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.
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'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.
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.