The problem in this case is this particular company believes they have enough power to decide the outcome of elections. Or more accurately, the problem is that they might be right.
This has been true for a long time - it was true for multiple Murdoch companies since the 80's. Hearst declared, in 1898 "You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war"[1]
edit: to be clear, I'm not condoning this reality, but it is not a new phenomenon.
Very specifically, if a site has applied editorial discretion like a publisher does, it is then liable for what is said. If it just reposts content provided by others, it has a safe harbor. By my lay reading, automated filtering intended to support a specific point of view would seem to be a grey area.
> Google and other social media sites claim to be neutral platforms. This distinction is important because certain protections given to neutral platforms don’t necessarily apply to publishers.
It is false. There is no such "distinction" in terms of protections applied to online platforms.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
Scroll down to section C.
1. No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
2. No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
2.a any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
2.b any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]
you should keep reading:
https://ilt.eff.org/Defamation__CDA_Cases.html#Exercise_of_E...
But if so, they already spectacularly failed to prevent a Trump election. Or maybe they failed to predict it, but aren’t they uniquely positioned to do so? How does this paint a picture of dangerous political influence?
That's all part and parcel of what that All-hands meeting discussed; I'd highly recommend finding it and listening to it.
They've demonetized/dropped ads for satire news websites, which also includes The Onion, but that was a response to the criticism that they are enabling fake news to become more prominent.
So for example, if I only ever feed an AI training data about doctors and nurses in which the male examples are only ever used for doctor, and the female examples are only ever used nurse, then when you or anyone else ask's what a doctor or nurse is, the output has a gender bias. This is Google Search becoming an unwitting amplifier in cognitive bias and stereotypes.
Now you might counter that "most" doctors are male, and "most" nurses are female and that's reality, but when I ask for the definition of what a doctor is and what it does, I'm not asking for demographics.
These guys are taking concerns that are openly discussed in AI conventions among experts and ethicists as a worry, and twisting it to fit their own scared political agenda.
We've had examples of this already with image classification networks classifying dark-skinned people are gorillas, which is clearly because the training dataset itself is unconsciously biased.
How do you detect when these biases occur? You need a diverse group of human evaluations to review the outcomes to make sure the AI hasn't learned the wrong biases. Or at the very least, you need that group of people to construct a good integration test set to look for misclassifications.
Seems what's going on, is someone taking complex technical issues, twisting them, and feeding them to politicians like Gohmert who clearly won't understand any nuance.
If Veritas wants government to regulate AI to protect conservative viewpoints, he may end up regretting getting the government involved.
They were not trying to prevent it. Google was just a search engine, trying to do their best. Since Trump, their view on information has changed from 'neutral' to 'fairness'. Their view of 'fairness' is politically loaded, and examples are given in the docs.
There is no doubt that Google can change the outcome of elections - this is for sure. If they really wanted to put their finger on the scales hard, they could.
I'm very concerned about the recent revelations, and I don't think that their 'fairness' policy is actually fair, but I wonder how much effect it will actually have. It's so hard to measure.
Instead it looks like they ignored it at best.
It would seem possible to me that if power was distributed widely over competitors it might be even harder to defend against, as fake news drives clicks which drives market share, everything about combatting fake news has been extremely polarizing (see this thread) and might drive bad PR to companies that take it seriously, a more diverse landscape might lead to a much more complicated regulatory landscape across competing products, and just a basic bystander effect of each executive team being more able to shirk responsibility because other people are too.
If I could propose anything, it'd be that we stop letting outrage and clicks drive our political machine, but we all know that will never happen.
A centralized source of power means a single target is all that is needed for manipulation to be effective. This is the basic premise behind decentralization in the first place.
Widely disturbed power is difficult to manipulate consistently without the manipulation becoming more easily visible, usually in the form of uncanny movement of many independent units as one, which most people can detect as suspicious.
The topics they brought up were left vs right, democrat vs republican, Conservatism vs progressive, women vs men, white vs black, poor vs rich, Hillary vs Trump, immigration, trade policy, globalization, brexit, Hillary campaign points, polling data and the failure of accuracy in it. A bit about net neutrality, regulations and taxes.
Project Veritas video directly say that Google executive Jen Gennai want to influence the next US election. The leaked 'all-hands' video from the Google leadership show that their political position is internally stated as democrat. Combined it gives us a very strong implication that Google might try to influence the next election.
National elections would be better off with less outside influence, be that other nations or companies that holds so much power, money and influence to rival nations. It would be great if Google, Twitter, and Facebook worked on removing information bubbles, bots and trolls, but I would not cheer if they simply replaced Russia as a force that influence national elections all over the world.
Aside from that, Russians spending $100,000 in a presidential race that cost $2,000,000,000 is just 1-part-per-20000. It's less than Bill got for his speech. It's just 0.005% of the total. That could be the personal project of a sufficiently dedicated non-wealthy individual. It's lost in the noise.
Wasn't that the main job of the FBI and CIA, two agencies with budgets that dwarf reason? These agencies' responsibilities are completely lacking from the public discourse.
CEO's tend err on the side of hubris, and it'd seem they all have strong political views. I think power maybe does that. So in a more informal 'TGIF' setting, I'm not surprised to see some of it come out, however uncomfortable (whether or not I disagree with the position is different, but I definitely disagree with political dialogue at the office by CEO's).
But today's revelation indicate more broadly material policy, i.e. 'not just off the cuff CEO's remarks'. Also, there's some information regarding the efforts of AI to 'rebalance' information, it's downright scary.
I don't believe that their activity is remotely 'neutral' and given some of the statements it seems they are blissfully ignorant of how people could possibly disagree with them. It's definitely a bubble.
Today's revelations have crossed the rubicon for me, I'm putting Google effectively in the 'bad company' camp.
I used to trust Google's goodwill and talent more than government, but now I don't.
I want Google to be broken up, and for there to be some kind of transparency and oversight into their algorithms.
That said, I would caution against taking Veritas at face value. Sometimes their claims match what is said, sometimes a bit more context tones down the severity of the comments. For example, I have seen them take someone making a hypothetical quote, and then make it seem as if that was the person giving their own opinion, something made clearer when they posted the full video later.
There's a difference between everyone being rightly concerned with the apparent rise of fascism/nationalism, which doesn't mesh with the culture of a global cosmopolitan company. But the fact that people are concerned about it doesn't meant they're engineering outcomes.
Almost all of the suggestions post-2016 that have been discussed in the tech sector have been around 1) stopping foreign interference from hacking, IRA/50-cent army, etc and 2) stopping the spread of outright falsehoods using the platform. Conservative movements are freaking out as if this has something to do with censoring posts, say, of calling for deregulation or tax cuts.
Some of those boil down to deliberately labeling videos or articles that are paid for and funded by foreign governments (e.g. Chinese or Russian government "news" networks on YouTube) and some of those boil down to checking arguments against known fact checking databases.
Is fact checking "anti-Trump"? Is trying to block online political bot spam "anti-Trump"? or is this anti-forces-that-undermine-democracy-with-propaganda?
Should Facebook not vet foreign political ads which try to stir up a racial confrontation by using false claims that Antifa or BLM activists are going to appear and do something which they weren't?
Because what I see is, attempts to block these activities are read as anti-conservative. And if I were a conservative, frankly, I'd be embarrassed if the way my party wins is that I have to defend the right of Macedonian spammers to spread fake memes about pedophilia dungeons.
We are entering an era with Deepfakes that are going to make determining what is true and what isn't 10x harder for the average person. Trying to combat this, and activities of the IRA for example, should be seen as something that needs to be done on a large scale.
Otherwise, there's a large Denial of Service attack coming for Democracy itself.
The flip side of all of the conservatives whining about Google censorship, is the vast criticism from the left that YouTube is a platform for the spread of alt-right extremism. So which is it? If I go on YouTube right now, there are ample left-wing channels calling for Google to be broken up because it's a platform for the spread of hate.
Both sides are claiming victim hood, and asking for the other side's content to be ranked below theirs. What are we going to end up with, a Fox-news like Google? When the big-3 news networks were broken up lots more cable news channels, are we better off, or worse off?
Now partisans of the left can watch MSNBC all day, and partisans of the right can watch Fox news all day, and the 'filter bubble' has become more extreme now that media has been fragmented into 500 "news" channels. Thus breaking up the large media and tech could make things worse, could make combatting foreign propaganda injection much harder.
I think the it's ok to disagree, that's the whole point of discussion.
That doesn't deserve a downvote on HN.
I don't think anyone is concerned about Google trying to get past fake news (or rather, surely there are few voices there)
The issues are more disconcerting, like senior executives trying to make sure that 'Trump never happens again', the assumption being either 'voters were so deeply misinformed' or that 'Trump is illegitimate because of who he is'.
If the former, well, ok, possibly, but I feel that G will end up leaning on the bias to try to tell us 'how bad Trump' is. If it's the later, well, this would be deeply anti-democratic.
The new policy sheds light on how they'll go about this - in the article they reference to how, when people type 'Clinton emails' that there should be no reference to the ostensible scandal. This is possibly problematic as Hillary Clinton was asked to produce emails by the Feds and decided to delete most of them: this is a legit scandal. Arguably, G is suppressing this information because they don't deem it factual? Or newsworthy?
More extensively, they gave examples of how they are going to move from 'truth' to 'fair' in an intersectional manner by offering ups suggestions that 'balance historical injustice'.
Open google.com right how, if you type 'women can' you get suggestions such as 'vote, fly, do anything'. If you type 'men can' you'll get as a first suggestion 'have babies'.
While the former is uncontroversial (i.e of course women can vote and fly), is this really Google's place to start to suggest such things unless they are material to historical searches? And the male suggestion, doesn't really line up with the female example. 'Men can have babies'? Well, this a very narrow and specifically intersectional ideal, while maybe it's technically true, I don't see how bringing up that issue in the context of someone searching is relevant to anything at all (again, unless it fits some kind of algorithmic purpose i.e. it's a popular search).
The notion that Google, the manger of the world's information, is going to 'right historical wrongs' is in some ways very good, I mean, who doesn't want to make 'wrong things right'? But of course it's utterly Orwellian in practice, with a small group of ideologues deciding what we should see and not, based on their unique worldview.
The implications of this new 'right the wrongs of history' worldview on search results is beyond scary.
So yes: getting rid of fake news, trying to point out narrative, calling out lies - sure.
Problematic: trying to feed people content that Google deems 'more appropriate'.
Scary: modifying search results and suggestions to be consistent with their worldview and to 'right the wrongs of history'.
I don't trust the talent and overall goodwill of Google anymore, I think they need to be regulated and there needs to be more transparency.
I also think it would be ideal to end the monopoly and try on actual diversity, i.e. real competition.
That's not what she said, she said "Trump situation", and by situation, one would assume, the massive abuse of social platforms to spread false and misleading data about Clinton, which we know from scientific studies, that false stories were reshared far more by Trump supporters than vice versa, and that a non-trivial chunk of these fake gifs came from overseas.
Isn't that a situation we don't want to repeat?
Also, I'd argue the definition of a Doctor is genderless, so if I ask Google what a doctor is, I don't want it telling my daughter "A doctor is a male human being who..."
This isn't "social justice", this is fact.
You can call for breaking Google up all you want, but AI ethicists at every company are concerned about cognitive bias creeping into machine learning, and correcting that bias will be perceived you as putting your finger on the scales to 'correct the wrongs of history'
I'm just telling you, this view goes beyond Google, and pretty much any honest data scientist is going to be looking to combat bias in his training data.
Anti-social justice warrior people arent going to like it, but the genie is out of the bottle government isn't going to stop the march towards unbiasing our databases.
See also: waitress, actress
1) Can you please cite those "scientific studies"?
2) Even if what you said is true. I am not sure how much it has anything to do with Google. Most of influences happened on Facebook or other social media platforms. How can Google prevent things from happening again on Facebook?
I don't know how one would assume the term "Trump situation" would imply "all the lies about Clinton on social media".
A more direct interpretation of her statement would be "we don't like Trump".
Now - of course you could be right, but I don't see how her words communicate that fact at all.
If the exec was concerned about 'all the lies about Clinton' - why didn't she just say that?
I don't think that 'getting rid of lies' is counter factual, nor is it controversial.
If this exec was communicating something along the lines of:
"There was some interference and misinformation in the last election, and it possibly affected the outcome, we want to make sure people are well informed"
That'd be great! There would be no scandal, nothing to talk about. This would be Google just 'doing their job' in a fairly conventional manner. But she didn't use that language, she went much further.
>>> "I'd argue the definition of a Doctor is genderless,"
Nobody is going to argue that.
But what does that have to do with offering up as a 'first suggestion' when people type 'men can' ---> 'have babies'?
Making sure the world is informed about that very specific 'fact' that does require some contextualization, is an ideological problem, and this has nothing to do with 'un-biasing' our databases': it's projecting a whole set of ideals.
So the 'first problem' with the 'Social Justice search algorithm approach' is that it will extend far beyond 'un-biasing'. It will go straight into ideology and narrative.
But the more subtle problem of 'un-biasing our databases' is the fact that it's going to be difficult to determine what bias is.
So instead of 'Doctor' how about - 'Truck Driver'. About 6% of Truck Drivers are female. Is this a 'bias' problem in society? Do we need to 'unbias' our data to make sure that every representation of 'Truck Driver' is 50%/50%?
What about race? In Sweden, there are almost zero Black Doctors, mostly by virtue of the fact there's very few Black people in Sweden of course. So, in Swedish search results, how do we represent the image of 'Doctor'? 15% Black? 50% Black?
What's the 'unbiased' racial representation of 'Doctor' in a country that fairly ethnically homogenous?
So the very mention of 'un-biasing databases' is a frightening, Orwellian concept, again, because it'll take a considerable amount ideology for someone to determine what 'unbiased' even is.
>>> "Anti-social justice warrior people aren't going to like it,"
"Anti-Social Justice Warrior" people are not generally not 'Anti Social Justice' - and they are not likely opposed to having search results showing a Female, or Black Doctor, or Pilot (or even Truck Driver), but there's a very legitimate concern about the extent to which information is manipulated, and how it's manipulated.
The examples given in the reference article I feel go beyond issues of 'getting rid of fake news' and go far beyond merely showing a 'female Doctor' on a search for Doctor.
The terminology she used was along the lines of 'correcting for historical injustice'. Terminology like that, and more directly 'un-biasing our databases' I interpret as 're-writing information to suit my view of the world and how it ought to be' - which is surely 'Social Justice' in the minds of those tampering with the data, but it's not to others.
Given the magnitude of the influence of Google, this issue has to be addressed in a more open and transparent fashion, and it probably needs to be regulated (and publicly communicated) - and in any case there needs to be more competition in search.
Edit: I should add, doing things like carefully altering AI training data so that the tech doesn't erroneously and in a 'biased' fashion identify 'black people' as more likely to be criminal is totally fair game (as we learned with MS's 'racist' AI). But we should be thoughtful and deliberative about such things.
How about we just not make any interpretation until Veritas, known for deliberate -- to be charitable -- "creative" editing in the past, releases the full unedited exchange without cherry picked statements out of context?
"So, in Swedish search results, how do we represent the image of 'Doctor'? "
How about a GAN-generated of an doctor with randomized features? The issue isn't really imagery, past instances of bias in machine learned text results has translated for example, gender pronouns according to historical bias, so if you translate foreign language text containing doctor, sometimes even female doctors, it'll end up replacing with male pronouns.
>I interpret as 're-writing information to suit my view of the world and how it ought to be'
How about rewriting it so it fits categorical definitions? The definition of a doctor does not specify gender or race, so any automatically generated extracted knowledge should not leak cultural bias.
> mostly by virtue of the fact there's very few Black people in Sweden of course
Geo-centric thinking. Google is a global service. People in Africa search for doctors. People in Asia search for doctors. So why should every query return a white, male, doctor? Shouldn't a global service either a) be localized to return culturally relevant results for the context of the region or b) be internationalized so that it returns unbiased results that can be applied anywhere?
The problem is when a Swedish engineering office ships a feature to Google globally, and all of a sudden, their own cultural biases turn up globally. This isn't just social justice, it's bad for business!
This is a classic example of why there is strength in diversity hiring, and monoculture is bad if you're a global brand.
But if someone takes their time to write several paragraphs of point by point response, using proper grammar, and non-hostile or personal attacks, they should be rewarded, even if we don't like what they're saying.
This particular video discusses how all of these individual issues (such as Jen Gennai's comments) point to a growing and worsening trend of the collapse of civil discourse in America, and where that could potentially lead us.
No one who is living pay check to pay check wants to think about climate change or doing anything which doesn’t immediately benefit their economic situation in some quick fix way.
Our political system lacks any generosity now as well. Losers don’t accept their loss and do their jobs according to procedure. Mitch McConnell for example, or the Oregon example of denying a quorum instead of just voting no. The general strategy of just not allowing government to function if you know you’re going to lose is a bad precedent.
Agreed. I really think the two-party system will lead to long-term strategic paralysis of the US government. I'd say it's already undermining our ability to implement infrastructure re-capitalization programs or maintain consistent international relations/foreign policy with anyone other than the UK, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel (the last two spend a TON of money bribing our politicians from both parties).
If we get into a shooting war with China this century (which I fully expect), only then will we see the folly of these bi-partisan obstructionist tactics.
There was even a paper released after the election showing that Google favored Clinton over Trump in about +20% of the searches.
But nobody ever believes this stuff, because:
1) The vast majority don't pay attention/or are too biased for a certain political candidate to care/believe it
2) "The Algorithm™ can only ever be objective and true" (i.e. Google would never tweak the algorithm for its own interests; ignore the antitrust cases saying the opposite)
3) Google can do no evil. Google can only ever be the good guy in the story
Could you possibly link this? It would be highly appreciated. The issue that most of these comments are usually coming from right-wing conpriacy theorists like Alex Jones etc. This means that although, the comment might actually be true, but the reputation that they have built up leads to it being instantly denied.
I would love to read the paper and see how they found that out. Whether its the algorithm favoring Clinton or is it simply the case of their being more results favoring Clinton.