Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account | Hacker News Reader

Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

nytimes.com

192 pointsdvt238 comments

It might be more appropriate to link to a indepdent article about this rather than Gabbard's site. Here is one from The Verge [1].

It sounds like Google's fraud/spam algorithms automatically triggered the suspension (maybe due to a large increase in spend meant to build on Gabbard's post debate momentum). The account was unlocked after human intervention. Gabbard insinuates the initial suspension was politically motivated, which seems hard to believe. But either way, it highlights a long standing problem with Google giving algorithms so much power. It is also potentially more damaging for the all of us who aren't presidential candidates and can't get our accounts quickly restored if we mistakenly anger some unknown Google algorithm.

[1] - https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/25/8930373/google-tulsi-gabb...

I was considering linking the NYT article[1] but consciously decided against it. I don't even particularly support Tulsi Gabbard, but I'd rather go to the horse's mouth, so to speak, and let people make up their own minds. Also, her blog has no intrusive ads or paywalls.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/technology/tulsi-gabbard-...

That is a fair viewpoint. I am just a little cautious of only hearing one side of a lawsuit, especially when that side is a political campaign and therefore is very concerned with spin. Gabbard's account has a lot of political grandstanding in it that you wouldn't find in a independent article.

> Gabbard insinuates the initial suspension was politically motivated

The subtext I'm reading is that the "major" political accounts probably have specific flags set by Google internally to prevent automated shut-offs like this. If Google is not applying these whitelist flags to all candidates in a fair and systematic fashion, it would effectively be utilizing their corporate resources to disproportionately benefit certain candidates at the expense of others.

>it would effectively be utilizing their corporate resources to disproportionately benefit certain candidates at the expense of others

Which is still not illegal.

Fox News does it all the time.

Would it be legal for Fox News to price political ads based on whether they agree with the bias?

It is not legal.

Under what law?

In the US, it would be Communications Act of 1934, as amended (Title 47 United States Code).

Aha:

https://www.fcc.gov/media/policy/statutes-and-rules-candidat...

Yeah, Google probably has no legal obligation to be an equal-opportunity ad platform however they really should be more careful when it comes to internal procedures like this. For instance whitelisting all potential candidates would have been a better idea.

Besides, if they are so eager to make algorithms decide things like this only to be fixed later by a human, they should at least set better thresholds or include some heuristics to find correlations that might legitimize the increase in spending or clickthrough.

However, Google does have legal liability for damages. If you hire me to do a task, and my ineptitude costs you a substantial sum, you can sue accordingly.

Google users have reasonable expectations for monetization, and the shockingly arbitrary & rapid demonetization without notice nor recourse, usually during a narrow window of opportunity, certainly is actionable.

Would be easy for Google to simply withhold payment subject to review, rather than deny payment altogether for the contended period.

Ineptitude doesn't create any legal liability. And loss of potential revenue isn't a basis for establishing damages.

Methinks Google would have a hard time establishing, or even admitting to, ineptitude as a legal defense.

That's debatable. Once certain kind of social interaction happens exclusively on a single platform or one of a few platforms, it can be argued (IANAL) that these platforms, even if privately owned, now have a public function - and thus have a "dual nature", partly public and private (that's an actual formal term in some non-US legal systems).

Google is a monopoly. Fox News is not.

How is google a monopoly? Every day we have people on HN telling us how they switched to bing or DDG.

Is HN a good indication of the total search market? 99% of the people I interact with don't even know about DDG or how to change the default search engine on their browsers.

Monopoly status is legally irrelevant (in direct terms) when it comes to political activity.

Now, it's true that (especially natural) monopoly status is often a justification for laws imposing common carrier rules, but such laws have not been adopted which apply to Google in the activity in question , whether or not such would be a desirable policy, so their alleged monopoly status isn't indirectly relevant that way, either.

In-kind political favors by companies is expressly illegal under FEC regulations. Google propping up a candidate or suppressing another is effectively campaign contributions (or suppression) worth millions of dollars by Google to certain candidates, in violation of FEC regulations.

The monopoly status has weight in such cases, as it can be construed as illegal electioneering, given Google's control over speech discovery on the internet.

> In-kind political favors by companies is expressly illegal under FEC regulations.

Yes, but monopoly status is irrelevant to that. It's as illegal from a non-monopoly as a monopoly and an act which legally isn't an in-kind contribution by a non-monopoly isn't transformed into one when done by a monopoly.

And policies which are not targeted for or against a particular candidate that happen to affect a candidate differently are not, even presumptively, in-kind contributions under the law—there is no “disparate impact” rule for political content as there is for, e.g., racial discrimination in employment.

> there is no “disparate impact” rule ...

There are rules against circumventing campaign contribution laws. Intentional suppression (as alleged) of Tulsi's speech, or that of any other candidate, is equivalent to donations to her opponents of millions of dollars, given Google's scale, without following FEC rules on the same.

> There are rules against circumventing campaign contribution laws.

Yes.

> Intentional suppression (as alleged)

Sure, the allegation is of something illegal

There is pretty much zero evidence presented that favors the conclusion alleged over a policy that is not illegally specifically targeted but happens to adversely impact the candidate.

But the allegation is itself a way of getting a not insignificant quantity of free media, which is a sufficient reason for a candidate that is polling at <1% in most Democratic primary polls at not above 2% in the most favorable, and who has raised close to an order of magnitude less money than the top tier Democratic candidates, to make it. The fact is, Gabbard’s never been anything but a third-tier candidate and no one would have any reason to lift a finger to suppress her campaign because it was never going anywhere.

It becomes illegal and election interference when that Corp is a monopoly with effective control of speech and discovery on the internet. No law entitles Google to gaslight America and interfere with democracy.

Under what law?

Multiple FEC laws where companies are barred from electioneering in kind, which is exactly what is alleged to be happening here.

Political activity by companies is regulated. A petroleum company cannot offer in-kind donations of "unlimited" gas to a candidate, without flouting FEC campaign contribution and electioneering laws. Likewise, Google cannot artificially prop-up, or suppress a candidate without breaking FEC regulations

That has nothing in particular to do with whether Google is a monopoly or not, though. Google doesn't graduate into being regulated by the FEC just because it's big.

Tulsi and the article are specific in their mention of Google's 88% market share, because it is material to her being heard in 2019, when most of our communication is online.

The FEC has no mandate to regulate monopolies, but when a monopoly with the power to manipulate elections violates electioneering laws, it automatically becomes the most egregious offender, and the focus of any logic based decision making at the FEC.

Obviously, these are still allegations, but Tulsi has won many elections over 15 years, and her campaign is likely seasoned in managing Google advertising accounts. Which is why her allegations seem believable, given her overt criticism of Google, and Google employees' support of other candidates

> Tulsi and the article are specific in their mention of Google's 88% market share

They can be as specific as they want, but it's immaterial as to whether a law was broken. It may be material, if a law was broken, to the argument for particular degree of damages, and it's certainly key to Gabbard’s ploy for free media independent of any legal relevance it has.

Which is still not illegal.

But it feels so very slimy. Also, such events seem to happen with alarming frequency. (I'm thinking of people's gmail accounts that disappear when their posts go viral, then get quickly restored.) What if electric utilities were like, "oops!" then claim an "algorithm" shut off the power to your campaign HQ. What if internet providers were doing things like that. In those cases, people could switch providers. In the case of online ads, I'm not sure that's a viable option for a campaign and many others.

> Which is still not illegal.

I think it most of europe it is illegal. Not so in the US ?

More importantly, who cares about campaign ads when the election coverage that’s supposedly impartial is larger age more frequent. The relentless focus on the Republican candidate we hate most by the US media did more to elect Trump than any ads.

Glad to hear that even liberals set the bar at "Fox News does it - it must be okay." There is no more moral ground on either side.

BUT Tulsi has bought and paid for the Google Ads that were disabled during a critical SIX hours when interest in her was high and her top placed ad would have driven traffic to her donation page. She BOUGHT that ad time just as much as an advertiser buys Superbowl ad time. This was an outright breach of contract.

Pretty sure her campaign wasn't charged for ads that weren't shown. If you buy a Superbowl ad and it wasn't shown and you weren't charged for it, it isn't a breach of contract.

In that hypothetical, it would definitely be a breach of contract. If you paid for an ad during the Super Bowl expecting it to be run, and then it wasn't, that's a breach. Refunding your money may or may not make you whole. What if that was the only way to reach your target customers, and now you can't do it for another year?

There are contracts you can breach and just provide a refund, and no one is worse off. But that's not always the case, and any material failure to not perform under the contract is a breach.

It's quite possible to structure a contract such that payment entitles you to either some other benefit or a refund; whether there is a breach at all depends on the terms of the contract.

And it is the norm that return of consideration is the limit to damages for breach of contract; the exceptional circumstances permitting additional recovery almost all involve you having—both in fact and in the other parties knowledge (and, IIRC, generally requires this to be expressly part of the body of agreement in the contract)—relied on the promise in the contract to forego some other opportunity that is lost in the breach.

> it is the norm that return of consideration is the limit to damages for breach of contract

What contract law are you reading? The standard damages for breach of contract are called compensatory damages... meaning they put you in the same place you were in had the contract not been breached.

Suppose you sign a contract to buy $1000 of widgets, but the seller never sends the widgets, and instead you have to go out and buy the widgets from someone else for $2000. You have a pretty clear breach of contract claim for the extra $1000 you needed to pay someone else.

And Facebook supported Obama. It’s not like Silicon Valley attempts to be impartial on any level.

https://ijr.com/ex-obama-campaign-director-fb/

> A former Obama campaign official is claiming that Facebook knowingly allowed them to mine massive amounts of Facebook data — more than they would’ve allowed someone else to do

https://www.rt.com/usa/421808-obama-facebook-mine-data/

Carol Davidsen, former director for media analytics for Obama’s 2012 campaign, has poured oil onto the fire by reveling in a series of tweets that Facebook allowed them to do “things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do.”

That reportedly included “suck[ing] out the entire social graph” – an individual’s network of friends on Facebook – in a bid to target more and more potential voters through friends’ friends on social media.

...

After Facebook “realized” what the Obama campaign staffers had been doing, they preferred to turn a blind eye for one simple reason: “they were on our side,” Davidsen claimed.

They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.

That is entirely possible but I don’t trust Russia Today as a source, and, I have never heard of IJR before. Would like to see other sources saying the same.

Keep on mind the top post is recommending we read a Vox media site.

Last time I checked, Vox media isn't tied to, nor funded by the Russian government. Russia Today (RT) is.

Is Fox News funded by the Russian Government? If not, does that make them ok? NPR is funded by the US government does that make everything they say untrue?

Seems like it might be better to use critical thinking of work off original sources rather than trusting any media organization to do that for you.

That's what I do in general with articles. Russia Today has a pretty consistent and documented history of being a propaganda outlet for the Russian government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)#Propaganda_cla...

The New York Times has a documented history of being a propaganda outlet for the US government: https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2014/07/01/how-the-iraq-wa...

Just curious do you bring that up in every time someone quotes them as well?

The Wikipedia article says that _critics_ of RT regard it as a propaganda outlet... which is not quite what you said.

TBH though, RT has a bunch of Russian-angle propaganda in some of its shows. Those are mostly the shows hosted by actual Russians, or with Russian/living-in-Russia panelists; and their newscasts. Other shows, particularly those by non-Russian journalists/creators, aren't like that. Of course, it is a Russian state entity which selects which people and shows get to be on the network. It seems to me like the main influence on the non-Russian shows is that they refrain from covering or referring to internal Russian affairs and politics.

Russia Today has had multiple journalists resign, citing they could not support their propaganda efforts in good conscience. One journalist resigned on air, apologizing for “whitewashing Putin's action” in downing mh17. Another resigned rather than leave the safety of the US and travel to Russian occupied Crimea. To act like these are commonplace occurrences in journalism strains credulity.

They've just been fined by the UK broadcasting regulator for systemic and repeated bias in reporting the Novichok poisonings, and withdrawing their broadcast licence was considered.

Vox is not a conspiracy theory laden government propaganda outlet.

Exactly. That was the point I was trying to make in my previous comment.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2018/03/19/why-are...

> As the Times put it, the massive exporting of private user data triggered repeated alarms at Facebook due to the volume of profile data going out the door, but that “in each case, the company was satisfied the campaign was not violating its privacy and data standards.” In all, through its data efforts, the campaign ended up with a database of 15 million persuadable voters.

> In short, according to the Times’ reporting, which is borne out by many other reports of the time, the Obama campaign engaged in nearly identical activity to what Cambridge Analytica is claimed to have done: they took a set of users who willingly contributed their data to a cause and quietly mined their friend lists, downloading immense volumes of private material from unwitting individuals that never authorized, let alone had any idea, that a political campaign was harvesting their information from Facebook simply because a person they were connected with had given the organization permission to harvest their information.

https://nypost.com/2018/03/20/obamas-former-media-director-s...

> Obama’s former media director: Facebook was once ‘on our side’

> A former media director for the Obama campaign said Facebook allowed them to access the personal data of its users in 2011 because the social media giant was “on our side.”

> “They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side,” Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, wrote Sunday on Twitter.

> Davidsen said she and her team were able to gather massive amounts of personal information from Facebook users, as well as their friends.

Here’s Carol Davidsen’s Twitter account where this entire story comes from

https://mobile.twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997

Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.

https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568130117459975?s=20

They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.

https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997?s=20

>Fox News does it all the time.

FB and G are natural monopolies, while Fox News is a branded commodities dealer.

It's totally reasonable for Google to draw the line somewhere in an exceptionally crowded presidential race. Imagine if anybody could get around Google's fraud controls by just declaring yourself a presidential candidate.

It seems not too difficult to turn them on equally for every candidate that made the debate and had to qualify with either a polling or a donator threshold.

>totally reasonable for Google to draw the line somewhere in an exceptionally crowded presidential race

She is a congresswoman, and you are politically clueless.

Good on her for suing Google, even if the fault is on terrible auto suspension. Something needs to be done to improve their god awful heuristics.

It is a bit disingenuous (to say the least) to claim that having to configure a few dozen presidential candidate's accounts is tantamount to letting "anybody" get around Google's fraud controls.

I could understand your line of reasoning if the figure was on the order of 100s or more. But when we are talking about less than 50 candidates, this is a ridiculous claim that comes off as a weak attempt to deceive your audience via false dichotomy.

> It is a bit disingenuous (to say the least) to claim that having to configure a few dozen presidential candidate's accounts

Even without it being a route around Google fraud controls, there are 791 declared Presidential candidates for 2020, which is a little more than “a few dozen”. [0]

> I could understand your line of reasoning if the figure was on the order of 100s or more.

But...it is; heck, there's close to 300 Democratic candidates. And it would be even more if it was a route around Google fraud controls.

[0] https://ballotpedia.org/List_of_registered_2020_presidential...

Okay, thanks for the information. I suppose I was referring to those candidates which met the threshold of support to be included in the debates on national television. And indeed, that seems to be a reasonable place to "draw the line", in my opinion. There is a very high likelihood that anyone speaking on national TV would be searched on Google.

Tulsi Gabbard falls well within the category of candidates. So, while I concede that the line ought be drawn, I still believe the post I responded to was arguing in bad faith, given Hubbard's popularity

It's like keeping track of pirated content. You're assuming Google is on top of everything happening in the world. They're not and simply can't be.

I would not be surprised if this was a manually curated whitelist that a human has to add to a table.

No it's not? There is a venerable plethora of pirated content. There are less than 2 dozen presidential candidates. If there is some override table which was manually updated, then the person who updated it, at minimum, did not perform due diligence to ensure that all candidates were listed.

Actually there are 791 presidential candidates according to https://ballotpedia.org/Presidential_candidates,_2020#Declar....

Yes, most of them are probably not "real candidates", but Google would be in even hotter water if they tried to predetermine who was and who wasn't a real candidate.

Google spent 3.5 million lobbying so far this year and 21 million last year. They know exactly who is a "real candidate"[0]

[0]https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00006782...

It's not up to them to decide who's real or not. It also opens up an easy to exploit situation where I can just claim to be running for president and I get some whitelist applied and could do some nefarious things.

> There are less than 2 dozen presidential candidates.

Not only are there actually 791 Presidential candidates, but there are 26 (27 if you count one who has only formed an exploratory committee)—that is, more than 2 dozen—that Ballotpedia calls “elected officials or notable public figures”.

https://ballotpedia.org/List_of_registered_2020_presidential...

Are you suggesting that the onus is on Google to be proactive and contact every US political campaign before they try to signup for Ads, or any Google account, to verify names, contacts, CC#s ahead of time?

There's no assumption here, Google _is_ on top of censoring various kinds of political content critical of the US political establishment:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-search-...

They've been caught on camera several times now talking about wanting to influence the elections. I keep that in mind when considering their excuses.

Sort of like how Bernie got locked out of DNC databases during the last campaign, etc., it gets hard to believe all the coincidences sometimes.

> Sort of like how Bernie got locked out of DNC databases

You mean after his staff got caught snooping around Hillary's campaign data?

https://time.com/4155185/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-data...

Bernie's campaign reported the vulnerability in NGPVan's platform to them and campaign asked the user who saw HRC data to resign.

Then they were suspended and the 'snooping in Hillary's data' spin appeared the next day.

Logs showed 4 staffers accessed the data (including running more than 20 search queries), and only one was fired (and he was fired, not "asked to resign").

It's not spin, it's what happened.

NGPVan is a buggy SaaS platform. They discovered and reported a bug in the platform that displayed HRC's information to the wrong customer.

'Snooping' is a biased mischaracterization.

By they, do you mean Google? Was there someone other than Jen Gennai? I think there are a lot of ways to interpret what she said, and it sounded to me, when I read it, that she was referring to the online foreign influence campaigns, but since the discussion was informal and edited, it's hard to know the exact context, or even what her hand in following through on that would look like.

>Gabbard insinuates the initial suspension was politically motivated, which seems hard to believe.

I'm not saying that she is right but it's not hard to believe at all.

Google has been shown to interfere with results that don't align with the company's political values. It's harder to believe that this suspension WASN'T politically motivated.

No, they haven't.

Which of Tulsi Gabbard’s views don’t align with the “political values” of Google? Sorry if I’m misinformed but from what I’ve seen Tulsi seems like a very reasonable politician. She may be somewhat of an outsider in terms of foreign policy but overall she has pretty standard left-leaning positions and I’ve never heard her resort to extreme rhetoric (a rare quality in today’s politics).

If I’m buying into this logic I would expect Google to take similar action against other presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, who are much more vocal in spearheading policies that are against the corporate interests of large tech companies like Google. Have either of those candidates been censored?

Gabbard doesn't believe in identity politics, thinks we should avoid making Syria a quagmire, was a soldier, and has a homophobic Dad. The first makes her the enemy to the hard left, so she is criticized for the later.

>thinks we should avoid making Syria a quagmire

I think you accidentally misspelled "makes excuses for a tyrant while the blood is still dripping from his hands". Because you can be reasonable about not thinking that an invasion of Syria is a good idea and call Assad out on his war crimes. Most other candidates manage that just fine.

> "makes excuses for a tyrant while the blood is still dripping from his hands"

Precisely the argument used to support pretty much every war. Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, Vietnam - it's all the same. Bad evil guy that needs to be killed by the good American empire. Only the dictator changes. How Americans fall for this every single time despite knowing well how disastrous the previous one was is beyond me.

For this to be malicious, it would be an incredibly risky decision by Google from a simple risk/reward standpoint. Gabbard is a huge long shot to win the Democratic nomination let alone the presidency. Putting their finger on the scale at this point in the election cycle to slightly disadvantage a candidate that in all likelihood won't matter is a huge gamble.

Considering what was exposed with the DNC, Press sources and the Clinton campaign last election, along with high level support from Google management and insiders, it's on the edge of conspiracy, but not beyond a reasonable realm of consideration.

Bernie Sanders had pretty massive grassroots and online support far before the mainstream media seemed to even notice he existed. To me, fingers on scales seems like just the way it's done nowadays.

It's beyond hard to believe. It's laughable.

It's crazytown tin foil hat conspiracy theory level garbage to think a megacorp like google is out to get you personally

Exactly. Why would Google risk a political storm that will dwarf this (at least for now) very minor candidate's entire campaign many times over, in terms of importance and newsworthyness?

It's called 'gaming the refs'.

It is a prominent tactic among certain american political circles that wish to claim that everyone else is abusing them while never actually believing in the system of rights, checks, and balances that they claim are being abused in the first place.

OK, we've changed to that from https://www.tulsi2020.com/tulsi-vs-google. If anyone suggests a better link, we'll be happy to change it again.

The site guidelines call for original sources, but in the case of press releases, especially corporate ones, we tend to switch to the best available third-party article.

Mind using the NYT link? It's in my post above yours. I think it's higher quality than the Verge. (Although I still think in my heart of hearts we should link to Tulsi's blog post but I understand the opposing viewpoint.)

Ok, switched to that from https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/25/8930373/google-tulsi-gabb....

It might be higher quality, but the paywall sucks.

We allow paywalls with workarounds here, even though they suck, because HN would suck worse without articles from NYT, Economist, New Yorker, WSJ, and others. Rather than complaining about the paywall, it would be better to look for the workaround. There's at least one posted to this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

> insinuates the initial suspension was politically motivated, which seems hard to believe

How is that hard to believe? We know for a fact Google does political censorship.

https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/24/insider-blows-whis...

https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/25/breaking-new-googl...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ricI5t66cj8

(note these are fresh links just from the last 2 days)

Some people still cling to the 10-year old image of "good guy Google."

I used to be one of those people.

James O'Keefe claiming something doesn't make it a fact. On the contrary, I'd be inclined to doubt the claim in that case.

You clearly didn't look at the links. O'Keefe is irrelevant.

With the amount he's been caught doing "selective editing" I'd say he's pretty relevant.

Project Veritas is in no way a reliable source on political issues. Both it and its founder have a long record of being exposed committing fraud.

I understand you're trying to do character assassination. Thankfully, we have actual videos of google insiders.

I also trust my own eyes, I see which political side gets banned en masse by Google, Twitter, FB and other large Silicon Valley companies. Are you going to deny this too?

Can you provide a different citation than a publication known to generate fabricated claims bolstered by fabricated evidence? (I'm serious and taking you in good faith here for the record.)

Can you even name a publication that has not fabricated stuff? I'm not aware of any.

That's not my responsibity; I'm not making any claims.

Project Veritas has a long record of collecting large sums in judgement against those who make such libelous accusations without proof.

I think you have that backwards. Okeefe has paid 100k in damages to an ACORN employee, for libel.

One case, poorly phrased, is hardly a "long list".

More than zero, which is the number of libel cases that O'keefe as won and gotten a payout from. (this is opposed to a number which he hasn't lost, because plaintiffs didn't win, but he was the defendant. But these didn't give him any payout)

https://twitter.com/jamesokeefeiii/status/115837860224274022...

I couldn't find any lawsuits they've won, just them getting lawsuits against them dismissed.

And information about James O'Keefe pleading guilty to breaking into a Senator's office.

https://twitter.com/jamesokeefeiii/status/115837860224274022...

Veritas is tabloid propaganda. They have less than zero credibility.

You realize the rightwingers say the same about CNN, NYT, and other "reputable" sources? They are all dirty, on all sides. Thankfully, we have videos, so we don't have to rely on anybody's reputation.

Nope, reputation is definitely still important. As it turns out, you can edit videos to produce a desired effect/impression -- just saying "it's a video" doesn't really establish objective truth.

Since O'Keefe paid $100,000 to settle a lawsuit centered around edited video designed to make ACORN look bad, it's pretty reasonable to treat his videos with skepticism.

As I said, they all have horrible reputation to me - I've seen major lies in all major news sources. They all editorialize to fit their agenda. Left or right wing, all bad.

But since you're the one claiming these particular videos are somehow edited, present your evidence. The burden of proof is on you.

That's interesting. Where exactly did I say these particular videos were edited? I only have one comment in this thread, should be pretty easy to point it out.

In the event that you realize you read something into my words that wasn't there, I would politely invite you to ask whether or not that reflects on your priors regarding all major news sources.

This says more about the rightwingers that say that than it does CNN, NYT, WaPo, Bloomberg, etc. - there is a reason the rightwing in this country has embraced Trumpism, and it isn't because truth is a guiding principle of their movement.

The media analysis skills of folks on HN continue to astound. What makes you think project veritas is a credible source? Im serious.

The video recording. Are you gonna claim they are fake?

Yes, because he's literally done exactly that many times, and lost lawsuits over it.

Ok, prove that they are fake.

Do your own research, it's not like documentation of his bullshit is hard to find.

I work at Google on ranking algorithms for Search. I'm aware of everything that controls how web pages are ranked. If I ever encountered a system that was designed to alter the results for political reasons, I would resign.

Just as an example: a controversial political figure's popular website is buried on page 5 of Google results (underneath a mountain of criticism) when you search for his name, despite being in the top 3 results of page 1 for all of Qwant, DDG, Bing, Mojeek, and Yandex. Obviously, the website is being downranked for being full of "conspiracy theories and fake news" (I wouldn't completely disagree that it is). But who decided all this? Is this not "political"?

I'd be happy to pass it along to debug if you have a specific query in mind. In the cases of this I've seen in the past, there's been a specific actionable bug that we were able to fix.

(Lots of other search engines use each other as backends, so don't be too surprised when they return consistent results.)

I think DDG and Qwant basically use Bing as a backend, potentially augmenting with their own crawlers. Yandex and Mojeek use all their own stuff, as far as I can tell. The query is "alex jones". At least put the garbage website at the bottom of page 1 where most people who aren't already looking for it still won't click it, page 5 is just lacking in subtlety.

Thanks, I'll pass it along.

Infowars being buried so deeply in the "Alex Jones" results is highly suspicious. How can Google's results be so ineffective compared to other search engines?

The "Pelosi drunk" results are also markedly different from DDG. I just now tried this one because the results were being manually short-circuited the day after the video went viral, both by DDG and Google (but not Bing). It appears that DDG has reverted to delivering actual results for that query while Google's appear curated.

During the election some fuss was made over auto-completion for "Hillary" vs. "Trump" searches ... apparently embarrassing for Google because these were soon "fixed".

I could go on and on.

Do you at least admit that Google restricts searches for the Christchurch shooting video? Maybe your definition of "political reasons" is very narrow.

I don't actually have a problem with burying Alex Jones. The only reason I have enough interest to engage in this discussion is that Google continues to deny these things.

Google does not curate web results, ever. The results for [pelosi drunk] are different certainly, but in what sense are DDG's better?

Google has a policy about "sensitive and disparaging terms associated with named individuals" in autocomplete https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7368877?hl=en which is often why you sometimes may not see the queries in autocomplete that you expect. It also has a policy about "violent or gory predictions" so it wouldn't surprise me if you aren't seeing autocomplete suggesting the Christchurch video, if that's what you mean.

> Google does not curate web results, ever.

Where is the transparency or independent third party oversight to back up this statement?

Or do we just have to take it on faith?

I'm sure search results are not curated in the sense that a stock answer is provided for a given query, but I would expect that filtering and ranking of search results involves lists that are curated -- for example, "offensive" words or "disparaging terms", etc..

Since you work on search at Google, maybe you could explain how typing "hillary clinton cri" stopped suggesting the common search term "hillary clinton crimes" and instead suggested "hillary clinton criminal reform".

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

Apparently "crimes" a disparaging term when associated with "hillary clinton", but not when associated with, say, "jared kushner"?

Isn't it explained by the policy I just linked? "Jared kushner cr" yields [jared kushner credentials] as a suggestion for me.

"cri", not "cr". I have two different devices that give different results; one lists "jared kushner crimes".

Since it isn't a matter of a single word (crimes) being flagged as disparaging, this blacklist can apparently be finely tuned to specific prediction results. (Maybe it's not a simple blacklist, but an ML model. Even scarier.)

I see: [jared kushner criticism] [jared kushner cries in closet] [jared kushner's father crime]

and so forth. Are you sure you aren't seeing your own search history as the suggestion? Another possibility is that you're seeing "... crimes" instead of the whole query? That can happen when the system isn't able to suggest a full query and starts suggesting individual word completions.

Do you really think that it simply excludes predictions with the word "crimes"?

Yes, I was seeing "... crimes" when typing for "jared kushner cri". But with other names it shows a complete prediction:

"julian assange cri" --> "julian assange crimes"

"jeffrey epstein cr" --> "jeffrey epstein crimes"

I don't know all the details of how that system works, I don't work on it, but surely you'd agree that they're both more appropriate suggestions, as both of them have been indicted. I don't get "trump crimes" for "trump cri" either.

I agree they are more appropriate. Surely you'd agree there's a lot of room for bias to manifest in a system like this.

Yes, and I definitely understand the argument that Google shouldn't be doing this, but note that we aren't talking about evidence of bias anymore. When someone sees confusing behavior on a political query, the tendency is to assume that political bias is involved, when it's just a very ordinary failing that search engines have all the time.

I don't know the basis of the decision to enact that policy around autocomplete, but I do know Google has been sued many times due to the queries in autocomplete associated with people's names. https://searchengineland.com/google-faces-autocomplete-lawsu... https://www.pcmag.com/news/326136/google-could-face-lawsuit-... http://www.dmlp.org/blog/2013/filing-lawsuits-united-states-...

I think he's talking about actual links to the Christchurch video. They exist, and I'm pretty sure that's what most people who search terms such as "Christchurch video stream" are looking for. I don't think I can believe that Google doesn't censor or re-rank certain "flagged" search results, that just doesn't the smell test.

There are a few situations where Google will remove urls listed here https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2744324 as well as for spam.

What if it's downranked because most of the people who search for him aren't looking for his site, but for commentary about him?

I mean, maybe this sounds implausible to you, but I think you should be conscious of whether you're discarding it as a possibility and why.

Does your claim include the keyword "abortion"? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/13/abortions-near...

There are complaints on both sides of this issue: http://christianresearchnetwork.org/2019/01/16/the-smoking-g...

That's a very strong claim you're making there. Do you not consider mixins from News and YouTube to be "web pages"?

I've also worked at Google. Things that are clearly the case:

1. There are blacklists of certain political query completions on web search, like "hillary clinton emails".

2. There is a controversial query blacklist on YouTube with political content. Go look at the file in google3 if you really think the screenshots are faked:

https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/26/blacklisted-leaked...

3. Google News is quite clearly blacklisting Breitbart from ranking: it's indexed but in many years of using Google News I've never once seen it be selected. The Guardian, on the other hand, routinely makes it into nearly every selected story.

The writing is clearly on the wall for you. Whether organic web index results are reranked politically or not, and for what it's worth I believe you for that specific subset of the system, other teams in the company that didn't inherit the same culture are doing politically motivated things with the full knowledge and acceptance of the executives. It's only a matter of time before web search falls to that new culture too.

And when it happens you probably won't even realise it. Some team you've never heard of will quietly adjust a machine learning model in subtle ways you'll never detect, to "debias" it in order to yield "better outcomes".

1. There are not blacklists of "political" query completions, as I explained extensively in this other thread. The policy is to not show "sensitive and disparaging terms associated with names" in autocomplete. This applies uniformly, and there's nothing political about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20530414

2. I can't speak to YouTube's policies, but there isn't any evidence there that this was designed to favor either side, rather than just to avoid the issue entirely.

3. The guidelines that Google uses to assess the quality of websites are public. You can read them here: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...

You sir, are a liar:

https://www.blog.google/products/search/our-latest-quality-i...

That is by Google's VP of Search, Ben Gomes. That's your boss, supposedly. So, Human evaluators flag content in general ("low quality"); and particularly, remove or down-rate content which Google determines to be "fake news", as Gomes puts it.

and some of the results:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/19/goog-s19.html

Consortium News, Global Research, Counterpunch, Truthdig, Russia Today, Truepublica, World Socialist Website and others - censored. Not entirely, but to a great extent.

Those ratings are used to evaluate the search system, not to change it directly.

Project Veritas has utterly shattered their credibility so many time, that they should not be used as a source even if what they say is true.

They edit videos, not even deceptively, but in a way that makes the people featured in the video make them look like they're saying something completely different. Not just clipping but also reordering the clips

Project Veritas was created by a known liar and manipulator. Anyone falling for their schtick needs to learn how to be less gullible.

Killing suspicious spending makes sense to both sides of the spend. If you're going to radically change your spending, the responsible move it always make sure everyone knows it's coming.

Same thing will happen to any Joe Plumber who's credit cards suddenly started spending uncharacteristically

Tulsi's campaign throwing a tantrum like this just shows how poorly run a campaign she has. Hire people who know what they're doing and you don't have things like this happen.

Why would you think The Verge/Comcast is an independent source when MSNBC/Comcast spent years firing their anchormen for questioning foreign invasions and WMDs. If you boiled Gabbard down to a single issue, it would be anti-war.

Weird, I'd say "pro-dictator." That kinda jives with anti-war, depending on which war you're talking about, though, I suppose.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/26/tulsi-gabbar...

https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/06/politics/tulsi-gabbard-syria-...

Why do you care so much about what the media has told you Assad has done? Assad is not and never has been a threat to you or anyone you know. It is a good thing that we didn't get into a protracted war with Syria. It's easy to see the results of our wars in Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The Syrian people are fortunate that they didn't suffer the same fates as those nations. Gabbard's diplomatic mission is at least partially to thank for that.

[EDIT:] This is a really complete explanation: https://www.tulsigabbard.org/tulsi-gabbard-on-syria

Assad is not and never has been a threat to you or anyone you know

1. That's an interesting assumption you make.

2. Why would I have to know someone personally to empathize with them?

3. U.S. foreign policy, as conducted by our military, has pretty consistently been a disaster for decades. I agree wholeheartedly with you on that point.

1. It would be easy to refute, wouldn't it? If you or anyone in your family have ever been ISIS members, by all means correct me.

2. I'm glad to know that you have empathy for war victims. When has a war with USA ever saved lives? Didn't the ramp-up to the planned Syria war look just like previous ramp-ups to our wars in other Muslim nations? Those media projects were later found to be completely false (as has the Syria gas narrative, at this point), so why would we have believed this project?

3. USA wars are always conducted in USA media first. That is the time to fight, and that's what Gabbard (and many others) did. We seem to have broken their spirits, too. After really trying on Syria and only failing because they made so much money hyping up Trump, their recent efforts on Venezuela were fairly half-hearted. The world might be getting safer...

I don't really disagree with anything else you say, but...

>When has a war with USA ever saved lives?

I don't know. I think there was a war of note which might have been around the 1940s?

It's fine to say that the costs of an interventionist foreign policy don't outweigh the benefits; I don't necessarily disagree with that. But it's absolutely inaccurate to say that the benefits don't exist. USA at the very least contributed a great deal to the European Theatre, and Imperial Japan was dethroned almost entirely due to their effort.

It turns out that all three of Italy, Germany, and Japan were successfully occupied and now have stable and democratic governments, as well.

I don't know. I think there was a war of note which might have been around the 1940s?

Nitpicking your nitpick:

Contrary to the American tendency to act like we singlehandedly won WW2, we were a latecomer to the war and not a central power prior to that war. There were many countries involved in it.

It's possible that the US played a critical role in Japan's surrender. It's also possible they would have surrendered anyway, we just have no means to go back in time, run the scenario twice and see how it would go without the US.

In the United States, generations were taught that Japan would never have surrendered so quickly without use of the atomic bomb and that victory would have required a bloody invasion of the Japanese mainland, costing hundreds of thousands of lives.

Japanese students were generally taught a very different narrative: that Japan already had been defeated and dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki three days apart was a geopolitical calculation to keep the Soviet Union at bay.

https://www.stripes.com/news/special-reports/world-war-ii-th...

I think you're discounting the roll of America's massive industrial output, which shipped more than 17 million tons of goods to the Soviet Union throughout the war, including more than 400,000 trucks/jeeps, 7,000 tanks, 11,000 airplanes, and 1.75 million tons of food, just to name a bit.

Relative to national size, the Soviet Union received more tanks and planes from the British than the Americans, but the American trucks in particular were incredibly important for the Soviets. During that same period the Soviet Union only produced a fraction of that many trucks and Soviet trucks were frankly inferior trucks. Beyond the obvious logistic advantages of trucks in a war largely characterized by mobility, receiving American trucks allowed the Soviet Union to dedicate more of it's (relatively limited) industrial capacity to the production of tanks and airplanes.

Incidentally, here is something else American students aren't taught (I wonder if Japanese students are?): The leadership of the Japanese military considered the emperor to be a figurehead and after the 2nd atomic bombing when the Emperor was preparing to surrender, the staff office of the Ministry of War as well as several members of the Imperial Guard seized control of the Imperial Palace, with the goal of preventing surrender. They failed of course, but only due to the bravery and good luck of a few people in the Palace. The point here being, there were high ranking elements of the Japanese military that wanted to continue fighting even after the second bomb, and even with the Soviets preparing an invasion. Nationalism is a hell of a drug...

The only thing I'm discounting is the American tendency to talk like we are the center of the universe and always have been. I'm saying "WW2 wasn't a war with the US. There were multiple countries on both sides of that war."

That's it. That's all I'm saying. It doesn't actually translate to "America didn't count and made no difference whatsoever in the war effort."

Americans do call it a World War, don't they? I think you're being a bit too cynical.

Perhaps pedantic. But the comment I was replying to specifically framed WW2 as "a war with the US" and I've had foreign friends, such as in Canada, who have commented on America's tendency to talk like we singlehandedly won that war.

I don't think "war with the US" was meant to imply "A war in which America was on it's own and did everything"; that's a cynical read of it. A less cynical read would be that "war with the US" means "war in which the US was a participant."

Germany did declare war with the US, hence there was in fact a war with the US. Of course, Germany was also at war with lots of other people. All Americans are taught that in schools. It's called a World War for a reason and people do understand that, even when they're going out of their way to mention it. If Americans don't mention Canadian participation much it's simply because they don't talk about Canada much in the first place. It's not because they're unaware that Canada participated in the war. Canada is a commonwealth country, of course they participated in the war. Everybody here knows that.

I don't understand your use of the word cynical here. It sounds like you might mean "bad faith or uncharitable reading."

Ironically, that framing of my remarks strikes me as uncharitable. I did start by asserting from the get go that I was picking nits.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

I know this very well. The US was late in a sense to the European theater, but the most substantial contribution of the US was lend-lease in any case. It's of course inaccurate to say that the US was the primary contributor to the European Theatre (that was probably the USSR), but the American contribution shouldn't be understated, either.

Japan was absolutely not going to surrender following the atomic bombs, unless you consider a conditional surrender in which they would keep all their colonial assets something even close to tolerable. The idea that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria was at all a threat to the Japanese is laughable; the Kwantung Army was a hollow shell with most of it moved back to the home isles, which was why the USSR had such an easy time there, and the Soviets had essentially no capability to accomplish an amphibious invasion.

It's true that Japan had already been 'defeated', but the dysfunction of its military and government meant that the sensible option was impossible to accomplish because those who tried would immediately be susceptible to coups from ultra-nationalist factions. Which in fact nearly happened even after the bombs were dropped and the surrender decision was made.

>...Japan would never have surrendered so quickly without use of the atomic bomb...

This is absolutely true, and the statement made by the Emperor directly refers to the bombs. The only alternative story is the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, but not only was that not a plausible threat to the home isles, but during Prime Minister's meeting with the Emperor in which the PM recommended unconditional surrender, he mentioned the bombs and (I don't think, IIRC) the Soviet invasion.

>...victory would have required a bloody invasion of the Japanese mainland, costing hundreds of thousands of lives.

I don't know of anyone who disputes that Operation Downfall would have been a bloody affair that would have killed this amount, if not more.

Edit: I just realized that somebody else already posted a bunch of what I wrote.

OK sure that might be an exception, not least because the Nazis were, like... Nazis. [EDIT: The "might" is intentional. If USA had stayed home, the war might have ended in 1943. Isn't it possible that fewer people would have died in a much shorter war?] If you don't like Nazis, however, I don't think you can support Wilson's lying our way into WWI. That certainly cost lives, and by forcing Germany into an untenable position it created the Nazis, the Holocaust, the horrific casualties suffered by the Soviets, etc. None of those things were actually prevented by our entering WWII, either.

It's true that a Nazi victory was practically impossible. But I have no idea how you can say that the US prolonged the war. Supplying the enemies of the Reich and fighting against them is not the sort of thing that causes wars to extend longer, and certainly it drew resources away from Barbarossa.

>by forcing Germany into an untenable position

No more untenable than what Germany had forced upon France following the Franco-Prussian wars, or what they forced upon Russia in Brest-Litvosk. It seems that neither of those countries engaged upon a ruthless war of extermination, though.

I also don't think that having your country split up is less harsh than reparations basically similar to what your country forced on others. Wilson's mistake was insisting on Peace with Victory, which resulted only in delaying victory by a few decades.

>I don't think you can support Wilson's lying our way into WWI.

Wilson undoubtedly bungled the aftermath to WWI, but I don't think that any of the events preceding it were faked? The Zimmerman Telegram was confirmed as being real by the man himself, correct? Unless you're talking about him breaking his promise of peace, in which case, I agree.

...practically impossible.

Germany had taken the entire continent. The British only held on as long as they did because we were happy to lose so many cargo ships to U-boats. Without our massive support they would have followed the French example, and that would have been the right decision. The war would have been over much sooner. In that case FDR probably wouldn't have baited Japan into their calamitous mistake either.

Would that have been a bad result? Probably! The Holocaust alone disqualified the German polity from any authority whatsoever, and they got up to all sorts of other evil shit besides. The point is that this hypothetical Big European War would have lasted less time than WWII and therefore it's possible that fewer people would have died.

Unless you're talking about...

I meant the election promises, but I suppose the Republicans at the time also wanted war because money. These things aren't decided by the plebes...

1. The Brits were never going to surrender. The Germans had no capacity to invade the UK's Home Islands. They completely lacked the necessary amphibious shipping to carry an invasion force, nor could they deal with the Royal Navy.

2. The German endgame was always conquest in the East, so even if the Brits DID throw in the towel the conflict wouldn't have ended. On the Eastern Front, the Germans were overstretching their offensive capabilities and logistics barely 6 months into the war (hence why they failed to take Moscow). Pivoting additional forces freed up from containing the British Empire wouldn't have helped Germany's logistical problems, so they wouldn't have forced a surrender on the Soviets like they wanted in any circumstance.

I highly recommend reading Wages of Destruction. For a more accessible study of WW2, check out "Military History Visualized", an Austrian military historian on Youtube who uses a LOT of primary sources.

[1]https://www.amazon.com/Wages-Destruction-Making-Breaking-Eco... [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnPo7V03nbY&list=PLv0uEimc-u...

Tulsi's trip was preapproved a month in advance by the House Ethics committee.

She was assigned to and serves on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, determining policy that directly impacts the entire world. Visiting other countries on fact-finding missions falls cleanly within the jurisdiction of her responsibilities to her constituents and to our country.

Seeking to understand all sides in the Syrian conflict, Tulsi met with Assad's opposition, displaced families and Gov officials from several countries. She did not plan to meet with Assad, but when invited took the chance to search for a peaceful solution. https://medium.com/@TulsiGabbard/the-syrian-people-desperate...

Tulsi was heroic for calling out the plan to arm al-Qaeda to overthrow the gov of Syria and heroic for meeting with Assad at the risk of political backlash, in the name of peace.

I don't know how they could mistake a major political candidate spending as spam. Seems like reckless neglect, really.

There are two separate issues here:

1) The spending. That tripped some sort of fraud detector that caused a shutdown until a human intervened. No big surprise, I'm sure we've all triggered fraud detectors at one time or another, even ones that should have had a bit more brains. (Hey, it's Black Friday. You know I make a decent number of electronics purchases, is it any wonder I made several that day?!)

2) The spam filtering. Just because it's a presidential candidate doesn't mean it isn't something people regard as spam.

Either there is a human in the loop, or they disrespect their largest ad clients by not having a human in the loop to prevent outages. Neither seems good for Google.

"Automatically triggered"? Yes, well...

   flag_the_adword = some_conditions() || (esimate_political_reliability() < THRESHOLD);

In the leaked emails in 2016, Tulsi Gabbard was threatened by Democratic party officials that she would be cut off from the Dem's fundraising and shut out in other ways, and given Google's support for the Democratic party, it doesn't seem highly improbable (although still unlikely).

This brings up the inherent absurdity of wanting tech infrastructure providers to sensor their platforms.

When the mob decides that they don't like a thing then it's "why were they allowed a platform".

Whereas when the mob wants access to a thing and then it's restricted it's "why were they allowed to capriciously control my access"

It's an inherently unwinnable game. Tech companies who are essentially an information utility at this point controlling huge flows of content should not be made judge jury and executioner on what is acceptable speech.

It's bizarre to me that people who on one hand seem to hate these companies also want to give them immense power and responsibility to restrict access to information. It's because they associate the idea of censorship with getting the specific thing they want censored and not with a broader world in which these companies hold this power.

Not a huge fan of Joe Rogan but Naval Ravikant expresses this very lucidly on the podcast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNWN5ioF-9A&feature=youtu.be...

This is why the corner solution of free speech as a cultural meme was started, which was a precursor to its formalization.

The corner solution essentially 'solves' this issue by realizing partial censorship is a non-stable equilibrium.

I feel like we've forgetton how to propose and discuss common standards that should apply in encouraging and enforcing public speech. It looks like a unwinnable game if there aren't standards - but our media and our politicians rarely ever couch discussion in those terms, only in individual conflict terms which makes it more difficult to pull a common direction out of the mass.

Yes this is a huge problem. These days everyone gets a say and the loudest voice wins but many people are simply not systematic thinkers. Their idea of a how a system should behave is whatever behavior gives them what they want now, regardless of what the final equilibrium of moving to that state would be.

There's been talk of antitrust/etc recently regarding big tech companies, from Warren and others. For better or worse, it occurred to me recently that we have no concept of eminent domain [0] when it comes to technology, data, or intellectual property.

If it's in the public interest to build a bridge, lay train tracks, etc., your private property can be purchased against your wishes at a fair market price. When it comes to things like open APIs, protocols, interoperability, data portability, even patents, I wonder if it might every make sense to leverage this legal framework to build true network commons out of privatized silos (while compensating shareholders), as opposed to the old "break up AT&T into multiple companies" model.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain

As it should be. Eminent domain is a policy that's is designed to be abused if there ever was one. I suspect that the only reason eminent domain has such a fancy name is to take focus of the fact that the other word for it is theft.

You know, when someone wants to buy a public company, Joe Schmoe doesn't get to say "I'm only selling my 10 shares for $1 million apiece!"

Is this an outrageous affront to property rights, or is it something you just take for granted because you don't see the connection to the government?

What???This is totally incoherent.

Yes that's exactly how it works. Joe can ask for whatever price he wants and if he doesn't get that price then he has to keep holding the asset.

An individual asking an unfair price for stock they own would not hold up the sale of other shares in the company in most (all?) cases unless they are the primary stake holder

Typically, if the shareholders vote to accept an offer by someone to buy a public company, everyone including the people who were against it is involuntarily cashed out at the price that was accepted by the majority.

This is a pretty common experience for anyone who owns growth stocks. It's why you can't just get rich by finding a fantastic public company, it has to stay public and independent.

Common sense should tell you that there must be some mechanism to deal with holdouts any time a collective action problem is overcome.

Assuming the "fair market value" clause is honored (to the extent such a thing is possible!), it's not quite as bad as explicit theft. Nonetheless, I take your point. While I can imagine a number of public works projects that are painfully difficult to achieve through only voluntary coordination[0], it's also clearly an easily corruptible mechanism.

That said, I can actually imagine such a practice being more valid for intellectual property, given that IP law is a purely artificial construct of the state (as opposed to natural law governing land and physical property).

Perhaps the "eminent" part is unnecessary, and the government could simply negotiate a price for certain IP and/or data to be bought and put into the public domain?

Just spitballing. The trend to consolidation based on Metcalfe's Law[1] represents a very real conundrum for vibrant competition of products and services whose primary value is the network itself.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

That's a big "assuming". I wouldn't want someone assuming when it was my house getting bulldozed.

> I suspect that the only reason eminent domain has such a fancy name is to take focus of the fact that the other word for it is theft.

Actually, “eminent domain” refers to the basic model of property ownership: the fact that ultimate title is held by the sovereign and only limited, conditional, subordinate title given to others.

You can't steal what is already yours.

It's not about "people". Google censors because of pressures from the US state (and other states they operate in) and commercial interests, particularly advertisers I would assume.

NYT article that has more information: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/technology/tulsi-gabbard-...

The account was inactive from 9:30pm on June 27th - 3:30am on June 28th. This doesn't seem like an act of malice from Google, but rather a verification check.

Some excerpts:

> Tulsi Now Inc., the campaign committee for Ms. Gabbard, said Google suspended the campaign’s advertising account for six hours on June 27 and June 28, obstructing its ability to raise money and spread her message to potential voters.

> After the first Democratic debate, Ms. Gabbard was briefly the most searched-for candidate on Google. Her campaign wanted to capitalize on the attention she was receiving by buying ads that would have placed its website at the top of search results for her name.

> The lawsuit also said the Gabbard campaign believed its emails were being placed in spam folders on Gmail at “a disproportionately high rate” when compared with emails from other Democratic candidates.

Changed to that now. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20528797.

In general, I think people would appreciate the link not being to a paywall.

Indeed. The NY Times has become unreadable. Sad.

Edit: OK, if you hit reader mode fast enough, it is readable. Otherwise you just get:

> Thanks for reading The Times.

> Create your free account or log in to continue reading.

Users usually post workarounds in the thread. There's one elsewhere in this thread.

I saw that Googles response was that "large spending changes" caused an automatic suspension.

With all of Google's tech, they should just have that weird Google Assistant call the phone listed on the account to have the account owner verbally confirm the changes instead of flat out freezing it.

Both sides, Democrat and Republican, are now anti big tech.

Love it or Hate it, when you piss off the most powerful governing body on the planet you're in for a bad time.

My question is more timeframe: Google obviously won't be broken up tomorrow, but probably earlier than a decade from now.

I guess the timeframe depends on who wins the next presidential election?

I'm pretty sure that google can just be friends with one of 300 other governments and survive.

reads like a great parable to be written afterwards:

the algorithms, successful 99.8% of the time, misfired on a US presidential candidate, who went on to lead the eventually successful efforts to break up Google, neutering its algorithms' effects upon the world.

the algorithms giveth; the algorithms taketh away

The worst part is I think both sides have at least some merit for their suspicion. Obviously the Republicans seem to be more openly punished and the balance tipped against them, but the Democrats also suffer occasionally, especially if they are not the right Democrat.

Google might be treading dangerously close to becoming persona non-grata for 50% of the population, regardless of who wins. There is also a cautionary tale there that perhaps the whole idea of "don't talk politics at work" was not some tool from The Man to keep workers subdued, but rather a hard-earned lesson to keep companies from imploding when employers think they've been hired to be activists.

Surprise, turns out not everything has to be political and your personal identity doesn't have to bleed over to your professional life.

Since OP has no actual information, some excerpts from the NYT story:

>Tulsi Now Inc., the campaign committee for Ms. Gabbard, said Google suspended the campaign’s advertising account for six hours on June 27 and June 28, obstructing its ability to raise money and spread her message to potential voters.

>The lawsuit also said the Gabbard campaign believed its emails were being placed in spam folders on Gmail at “a disproportionately high rate” when compared with emails from other Democratic candidates.

>Google has automated systems that flag unusual activity on advertiser accounts — including large spending changes — to prevent fraud, said Jose Castaneda, a spokesman for the company.

>“In this case, our system triggered a suspension and the account was reinstated shortly thereafter,” he said. “We are proud to offer ad products that help campaigns connect directly with voters, and we do so without bias toward any party or political ideology.”

>Gabbard campaign workers sent an email to a Google representative on June 27 at 9:30 p.m. once they realized the account had been suspended. In emails reviewed by The New York Times, the campaign sent Google a screenshot of a notice of suspension for “problems with billing information or violations of our advertising policies.”

>The account was reactivated at 3:30 a.m. on June 28. In the email announcing that it had reinstated the account, Google wrote that the company temporarily suspended the campaign’s account to verify billing information and policy compliance, but offered no other explanation for what had happened.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/technology/tulsi-gabbard-...

> but offered no other explanation for what had happened.

And yeah she should be suing to force discovery.

>The lawsuit also said the Gabbard campaign believed its emails were being placed in spam folders on Gmail at “a disproportionately high rate” when compared with emails from other Democratic candidates.

Or you know, more people spam foldered your junk mail and triggered the algorithim to learn and mark you more globally as spam. Shit, I spam folder anything that is unsolicited, any politicial party.

It doesn't even have to be from people, she could just have a terrible email full of red flags and/or didn't send from a decent ESP with a good server reputation.

Algorithm defense is a new Twinkie defense.

On the first debate where so many candidates are buying google ads, for Google to have not planned for a spike in advertising and blaming it on the algorithm is just inexcusable.

Either Google is very incompetent and the person in charge needs to be fired, or there is something else going on. Either incompetence or intentional their action did impact Tulsi Gabbard's post-debate moment and her fundraising ability and google is liable in election interference.

Tulsi is the most prominent Democrat presidential candidate that the media often says has conservative views. She is also broadly considered anti-establishment. Are there any establishment Democrat candidates (e.g. Harvard and Yale Law faculty member and senior senator Warren) to date that have had their Google ad accounts suspended by an 'unbiased' algorithm?

This is the kind of evidence I'd want to see before going along with the "we know there's nothing to see here" crowd - if this outage is completely legitimate, I'd think Google should be able to produce a list of similar outages involving non-run-of-the-mill accounts - or, do they genuinely have no attribute that would provide their algorithm with a hint as to the "class" an account falls in?

Of all the trending searches after the debate, Google's systems singling out Tulsi's account for flagging seems suspicious, and Google's robo-responses to press inquiries specious. I'm sure other candidates upped their spending, so let's have the ACTUAL numbers Google!

Also, it's a little surprising to see parroted defenses of Google here - they operate behind an opaque cloak, designed from the ground up for plausible deniability on every single one of their actions. Their P.R. statements cannot be believed. Tulsi's criticisms do not seem unsubstantiated, and the fact she's suing a corp. with unlimited funding indicates her campaign believes they have some evidence of malice. Between the two, I'd give Tulsi the benefit of doubt, and wait for the discovery stage in this case

stoked to see this on multiple fronts:

- someone with a vested interest + some modicum of power can hold .google's feet to the fire on this issue and will likely hammer the point home even post-settlement or whatever (remember when they out of the blue suspended my ad account?...)

- Tulsi maybe gets more exposure as a candidate, leading people to her anti-war ideals, which may influence other candidates

admittedly haven't heard google's side but there's precedent here for them committing unwarranted screw ups. of course, if the campaign did do something naughty that'd be a pretty big self inflicted wound.

Better that they hash the issue out in the primaries than in the general.

How is this a violation of her "Freedom of speech"? Google is not the government. The Bill of Rights protects us from the government, not private enterprise. I feel I'm surely missing some key detail.

The microphone cutting has been going on since long before the debate, kiddo.

Welcome to the private-government deplatforming dystopia.

In all likelihood, Gabbard and her campaign managers are perfectly aware that: 1. Google's automatic account suspension systems were doing exactly what they would do for any other account.

2. There was no intentional discrimination/meddling.

A sudden spike of search traffic corresponding with a sudden influx of advertising spending is likely to trigger red flags for the system. 6 hours of downtime for these google ads did damage her campaign, but Gabbard, or anybody, is not entitled to 100% uptime for a service provided by a corporation, except to the degree that it violates a contract/ TOS.

“Google’s discriminatory actions against my campaign are reflective of how dangerous their complete dominance over internet search is, and how the increasing dominance of big tech companies over our public discourse threatens our core American values,” Gabbard said in a statement. “This is a threat to free speech, fair elections and to our democracy, and I intend to fight back on behalf of all Americans.”

Her statement quoted above make me like her less, and I don't feel like I'm a particularly pro-google guy.

In all likelihood, Gabbard and her campaign managers are perfectly aware that:

1. Google's automatic account suspension systems were doing exactly what they would do for any other account.

2. There was no intentional discrimination/meddling.

Her statement quoted above make me like her less, and I don't feel like I'm a particularly pro-google guy.

Not to mention, as a private company, Google could do whatever it wanted anyway, there is no first amendment protection.

This lawsuit is probably going to get dismissed, so I have to treat it as a stunt to get some cheap headlines.

I am not an american and know none of the players. However I do use google ads. What I see, is that in two independent google accounts, running campaigns on the same search terms and keyword triggers, there are times I can show my two accounts "compete" for the same mindshare.

In any normal endeavour this is just how it works, but in politics, the consequences of a differential treatment of two candidates in the same space is not good for democracy.

I don't know who I support, but a framework which accepts money for placement and then determines an asymmetric bias in placement irrespective of bid price, and then perturbs visibility of political ads, is going to be mis-understood and mis-represented as systemic bias by somebody. Its human nature to assume its human centric behaviour, not a heuristic breakdown. Hanlon's razor isn't always well applied.

The allegation here is of intentionally suppressing her campaign. Google acts behind a veil of secrecy, and without access to internals, the best you have to work with is their word. And I DO NOT trust the robo-responses from giant corporations

She has won numerous elections over a decade, and her campaign is likely adept at managing Google ad accounts. If they suspect malice, they cannot be discounted for lack of experience or understanding of what they are dealing with. It's best to wait till this case enters the discovery phase before concluding anything.

To plays devils advocate, google may be a private company, but it has a sheer dominance in a how information is disseminated, giving it a influential role in how people formulate there beliefs and opinions. And even though currently, as a private company, Google can argue that they don't have to allow anyone on there system, because of how much influence they have on the flow of information, not having proper or fair access to there platform is equivalent to a community not being giving access to vital utilities or education. There is no equivalent or remotely second best option to google.

The event regardless is an issue in both Googles system and for Gabbards campaign.

Google should just disallow political ads entirely. This is a no-win proposition. Being too lax leads to election meddling, trying to flag suspicious activity is censorship. You're just an easy punching bag.

They've already stopped serving political ads in Canada, so there's precedent.

> The lawsuit accuses Google of violating the First Amendment, among other offenses, and Gabbard is seeking $50 million plus assurances that Google will refrain from “censoring or restricting” the account.

Isn't it common rhetoric that Google _can't_ violate the First Amendment, being a private company? They have the ability to arbitrarily close or censor any account they choose. Politicians don't get special treatment, especially while saying it's fair for Google to close accounts belonging to people whom they personally find objectionable.

On one hand this might seem like Google is trying to hurt her. On the other hand, if there was anyone at Google who was actually rooting for her, and had any input or ability to suspend accounts, this could end up actually helping her, as it pits her against the "big tech" and would in the long term help her chances of winning the election.

But, as they say, sometimes, the algorithms is just an algorithm, and it could be just a routine suspension and Gabbard's campaign saw an opportunity to profit (PR-wise) from it.

"We didn't really do anything to you, it was this automatic machine that we programmed. We have no way of controlling what it does, and thus are not responsible for the outcomes of its activities at all."

Google defense brief. Also, probably, a classic Dilbert comic.

On a first principles level, this highlights the core issue of bans/blocks/suspensions being handed out immediately rather than after a series of strike-based warning messages or something to that effect.

YouTube creators come to mind as some of the most blatantly affected by this, i.e. when YouTube automatically demonetizes videos, losing the creator revenue from 75%+ of the video's viewers, and then remonetizes it after an appeal.

At no point should any algorithm have the ability to block any account or perform any other such drastic measure (demonetization, etc.). It's just absurd.

http://archive.is/AM6iY

whoever coined the term "artificial stupidity" is/was a prophet

Would he resign if Google took a position in a non political debate but a scientific debate?

http://linkaudit.co/blog/google-takes-side-in-controversial-...

Tulsi is one of the few candidates on either side that believes in servant leadership

Perhaps it’s a simple case of “Gmail users label her messages as spam more than other Dem candidates.” and Google is using that to train their filter.

Social norms have never been decided in an entirely open and objective way. We’re free to speak. Not be heard. Tulsi isn’t owed an audience of Gmail users.

Look at all these “but the free market!” type pols who got us to give everything up to corps getting bit. Suddenly investigations and regulations be coming!

Not a peep when, you know, they started bulk collecting the general public’s phone calls and emails.

I'm not a proponent of censorship by any means, but I'm starting to get serious fatigue of these types of stories.

Especially in the case of politicians, I have no sympathy when Google or Facebook or Twitter decides to terminate or otherwise take action on an account. Rally behind them until it becomes inconvenient, then launch a suit! What hypocrisy.

We got here because of our weird fervor for capitalism, holding it up as some pinnacle of society. Yet when a company successfully exploits all that capitalism has to offer, it's screams and outrage!

I admit, I am not fully up to speed on this story. But here's the kicker - after reading this article, I still have no idea what the story is. This is just boilerplate "rally against the big tech companies!" without any rhyme or reason - at least no reason mentioned in the article.

>Please join Tulsi in her fight for our core American values of free speech and fair elections.

Free speech flows two ways, which is often forgotten. Corporate entities are entitled to free speech as well, for the better or for worse. They are also entitled to remove anyone from their platform or limit the services they offer someone. This is baked into the concept of capitalism. The whole legal system is built on the premise that corporations are awarded autonomy / person-hood.

The whole rallying against the corporations which capitalism enabled, in the name of capitalism and free speech.. I just don't understand it.

We wanted capitalism. We got it.

Stop begging for governments to intervene in private companies, while praising capitalism like some god. Pick a path. And then, apparently, ask for some donations.

Let companies rule the world! Let them put whatever they want in our meats! Remember the term "mystery meat"? That was from poor quality controls in corporate with zero government oversight.

I'm not saying that this is the way it should be.

I'm just pointing out that we fought for capitalism in it's truest form, and then got angry when companies exploited it. (And still praise it when it suits us)

You're describing the caricature of capitalism by people who oppose it and saying "we fought for it". That's silly, regardless of whether your description is accurate or not.

Tangentially related question: How much money will be spent by all these losing campaigns?

A few hundred million dollars: https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race

I hope so wins the lawsuit!

Yea it almost certainly tanked her campaign.

On the contrary, I believe the publicity will call lots of attention to her.

Can anyone think of any likely and plausible explanations for what went wrong on Google's end?

Yes - it's even outlined in the articles. A sudden increase in spending triggered a fraud detection algorithm, and the account was re-established before the next morning when a human verified there was no fraud.

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