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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

> For example, it claims that British users searching for broadcaster Piers Morgan's comments on the Duchess of Sussex following an interview with Oprah Winfrey were more likely to see articles about Morgan produced by smaller, regional outlets.

A quick test does bear out this claim[1], I see no Daily Mail articles with that search even though they are indexed[2]. However DuckDuckGo has similar results[3], so...

A much more likely explanation is that 1) The Daily Mail is just a shitty "newspaper" hardly even worthy of the title and not generally considered to produce high-quality content, and/or 2) that the other articles were much more widely shared, linked, etc. and much of society at large ignored the nonsense from The Daily Mail.

There's a reason The Daily Mail is generally not accepted as a reliable source on Wikipedia.

Aside: I am flabbergasted that Piers Morgan managed to survive this long at all, considering he's been one of the most disliked people on TV for a long time (and for good reason IMO).

[1]: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Piers+Morgan+Duchess+of+Su...

[2]: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Piers+Morgan+Duchess+of+Su...

[3]: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Piers+Morgan+Duchess+of+Sus...

View on HN

I could absolutely believe that there is a "quality" ranking that pushes Daily Mail stories down because the domain contains such poor quality content, or that the pages are loaded down with so much crap that people hit 'back' almost immediately after clicking on one of their links.

That said, and as much as it pains me to side with the Daily Mail on anything, I think there's an interesting argument to be made here that Google's "quality" ratings are entirely opaque and the public should be given better access to them.

The problem with that is if people know the exact formula for quality, sites can work to game it. Basically, once the formula for quality is known, it no longer is a formula for quality.

There are ways to perform 3rd party assessment without directly exposing intellectual property to interested parties.

But the point isn't 3rd part assessments, the issue is that people want transparency of the algorithms; i.e. the intellectual property is exactly what people want to see.

Agreed and I'd be willing to bet that a significant portion of those people may have conflicting interests here.

Unless you think it's even in the realm of possibility to have a human being do the assessment, at the end of the day it's still going to be an algorithm that can be gamed.

This is the key problem. All automated moderation is essentially a wicked mix of an iterated prisoner's dilemma and Goodhart's Law.

> I think there's an interesting argument to be made here that Google's "quality" ratings are entirely opaque and the public should be given better access to them.

It's a tricky problem, in principle I agree with you, but on the other hand more transparency also means more information for people who are gaming the system.

And there are many MANY people who (try to) game Google. Never underestimate the amount of ridiculous effort some people will go to to make a buck. Arguably Google's largest value is that it's actually reasonably good in preventing this.

So ... I don't know.

Good? Are you kidding? Google results nowadays are a funfest of SEO abusers and quality is VERY LOW.

The main reason I gave up Google as default search engine is that results were not good and I couldn't find material.

Duckduckgo provides generally better results and has some very cool gadgets (like stack overflow answer expansion).

Google is winning on businesses' opening hours and safe search on images is not as safe as Google, which is the single caveat I need to remember about before looking for something.

Why should the public be given access to that information? Google should be under no obligation to provide any of that unless we "nationalize" the idea of search engines and declare them a human right. Until then, it's a voluntary service to be consumed.

Of course google isn't under such a legal obligation. But then they should be explicit: "We are ranking results on our own quality metric which we won't disclose, you'll just have to like them", and let the market react. This position can then be taught in schools to kids, and used whenever google search results are being evaluated by the public. Right now google brands its search results as being driven by the public.

It's like when people say google (or fb, etc) has no [first amendment] obligation to allow freedom of speech. Fine, but then don't constantly describe yourself of defenders of free speech, say from the outset you will police speech as you see fit, drop the pretense that your policing is somehow objective, and let the market digest that.

> Right now google brands its search results as being driven by the public.

Where does it do that? Google search results being an opaque algorithm is not a big secret, given how Google clearly refuses to talk about details every time this comes up.

Governments would be absolutely salivating at the prospect of such simple censorship if they owned the search engines. And be under no illusion that all without exception would abuse that power in some way or another.

All limited-liability companies are government-supported entities and it's perfectly fair to impose corresponding social responsibilities on them. In this case Google is in a monopoly position which means they have a stronger responsibility to not only be fair but be seen to be fair.

Here’s a Google AMP page of a Daily Mail page that crashes on every page load for me on my iPhone’s default Safari browser. They probably need to hire a front-end developer or web performance specialist to diagnose it.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl...

Slow or failing page loads negatively affect search rankings on all search engines & 80% of users abandon your site if it takes more than 10 seconds to load.

WFM

Safari is notoriously the new IE. It's probably a perfectly spec-compliant page that happens to trigger a bug.

This became my most upvoted comment of all time (+22) so it must’ve gotten a lot of attention and is probably worth me following up on. The Google AMP link above now loads impressively fast in under 1.5 seconds in the same iPhone Safari browser. If you click-through the AMP link to get to the Daily Mail’s full version of the page, that loads in 9-10 seconds on the first view and about 6 seconds on subsequent (cached) views.

FYI Google's leaked docs on the subject:

https://www.zachvorhies.com/msm_rankings.html

If you ever want to play censorship scavenger hunt, try to get Google to link to breitbart.com without including the word breitbart. You can search article titles word for word in quotes and the names of the authors but google will not return a single breitbart.com link.

I know I’m a sample size of one, but I just searched for the string (without any quotes) ‘biden doj to investigate mpls police joshua caplan’ on Google, the story on breitbart.com was the 2nd result, the first result was the same article on ‘newsbreak.com’

That is an interesting observation. I can confirm I get those results too. Perhaps they are relaxing their algorithms now that elections are over. I originally tried this month (or maybe a few) ago and was unable to get any link to breitbart.com even if I googled entire paragraphs.

Some sources aren't merely low quality they are poison. A website on fragrances isn't liable to show you which sort of toxin would make your corpse smell most sweet after you have choked on your own death.

An ethical take would be trying not to spread poison is the right thing to do. Inaction in the face of evil isn't neutral its evil.

I'd rather decide for myself what is "evil" and "poison" rather than have that decision made for me by a search engine who's only job is to return the information I'm asking for. I could want this "evil" information for any number of non-evil reasons, it is not their nor anyone else's job to make that decision on behalf of the user.

I think I will be better off if social media and search engines don't help people poison their minds. That is to say its possible that your desire to be informed and my desire for you not to find what you are looking for might be opposed.

If you think that you are missing out on legitimate information pick a different search engine or make one.

There are lots of oppressive things we can do to help people not "poison their minds". Strictly controlling the information your citizens interact with, as is done in places like China, shows what an implementation of this may look like.

It's also roundly criticized as repressive, anti-freedom, and ripe for almost unlimited abuse by every first world nation.

You're right, but the question is, how absolutist should we be on that principle? The results of free sharing of "information" can be seen in measles outbreaks, for example.

Completely, in my mind, because the alternatives have unbounded abuse potential.

Even if you had freedom from legal coercion it doesn't imply a platform ought to use that freedom to help poisonous crap spread. Lets give an obvious example there was a lady spreading nonsense about how you could cure your autistic kid by giving them bleach anally. She is encouraging dumb people to torture their vulnerable mentally challenged children.

Whether the government ought to let her spread her malicious lies is an entirely different question from whether for example amazon ought to carry her book or google ought to index her site. If your absolutist free speech position doesn't allow you to admit to the idea of the government censoring her I understand. However if you think that amazon and google ought to be morally obligated to help her spread her poison I don't understand your position at all.

A rational person can tell the difference between a grey area obvious nonsense and pretending that there aren't plenty of trivially definable black and white situations in which not carrying poison makes the world a better place is complete nonsense as is the idea that ANY editorial discretion magically leads to 1984. Life is literally the finding a balance point and I think we can reasonably discover a point of homeostasis between free heroin on every corner and constantly strip searching everyone for drugs.

If you don't think so you haven't considered the problem very deeply.

I thought we were speaking mostly about governments in this discussion, but quite frankly, the amount of power that Google and Facebook combined have over the average internet user's information intake puts them in a similar place. I believe the "moral obligation" is to act like the common carriers they play at being when it's expedient to do so, keep their hands off, and allow the government apparatus equipped to handle incitement to violence to do its job.

The problem at the end of the day is that we're not talking about extreme, contrived examples like the one just mentioned. We're talking about ideological things that rational people can disagree about in good faith, and there is no downside for tech companies to boost their preferred ideologies/candidates/etc and suppress their non-preferred ones.

That is a huge problem with, just like the governments, unlimited abuse potential... except it's more insidious. Government suppression of speech comes at the point of a gun, tech suppression of speech happens passively, in that you won't know it's happening unless you know to look for it, or its application is exceedingly blunt.

It's handwaved because many people find the list of boosting and suppressing targets acceptable.

The example I gave isn't contrived at all.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/28/amazon-removes-books-promoti...

Where do you derive the moral obligation for facebook or google have to act as neutral carriers of information? I'll do one. A restaurant has an established duty of care to maintain a minimum standard of cleanliness so as to provide sustenance and not illness. This duty is established in law and custom, maintained by inspection and certification. It's a duty whose exact performance and rules has changed over time but which goes back in custom over thousands of years.

This duty rendered real and specific by law and inspection is based on the most basic of rights the right to retain your life and health. It is trivially to suppose that someone ought to respect your desire to remain alive by not doing their job so poorly that filling your stomach once leads to you filling a hole in the ground.

Tech companies which so far as I can see have no duty of neutrality beyond what is required to keep our business are in fact very very circumspect about blocking things. Facebook happily left the groups up that I and others reported in the days leading up to the Jan 6 insurrection where they were planning to overthrow our government and it wasn't that long ago that reddit decided to remove communities like jailbait and subreddits in which the people who used to use lynching as social gatherings would have been quite comfortable.

When people talk about the problem with insidious blocking by tech companies I suspect the person is either an idealist or one of the deplorables. I'll do you the credit of assuming your in the former basket because so far as I'm aware the only people at present negatively effected by google and facebook are all in the latter basket.

>Where do you derive the moral obligation for facebook or google have to act as neutral carriers of information?

It's interesting that you mention restaurants. Restaurants have standards that go beyond the casual cook in a home kitchen because the restaurant, owing to its scale, can multiply the effect of a problem with food safety and injure/kill very many people very easily.

To briefly answer your question: Big scale means errors are magnified means different rules apply.

Facebook by itself is the single largest website in the world outside of China. I find it outrageous to suggest that a company in that position (Google too) should get to just do whatever they please regarding the information input of a massive chunk of the global population.

Pretending that power doesn't exist does not nullify its effects or its abuse potential.

>because so far as I'm aware the only people at present negatively effected by google and facebook are all in the latter basket.

Your unwarranted personal attack aside, this is precisely what I meant about those handwaving the establishment of an abusable power structure simply because they're generally okay with the decisions that structure is making.

What about when you're not so okay with those decisions anymore? You mentioned the Capitol insurrection, I assume then, that you think Facebook should clamp down on such groups? Their answer to you is the same as their answer to me: "Our back yard, our rules."

I think we can do better than that. And to preempt the inevitable argument that the first amendment allows them to operate free of oversight in this way.. that's true. It would be a lot easier to tie their freedom from liability for the libelous, terroristic, etc. content their users post to some additional duties, transparency, and so forth.

> Google's "quality" ratings are entirely opaque and the public should be given better access to them.

There's only so many top spots in Google search results, I'd rather those not be awarded to parties that are the most litigious.

Nobody is entitled to a particular place in ranking and making this maximally transparent would almost certainly result in people gaming them more effectively decreasing the quality of search results for all users.

Furthermore what are you supposed to do with this data? If you ultimately find that one site is given one score and another is given another and you disagree with this are you going to demand that google show other people the sites you prefer in a higher rank? Nonsense.

No matter how they rank showing their hands would almost certainly be harmful to google because it would allow political groups of any stripe to put pressure on them to "fix" their results on any number of dimensions. Google would in short be crazy to give this to you and you aren't entitled to it.

"Nobody is entitled to a particular place in ranking and making this maximally transparent would almost certainly results in people gaming them more effectively decreasing the quality of search results for all users."

According to this logic, if results were listed alphabetically (i.e., based on a truly objective criteria), we would see folks naming everything beginning with "0" or "A".

The above statement seems to ignore the history of search engine paid placement (people are certainly entitled, so long as they pay) which has evolved into "Ads by Google" appearing above search results. Further, the statement admits gaming occurs ["gaming them more effectively"] regardless of Google secret "solutions".

Listing search results by subjective criteria while portarying this as some sort of pseudo-objective "search" is not helpful. The "web search engine" has become a front for an online ad services business. The public is absolutely entitled to an index of the public information web, not controlled by a private company selling ad services. One day, we may get it.

> According to this logic, if results were listed alphabetically (i.e., based on a truly objective criteria), we would see folks naming everything beginning with "0" or "A".

This is seen in practice. The yellow pages were?(are?) alphabetical, which is why you see so many business that start with the letter A.

The Yellow Pages still exist IRL. There was an interesting book I read some years back about the history of the phone book and it included some history behind the yellow pages.^1

The YP allowed an advertiser to pay for a larger type font, or a quarter/half/full page ad, in addition to the free listing. It is also divided into subject catgories.

What has been lost with Google's web search is the concept of the accessible free listing. It is only accesible under Google's secret rules. The ability to finger through the pages to get to, say, the last entry beginning with "Z" is not possible with Google search. Google will hide the bottom of the list and only display the first several pages. This creates pressure to buy ads or SEO services (game the search) in order to "appear at the top", which is "the only way to be found". Absurd. Google will not even return more than 400 results anymore.

While the phenomenon of naming things to begin with "A" may be seen in pratice outside of the web, this has not rendered the system of alphabetical listing obsolete.^2 Not even close. Also, there are likely other factors influencing the decision to name things beginning with letters like "A". As many computer nerds know, not all letters are equally common in the English language. Anyone who has looked at large zone files knows that domain names tend to begin with "A", but such choice of name is not done to game alphabetical ordering.

1. About 11 years ago I read a book by Ammon Shea called The Phone Book. It had some discussion of the history of the Yellow Pages.

2. Last year, Judith Flanders published a book on the history of alphabetical order.

It's not obvious to me what the bounds of "all websites" are.

The list of all phone numbers is obviously enumerable. There's a registry and a flat list of phone numbers. But, resource constraints aside, is it possible to enumerate all websites? I suppose you could theoretically enumerate every domain name, but that isn't necessarily the same thing.

> The public is absolutely entitled to an index of the public information web, not controlled by a private company selling ad services. One day, we may get it.

You aren't entitled to one paid for by google but I don't think there is any reason you can't fund the PBS of search engines. There in fact save lack of interest or motivation why you couldn't start working on it tomorrow and lobby for government support.

> and much of society at large ignored the nonsense from The Daily Mail.

Isn't it one of the most sold newspapers in the UK? I like how elitist folks are. In Romania everyone I know would also go "no one buys Libertatea" (one of our trashy newspapers) but it is the most sold newspaper in Romania.

High brow people badly underestimate how much influence these tabloids have. There's a reason their readers made folks like Kim Kardashian a billionaire.

Sure, but that doesn't mean these particular articles were also widely shared or read.

I think this is confusing the general ("Daily Mail is the most read paper in the UK") with the specific ("this article was shared, linked, and read a lot").

It sells quite well but not necessarily for good reasons. One of it's nicknames is the Daily Hate https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Daily%20Hate

You can check out their coverage of Romanians if you want some examples https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Adailymail.co.uk+rom...

> It sells quite well but not necessarily for good reasons.

Who cares? That only means that a lot of people want that hate (and probably feel that hate).

Love is the answer!

Also newspapers stirring things does sometimes muck up politics. Like in the 30s the Mail used to support Hitler and Mussolini who then went on to cause some bother.

It is high brow left wing types in particular that delude themselves about the oddness of their own beliefs. The Daily Mail becomes a special object of hate because it is a reminder that they are - at least politically - very strange.

Food animals need to find comfort in the crushing presence of their fellows as a sign of safety even while they are all headed to slaughter together.

Yes, many media outlets are sensationalist, have a poor record of journalistic integrety, yet their product is consumed by millions of people. That doesn't make them a good source; it makes them a liability.

I was about to say, this article makes perfect sense to me. The Daily Mail is one of my last choices of news, and I generally don’t use it as a source at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google’s algos have figured out the same thing many of us have…

And remember that search results are personalized unless you browse incognito.

Wikipedia agrees:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not...

tl;dr best quote (imo) "The Mail should be on the citation blacklist. There's no area of news where it is actually reliable. It can be relied on to accurately report celebrity gossip, but in that case the gossip itself is frequently false and the Mail doesn't check it. Their coverage of medical, science and political topics is a byword for deliberate inaccuracy."

Wikipedia's editors are significantly biased.

Any somewhat political article is extremely left leaning.

God forbid you have to use it for research of any political topic, always check the references and compare to right leaning sources.

It's funny because their critique of DM can be applied to Wikipedia as a whole.

> Any somewhat political article is extremely left leaning.

I've seen that same argument before to argue how the Nazis, and modern neo-Nazi groups are supposedly all "left wing", their categorization on Wikipedia as right wing and far right is allegedly only the result of that very same "left leaning" bias you are claiming.

Which, as a German, is just a tad bit weird, because it wasn't Wikipedia that defined these groups as such, those results come out of the political sciences. Nazis being right-wing, and neo-Nazis having moved further into the far-right is a very established fact in Germany.

Their name has "socialist" right in the middle of it. You might argue over definitions of socialism and whether it's left or right. But I don't think you can say "a group that calls itself socialist has at least this one left-leaning trait" isn't a position reasonable people can disagree on.

What I find worse than people going both ways on wether nazis are left or right leaning, is someone in a position of authority like wikipedia saying, one side is objectively right [about a question that isn't even rigorously posed] and will be treated as such.

I suppose you believe the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea is democratic then?

Oh, I don't think socialism is only in the name of nazis, I think their nationalization of many practices and aspects of culture is key. Do you think "nazis had socialist tendencies" is a position that no reasonable people can take?

I didn't mean to suggest taking the name itself as the only evidence of socialism.

> Do you think "nazis had socialist tendencies" is a position that no reasonable people can take?

Yes, because a socialism that benefits only members of the "Aryan race" while excluding, oppressing and murdering others in the same country is not socialism at all.

I'd say that's a staple of socialism/communism/marxism.

From Mao to Venezuela, the core idea depends upon excluding, oppressing, and murder of others in the same country based on class.

The only thing different about the Nazis is they targeted by race not class, though Communist China is targeting Uighur and other minorities in their country.

> excluding, oppressing, and murder of others in the same country based on class.

> The only thing different about the Nazis is they targeted by race

The government excluding, oppressing, murdering based on race ... so the American south was socialist then right?

That can very well be socialism for a subgroup of your existing population.

I think the divergence in views is in the definition of socialism we have; I see it as an economical doctrine of state centralisation, you probably have other egalitarian ideals attached to it.

Economically, on a scale from free-market to socialism, where do you think nazis rank? I think they were closer to socialism that nowadays mainstream left wing parties

> That can very well be socialism for a subgroup of your existing population.

This is like calling ancient Sparta - where the Spartans lived in an egalitarian structure while simultaneously oppressing their Helot slaves - socialism.

Or for a more a recent example, apartheid South Africa, where whites received a great deal of support via government policy that practically ensured their prosperity. That wasn't socialism, either.

Socialism is not about centralized state control. It's about whether the state plays a strong role in ensuring a standard of living for all it's citizens. In successful examples (like Social Security and Medicare in the US) it has accomplished this while the majority of the economy is not under state control.

That's exactly my point, there is a difference between the ideals of socialism and the economic doctrine which plays out when socialism gets implemented.

In terms of economic policy, all the examples you cited are on the left side or going left in my book. There is definitely nothing capitalistic about state intervention.

It also makes sense historically: it took us a long time to understand that capitalism is the most efficient way to create value and advance technology. Even the communist dictatorship that is China understood that and it's using this to rule the world, while the western world (especially the USA) marched back on their capitalism and hampered their economy with more and more regulations.

I think we still don't have enough capitalism and we need a completely unregulated market and no government at all.

> I think we still don't have enough capitalism and we need a completely unregulated market and no government at all.

Who was arguing the merits of capitalism? Not me.

But true colors shine through. It seems like your actual motivation for arguing that Nazis were socialist was just a device to argue for unfettered capitalism by falsely associating socialism with them. That's a weak rhetorical trick that far right commentators have been using for quite a while now.

> That can very well be socialism for a subgroup of your existing population.

Using that same line of reasoning one could frame the American slave trade as "socialist" in nature because the slave owners were "socialized" by the exploited slaves.

> Economically, on a scale from free-market to socialism, where do you think nazis rank?

Which is kinda meaningless, if you want to see were Nazis stood on what you gotta look at their actions past abstract economic theories and their own PR, you have to look at the people they oppressed, persecuted, killed and for what reasons they did it.

Or you could also look at what kind of people [0] and ideas [1] in large parts inspired them.

Those weren't socialist/communist ideals out of the East, that inspiration came nearly exclusively from the West, a lot of it from over the pond, straight down to originally coining the term "Untermensch" and the associated race theories [2]

[0] https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/henry-ford-grand-cross-1938...

[1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172422/hi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch#Etymology

> But I don't think you can say "a group that calls itself socialist has at least this one left-leaning trait" isn't a position reasonable people can disagree on.

It is to anybody actually familiar with the history of the NSDAP. The "socialism" in their name was mostly PR, what little socialist currents existed in the early NSDAP, represented by the Strasser brothers, was bloodily purged during the Night of the Long Knives.

It's for that reason the very first victims in the concentration camp Dachau were not just Jews, they where German leftist political opposition Jews: Communists, socialists, antifascists, killed as early as 1933. The very same reason why Nazis considered the communist USSR as their arch-nemesis.

> What I find worse than people going both ways on wether nazis are left or right leaning, is someone in a position of authority like wikipedia saying, one side is objectively right [about a question that isn't even rigorously posed] and will be treated as such.

All this information can be found on Wikipedia, not just there, but also local Wikipedias from the places it actually happened. Like the Fuerth Wikipedia being even more in-depth and detailed [0], which is the city next to Nuremberg, both very relevant places for the early rise of Nazism.

That's why it's really not this "open debate" you make it out to be. The only people who insist on that are usually US Americans, due to the caricature "atheist socialist leftist" boogeyman that's been peddled to them for decades and some Eastern Europeans with post-communism shock, to justify their ideological hard shift to the right into often straight up fascism.

[0] https://www.fuerthwiki.de/wiki/index.php/Rudolf_Benario

I've read extensively on the subject and I'm aware of the claims of using socialism as PR and I'm aware of the great purge.

At the same time, Hitler viewed Marxism not only as a philosophy close to its own, but also as a rival. I don't think the first victims of Dachau prove anything.

The only data I use to argue nazis were closer to socialism than free market capitalism is that their economy (despite having a semblance of a free economy) revolved around the state: prices, wages were fixed, members of the nazi party were put in control of private companies who disobeyed.

Hitler was definitely to the right of Stalin, but he was left of most modern left wing parties.

I also disagree with you that something is not open to debate, and I think it's worrying to hear people hold this view - especially on something so subjective as political categorisations.

Some more reading material:

https://mises.org/library/why-nazism-was-socialism-and-why-s...

https://fee.org/articles/anti-racists-should-think-twice-abo...

That's a well established fact everywhere. That's what every kid studies in school. I don't think it's correct.

The main problem is that left wing and right wing are meaningless terms. Left and right generally apply to the economical sphere which goes from communism (entirely state operated economy) to libertarianism (entirely de-regulated market). Usually when people talk about left wing vs right wing they attach some authoritarian / anarchic connotations. The politicalcompass.org (which is kind of left leaning) has a nice explanation of this problem.

Going back to nazis: if you look at their policies and how the economy operated in nazi Germany, nazis are closer to socialism than libertarianism. There is a nice analysis here: https://mises.org/library/why-nazism-was-socialism-and-why-s...

Sure, Hitler may have been to the right of Stalin, but he was much more left leaning than any of nowadays left wing parties.

Yes because Wikipedia's opinion and some random quote on there should be what matters above all...

You realize Wikipedia itself is not considered a reliable or credible source for anything right?

If I’m searching for coverage of a news story via a search engine, I will always choose any other option than the DM even if its ranking is lower. It is a source of right wing hate, propaganda, racism, and generally all round poor journalism.

It doesn’t deserve a click.

and I strongly believe that YOU get to make that decision. I don't believe that google in their monopoly position gets to make that decision on your behalf without clarity into how it's made.

How would that work? Google always decides the order of search results. Are they supposed to show a random result that matches the search terms just to be „fair“?

I also decide by choosing search engines that are more likely to deliver the results I'm looking for.

Daily Mail should not be able to litigate their way to my eyeballs.

When monopolies exist. Do we let the government tell them what to do (beyond the laws applicable to all businesses)? Or do we just break them up?

Let's say I accept your claim about Google being a monopoly. Should the government force them to rank sites the way the government wants? Or do we just break up Google?

It's not an either/or in the US. Trusts can be ordered to stop engaging in anticompetitive behavior as well as be broken up.

Google doesn't have anything like a monopoly and the barrier to switching is microscopic.

Google has over 90% market share* in the search engine space worldwide. They most certainly do have a monopoly on web search.

* https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share#monthl...

Having a large share of a market doesn't constitute a monopoly.

> exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action

Google doesn't own exclusive control of the supply of answers to queries about the rest of the web in fact it would almost be silly to even talk about such. Its also not the only game as far as ads

What people are worried in fact is google controls access to a very large share of incoming eyeballs in terms of organic unpaid for results such that ranking you poorly or not at all could harm you despite having no business relationship with google.

This however isn't business because the only customers are searchers and the ads on top of the results.

Whether you appear 3rd or 37th is material to your business but not a matter of google having a monopoly on my eyeballs. The framework which you understand commerce doesn't fit the situation.

If you believe it's worth addressing it will have to be via unique legislation that actually suits.

it's much more likely that it doesn't appear in results because people don't click on it when it does

It's well known that Google uses clicks on search result as a preference signal to modify its ranking. This way, decisions by users turn into decisions by the algorithm.

Sure, google should just start... randmomizing results I guess? Makes total sense.

Remember when Piers was caught in the phone-hacking scandal and f*ked off to the US in shame? Why'd he ever come back..

maybe it's simply that few people bother to link to Daily Mail pages

Why does this feel like the standard HN "things didn't work because you suck" ad hominem attack on daily mail

The Daily Mail seems to do more real reporting of events in America than prestigious American newspapers do.

In what possible world could that be true?

Ummm no?

"Real" === "fits my biases"

You think the news is about 'takes'. It's not, real news is about scoops.

Other than celebrity news, what meaningful scoops are the Daily Mail getting? Genuinely curious.

here’s one from today

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9521649/amp/Fundrai...

Fair. All financial conflicts of interest should be reported on equally, like when Kyle Rittenhouse received funds.

Like, non-celebrity-related events?

Like what? I don't see anything that's not covered by other outlets.

I do see stuff like "Can you THINK yourself thin? A hypnotist to the stars says you can - and reveals the five-step technique to try if you want to shed the 'lockdown stone'"[1]

Taken from the front page right now. The article is even worse than the title suggests.

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI

[1]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-9492639/Hypnotist...

>Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI

Ahhh this takes me back. What an amazing video. Made 11 years ago and it's just as accurate as it was back then.

Honestly? Fuck the Daily Mail. Also The S*n, Daily Express, etc.

The Piers Morgan episode of Have I Got News For You, from when he was still the editor of The Daily Mail, is also a hilarious watch; highlights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6TcgfjcOPU or full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeOIfKrWyVA

The Daily Mail stalked Ian Hislop for years after this in an effort to find "dirt" on him (never found any), all because Piers made a complete arse of himself :-/

Morgan has edited the News of the world, and the Mirror. He has never edited the Mail, though has been published there from time to time.

Oh right, I got Daily Mail and Daily Mirror mixed up >_<

https://www.google.com/search?q=paul+rossi+grace+church

NY Times has conspicuously not been covering this NY story, whereas Daily Mail and NY Post have.

Is that... like... a story though? "Private school you've not heard of in NYC has minor curriculum and staffing dust-up". That should struggle to make any part of the paper in a major city, and if it does, maybe a little column buried in the middle.

The only way that could possibly count as international news, certainly, is if you're looking for examples of some certain phenomenon and failing to come up with any more important or relevant than that.

It is a local story, of no interest, if it doesn't validate your worldview. If it props up your side, and make the other side look dumb, then it is of international importance.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/us/slave-trade-auction-sn...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/us/texas-chivalry-assignm...

Completely agree. "Prestigious" American newspapers do so much selective coverage it's insane...most people have absolutely no idea the extent of it. It produces the result of censorship without needing to actually censor. Just look at the Hunter Biden laptop story for an example -- initially blacked out and denied by American media, blanket rejection of underlying premise of story & suppression of relevant facts, eventual subtle admission on page 10 that everything was true all along.

The average person on the left will deny and reject this since the communist American owned media only feeds them stuff they want to believe. Truth hurts sometimes.

This doesn't follow, the laptop story's premise doesn't pass the sniff test at all.

A laptop is left with a computer repair salesman for some reason, in Delaware for some reason, and for some reason no contact information is given for the laptop's return, and for some reason the repairman both wanted to and was capable of getting a direct line to Rudy Giuliani who for some reason gave the only copy of the hard drive to the NYT without screening any other news outlets.

The repairman goes on to give contradictory statements repeatedly about the origin of the laptop. The FBI acquires the device for investigation into Russian disinformation campaigns.

I suggest you read up on the scandal more, you either leave out details willingly or you are severely ignorant of the facts.

When you say "for some reason" you are alluding that there is no answer and you're trying to downplay it, you are lying.

The laptop was turned in by Hunter because it was waterlogged. He signed the form. When he didn't come back in to get it and the owner noticed the illegal things on it, a copy of the hard drive was first given to the FBI, another was later given to Rudy because nothing was done by the FBI.

The emails and photos on the laptop have not been disputed. His business partner has confirmed the emails, and the DKIM of at least one of the emails have been verified.

Nothing I said is false, any of you downvoters want to dispute what I said?

No, because when you're so deep, you can't be saved. I'm sorry. I wish you all the best.

Projection. This is scary to you because you're not allowed to know it's true. Your President and his son are corrupt.

--- to others in the thread ---

> After obtaining a copy of the hard drive, DailyMail.com commissioned top cyber forensics experts Maryman & Associates to analyze its data and determine whether the laptop's contents were real.

Company name is listed. You'd have to go ask the cyber-firm they used, any outlet could verify it and write a story debunking it if they wanted. Something tells me they don't want to because they know it's true.

An email from the laptop has been DKIM validated, here's the repo: https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim

What are you suggesting was made up?

He literally presented all facts and hard evidence, but your brain somehow rejected all that, offered no response to anything he presented, and instead came up with this completely unintelligent response.

You should seriously reanalyze how you reach conclusions and look up what cognitive dissonance is.

Ironically, DM did enough journalistic leg work that they managed to get their hands on a copy of Hunter Biden's hard drive and had "forensic expert" examine it. Something the rest of the "reputable" media couldn't do.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9445105/What-Hunter...

Based on the source how do we know they just didn't literally make it up?

> After obtaining a copy of the hard drive, DailyMail.com commissioned top cyber forensics experts Maryman & Associates to analyze its data and determine whether the laptop's contents were real.

An email from the laptop has been DKIM validated, here's the repo: https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim

What are you suggesting was made up?

That an individual stolen email could be released without ever having a laptop belonging to you. If they had jack shit they would have leaked everything.

They did "leak" everything, from Hunter fucking prostitutes, high on crack, missing his teeth, and all his business emails,

Look how hard you're trying to ignore and twist facts to mold them to what you want to believe. It's literally astonishing to see.

Look up what cognitive dissonance is. You're experiencing a serious case of this here. I'd urge you to reanalyze how you reach conclusions moving forward, there's probably other areas of your life where you're doing the same thing.

Giuliani is an incredibly unreliable source, a known and prolific liar. Without the ability to interogate the evidence directly anything that comes from him is as reliable as he is.

That is literally how human communications networks work reliability of speaker is a pre filter for analysis of evidence. Do you specifically suggest that Giuliani is a reliable source?

If he's not anything whose exclusive providence is established through him is contaminated. Anything anymore including video is trivial to fake if you have resources and the laptop which whose very existence seems so unlikely turned up with maximal political convenience.

In brief we are supposed to believe Hunter filled a laptop with incriminating evidence, then dropped it off at a trumptards computer repair shop in a state he doesn't live in and forgot about. We are also to believe that he happily gave him the login to unlock the encrypted drive full of potentially election killing data that just happened to come into ghoulianis hands.

It's amazing that you believe this shit without hard evidence.

What does it matter? The information on the laptop is still subject to all the normal procedures of journalism: follow-up, look for corroboration, seek confirmation, ask questions, look for evidence tampering, and so on. Instead, the story was buried and ignored. It boggles my mind that anyone could defend this as proper behaviour by the press.

> The information on the laptop is still subject to all the normal procedures of journalism: follow-up, look for corroboration, seek confirmation, ask questions

And The New York Post did none of this.

There are plenty of other articles written by about it by almost every news outlet[1]; it was never "buried". The difference was they treated the suspicious weird story as exactly that, instead of immediately rushing to conclusions.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hunter+biden+laptop

The laptop is/was real. Are you actually maintaining that it is fake?

We live in a world of subjective truths. "Hunter Biden laptop is fake" is to the left what "wide spread voter fraud" is to the right. People are too emotionally invested to have adult conversation on these topics.

There is ample evidence of a fair election I have seen zero verification that the laptop belonged to hunter Biden in the first place and a lot of reasons to believe that the story is largely fabricated. Specifically its entirely sure that the laptop exists. It's possible it contains some actual stolen data in the same way that a lot of celebrities nudes are now out there due to a vulnerability in icloud.

Its not clear to ME that the physical device ever belonged to Hunter Biden or that it contains anything like what they claim it contains. The single source of truth is massively tainted because the source is a lying scumbag with zero integrity. If you conclude otherwise I conclude its because its the answer you wish were true.

>If you conclude otherwise I conclude its because its the answer you wish were true.

Confession through projection.

You are totally missing the forest for the trees. Is there a single piece of information or revelation from the “laptop” that has been disputed, denied, or debunked? No. More importantly, have the mainstream American press managed to get the Bidens to address any of the insinuations stemming from materials? They haven’t even tried: they’ve decided to settle for whatever generic comment the Bidens put out through their press agents.

The story is unproven nonsense. The burden of proof lies with the accuser and it has never been met in the first place.

That doesn't really apply when theres a bunch of dick pics on an ACTUAL COMPUTER EVERYONE REFUSES TO LOOK AT. Jesus just check the saved wifi network passwords....if Hunter Biden's house network is saved on it, safe to say it's his laptop. Instead ppl like you unintelligently refer to it as "unproven nonsense" and bury your head in the sand.

I don't have access to the computer nor the raw data. I was underwhelmed by the original news article and never saw anything that changed my mind thereafter. I'm not refusing too look at a computer nobody has access to.

Maybe they ought to have leaked the raw data for me to look at.

Zero verification minus the dozens of Hunter Biden dick pics and pics of him around drugs or whatever. Could easily scrape metadata to figure out if it was def his laptop or not. Macs send data to their servers whenever an application is open...and also probably have location data on the specific device ID. Could simply cross reference that with the location of Bidens house. Or even look at the wifi connections....does it have the password saved for Hunter Biden's home wifi? Simple stuff to find some answers but the truth is you want to believe it's a conspiracy theory so you will instead bury your head in the sand and be ignorant of facts.

Also, there's ample evidence of an unfair election as well and zero credible verification of any results.

Of course there is a real laptop, and the content published from it is probably real too, and the laptop may very well have belonged to Hunter. But we don't have the full context, and the initial reporting was suspicious as hell.

And none of this means the narrative it's used for is real (i.e. the claim that Joe Biden has corrupt connections to Ukraine). We saw this with previously leaked emails of DNC, Weiner, etc. where the intended meaning was twisted to "prove" some grand conspiracy. The emails were real, the conspiracy was bullshit.

That Hunter Biden is a bit of a screw-up is not controversial. That this somehow automatically reflects badly on his father is.

Adam Schiff's "Russian disinformation campaign" assertion was denied by the director of national intelligence, and yet it persists.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/john-ratcliffe-rejec...

“This is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign. The intelligence community has not been involved with Hunter Biden’s laptop. Hunter Biden is a U.S. person, and he would be subject to any investigation regarding fraud, or corruption would be rightfully the jurisdiction of the FBI. So, the FBI has had possession of this, and what I can say without commenting on any investigation that they may have in corruption or fraud — is to say that their investigation does not center around Russian disinformation, and the intelligence community is playing no role with respect to that,” Ratcliffe said. “Adam Schiff saying that this is part of some Russian disinformation campaign and that the IC has assessed that or believes that is simply not true, so I appreciate the opportunity to be able to tell the American people that that is the case."

Do you have an example handy?

I haven’t been keeping a list, and sometimes it’s not so much a major scoop/exclusive as it is providing details and getting quotes on stories that are missing elsewhere. But it’s a definite trend I’ve noticed over time.

Some examples I can think of

- locating where Ghislaine Maxwell was hiding out

- Anthony Wiener sexting scandal

- Floyd arrest body cam footage

This article chronicles their American operation. They do aggressive tabloid reporting/investigation, which may generate a lot of forgettable celebrity content, but is also brought to bear on politicians, officials, and other ‘important’ news subjects. https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/...

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