incorrect to say that personal bias or subjective interpretation has never played any role whatsoever in search results is a vacuous truth. It's a meaningless tautology. And it's fallacious to use it to excuse for injecting any sort of political ideology into search results.

> inappropriately prioritising prejudiced results

Inappropriate to whom? Google search reflects relevance and to tweak the results would be to replace relevant results with biased ones. In the emails they admit that it would be an act of political activism.

The article is trying to not-so-subtly prop up the conservative meme that google is a leftist empire out to censor conservative voices.

A meme? Did you happen to watch the video of the post election all hands?

Where in the video did they pledge to censor conservative voices?

They don't have to. The singular monotone reaction from the top echelon is message enough. I'm no fan of Trump or his policies, but neither am I a fan of an environment where it is assumed we all have the same political views. For a company of over 100k employees, an event like that can't be seen as inclusive.

I probably wouldn't feel welcome at Fox News. Can I force them to become more liberal in the name of "diversity of thought"? Or does that meme only work when it's trying to promote people on the right?

One can think that Google has a right to a viewpoint and also point out that the viewpoint isn't objective.

Google can do whatever they want as long as they are honest about it. If they want to call themselves “The progressive search engine” then at least they are being upfront about it.

The concern is not that they're currently doing it at scale, but that they're about to.

It also frankly looks like they're already doing it at scale for Google News specifically, vs general web search results.

Where in the video did they do anything wrong?

This article shows that a company which claimed "we lost" in a post election meeting has actively discussed censoring search results related to conservative policies - no subtly required, just facts.

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