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Comment by seesawtron | Hacker News Reader

This is insane. Just tried it and its true. Let this be a reminder that internet is not free but under control of umbrella corporations and it is naive to assume the opposite.

Is this what Orwell meant that history can be re-written when you have the full authority?

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped."

Edit: Maybe Google will respond (again) with: Sorry it was an internal bug in the code.

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"Internal bug in the code?"

"An internal bug in the code, at this time of day, only in this country, localized entirely on this photo!?"

"May I see it?" "No."

Which is a great description of proprietary software. Without transparency, you cannot trust anything it's doing.

>"May I see it?"

Given what we've seen from the likes of Cambridge Analytica, this seems like a question of national security.

Yeah, it'd be nice if there were a transparent search engine.

Not even DDG lets us see the metadata that drives how it makes decisions on what results to return. Not like any of us can debug those search results from our couches.

Rollouts often happen on a per-country basis. Including bugs.

The ticket says that this is a problem in a ton of countries (US, UK, Sebia, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Ireland).

Good Simpsons reference!

Isn't it more likely to be an external activists who figured out a way to poison Google search results?

Maybe don't be so alarmist? Bugs do happen.

This is no bug, this is intentional. Google the names of UK's PMs, from Johnson, May, Cameron going all the way. Only one PM does not get their photo displayed on the page with search results. Not because it failed to load/whatever, the page layout simply does not contain the photo in the place where it is for all others.

You don't know that. For all you know, some kind of knowledge graph tag propagated too far. There is zero evidence of it being intentional.

You really think they'd just erase the photos of UK PMs? Please. If there was some kind of conspiracy there, don't you think hiding the information too (vs linking directly to the pages that have it) would be a more effective strategy?

I know it's fun to jump on Google as the dictator erasing history here, but have you really thought this position through? Especially when one of Google's big industries is education, and kids are going to write papers about WW2, and various British PMs?

Not erase, just add it to the already long list of suppressed and filtered content. Have you tried what I suggested, have you googled the names of few PMs? The page with search results for Churchill lacks the code to display photo in the bio at the right side. The layout and code is different, it's not just failing to load, cache problem or whatever.

The most likely explanation is that a google employee added the photo on a block list in support of BLM.

A (cache or whatever) problem that leads to the property not being set would produce exactly that result.

It also seems clear that there isn't one global list of these people and their portraits Google uses to feed these boxes: When I compare the screenshot someone posted below with what I see, many of the leaders have different portraits.

It would be an incredible coincidence that it's just him and right at this time. Also, from Google's support thread, he is receiving the same treatment as Weinstein, apparently Churchill was added to a list of people for whom Google won't show photo in the bio summary, next to Weinstein.

And somehow that "list of people Google won't show photos for" applies in some European countries and not in others? Because Google is showing pictures for both of them to me.

What Orwell described is a matter of degree, not a different state of affairs. His criticisms were of the mechanisms of power enabled by the mechanisms of media in the era of industrialized civilization. His efforts were towards a future where we transcend that era in favor of democratic socialism. In his own words:

"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects."

If the degree is still such that other search engines return Churchill, and Google also returns Churchill if you make clear your intent (https://www.google.com/search?q=winston+churchill&tbm=isch), I think we can relax a bit on the fear of Big Brotherism.

I certainly don't think it's Big Brother* at work here but it is worth pondering what it means that communication is so centralized that the idiosyncrasy of a single point of access can affect billions of people. For every quirk that is noticed, what goes unnoticed?

* especially since, like, Big Brother as it exists loves Winston Churchill

That's always a good point. Decisions that Google makes do have wide-sweeping impact. This bug is minor; the decision to have top-boxes at all (for example, the fact that there's a result at all for "World War II leaders" and it includes specific people and excludes others) is a feature and has billions-of-users reach.

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