7 ms·

Merkel may not say it directly, but a very serious risk is if Google, Facebook or Twitter's leadership decides to try to influence public affairs by hiding some

Merkel may not say it directly, but a very serious risk is if Google, Facebook or Twitter's leadership decides to try to influence public affairs by hiding some things and showing others. You may think the current leadership of those organizations wouldn't do that, but they are human beings. * What if a powerful business partner, such as the Chinese or Indian governments or a large company, wants search results 'made more fair and balanced' in return for their business? Hollywood studios, Bloomberg, and (IIRC) Fox already have censored themselves for the Chinese government. Advertisers' influence on the news is well-known. * What if one of the big platform's leaders feels very strongly about an issue, feels attacked, or thinks they are doing the right thing? IIRC, Jimmy Wales used his power to alter articles in Wikipedia to suit his preferences and to cover up the changes. What if a highly critical, maybe even partly false story about Zuckerberg or his wife goes viral? Will it get treated the same as other such stories? * What happens when a big platform's leadership changes? Maybe the new people will be highly politicized. Maybe the Koch brothers or Fox/Murdoch (or Peter Thiel?) or another politicized investor will buy in - precisely to gain that influence, as many have done before. These platforms have the responsibilities of journalists, without the institutional or professional norms and training, and with far more power than any news organization ever had. Rush Limbaugh, Fox, CNN or the NY Times each (or even together) have nothing compared to the breadth and depth of influence of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, in the U.S. and around the world.

oh_sigh 10y ago
Many tech engineers are extremely principled, to the point where it would be impossible to pull something like that off without someone finding out about it and blowing the whistle.
- hackuser 10y ago
  Many very bad things have happened in large organizations, and have persisted for years or decades without someone blowing the whistle. The Catholic Church, intelligence agencies, and many police forces come to mind. I don't think engineers are more principled than others, and thinking we are exceptional is, IMHO, the number one way to expose ourselves to these human frailties.
  - dlss 10y ago
    I think oh_sigh might have meant to say "the rate of extremely principled individuals seems higher in geeks vs non-geeks" -- which I think is true, even if the average rate of principledness is around the same for both groups. So I'd like to add to your rebuttal that extremely principled people are also capable of awful actions. All it takes is a good theory.
    - TillE 10y ago
      I'd agree that "principledness" seems unusually high in geeks, except that those principles are often bad ones which lead to bad outcomes. Which is a lot more dangerous than a hypothetical average amoral schlub.
- 4ad 10y ago
  > Many tech engineers are extremely principled Extremely principled about who should win the election. I don't want to turn this discussion into the presidential mess, but it's no secret that virtually almost everyone working for a particular search engine, from employee to executive support one particular candidate and not the other.
  - oh_sigh 10y ago
    I work for a particular search engine and I support the other candidate. A small group of people here are very vocal about who they support, but probably 90+% of people never mention politics and don't seem to like to talk about it at work.
- eeZah7Ux 10y ago
  When organizations do something highly questionable it usually happens in teams where people have been selected, through time, to accept the ethical or legal consequences.
  - oh_sigh 10y ago
    That's a good point. I guess I'll say I only know the google model of things, where pretty much 99.9% of the codebase is open to FTEs. It would be very very difficult to slip anything into the code there without someone catching on and causing a shitstorm.
- mzw_mzw 10y ago
  Being extremely principled is exactly why many of these companies and/or their engineers might be tempted to put their thumb on the scales. After all, this election or this issue or this whatever is just so super important that it would be immoral not to take a stand...
  - tikhonj 10y ago
    I mean, just think about how many people have been saying literally that for this election! If anything, the strongly principled are the ones I'd worry about the most.
  - oh_sigh 10y ago
    Find me any significant system in a company like facebook or google where only 1 person or even only 3 or 4 can sneak something in without anyone else finding out about it.
    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-secret-yahoo-security-2016-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-secret-yahoo-se... It's not about nobody finding out about it. It's about having enough people in key positions who are OK with doing it.
      - oh_sigh 10y ago
        My point is that many of these systems have hundreds of eyes on them. If one person finds out, and doesn't like it, they can blow the whistle.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    The most dangerous leaders have often been people who truly believed that they were doing the right thing "for the good of the people"
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
I think everyone is missing a key point here: those algorithms are essentially incomprehensible to the layperson. What if you demand full disclosure of the science that drives the accelerator at CERN? Well, it's "disclosed" already, just read the papers. Quantum-electrodynamics-something-something. Now what? Might as well be magic. This is a core issue with democracy. You're asking average individuals to express a choice on matters that are orders of magnitude above their cognitive abilities.
- hackuser 10y ago
  A good point, but experts can review the algorithms and report on them to laypeople. Almost everything in the world that we understand is a result of that process, other than some things (not all) in the field we have expertise in. Nobody has time to review the source material in more than a tiny fraction of the things they know.
  - k__ 10y ago
    Just look at the "Science Must Fall" movement in South Africa. The problem with this is simply, that if some people don't understand the science, other that ALSO don't understand it can tell them they DO understand it. Who should tell the differens, besides the people wo really understand it?
    - freshhawk 10y ago
      Excellent example! There are three groups or movements in question: Rhodes Must Fall: protestors unhappy with having a large statue of Cecil Rhodes (founder of De Beers, "architect of apartheid", extreme white supremacist) on their campus. Fees Must Fall: Large protests against university fee increases that used the naming convention Shackville-TRC: advocates for alternative dispute resolution for those students who were expelled for participating in the protests. "Science Must Fall": a hashtag made to mock one single student who said very crazy stuff in a video on youtube. There is no "science must fall" movement documented, there was one viral story about one single person saying one single dumb thing. It went viral on Reddit in the /r/videos and /r/rage sub-reddits (those bastions of coherent discourse). It was picked up by click-bait sites who implied the existence of a movement because the angrier you are the more likely you are to click "share". This is an excellent example of the exact problem being discussed, although I'm not convinced transparency into the algorithms is the solution here. We already know exactly why these stories were pushed out to people's feeds: this type of disinformation makes money.
r00fus 10y ago
Other side of the coin: is it Google/Facebook/Twitter's responsibility to eliminate spam? Because that's what a lot of output of "news" organizations is these days... one might say it's very close to propoganda. What about safe-browsing filters? To shape your users' traffic - is that not exactly what's occurring? The question is whether they're doing it on our behalf, or for their own ends (and what happens when those two align?) The hypothetical you pose is not nearly so cut and dry - in fact, I argue it's happening now, but it just so happens in more cases than not, that it aligns with what users want. Just take a look at the Facebook "trending" issue.
DominikR 10y ago
> What if a powerful business partner, such as the Chinese or Indian governments or a large company, wants search results 'made more fair and balanced' in return for their business? Hollywood studios, Bloomberg, and (IIRC) Fox already have censored themselves for the Chinese government. Advertisers' influence on the news is well-known. This is what _every_ business would do and actually does when it is offered a significant advantage over all potential competitors in the market. That's what lobbying is all about. Large corporations pay politicians so they create laws in order to suppress competition. Everyone loves free markets as a consumer, but a business is never interested in the kind of competition that could put it out of existence, its employees fired and leave its founders bankrupt. The solution here is not to create new regulations which make it even harder to do business than it already is, or to enact laws that make this kind of bribery illegal (it would continue no matter what you do) but to impose serious limitations on government power so it can't rig the system for a handful of powerful corporations that can afford engaging in this kind of bribery.
- hackuser 10y ago
  Rather than address these points individually, I think it will be more efficient to get to the heart of the issue: It seems (forgive me if I'm wrong) that the comment is based on the libertarian/Objectivist ideology that everyone is driven by greed only and that that's a desirable or necessary order of things; and that government, including regulation and law, is bad and ineffective. I don't agree with that premise, so I'd need to hear arguments that address these specific situations. > This is what _every_ business would do and actually does Google and the NY Times refused the Chinese government's proposals and were kicked out of that market. > to impose serious limitations on government power so it can't rig the system for a handful of powerful corporations that can afford engaging in this kind of bribery. I don't see how limiting government power to regulate large businesses will help; it will shift power to the large businesses, worsening the situation. I don't think Google and Facebook's success is due to government rigging the market, nor do I think their influence will now diminish if government regulatory power is reduced.
  - DominikR 10y ago
drakonandor 10y ago
> Merkel may not say it directly, but a very serious risk is if Google, Facebook or Twitter's leadership decides to try to influence public affairs by hiding some things and showing others. Amusingly enough, Europe already does this through their 'right to be forgotten' laws. Criminals routinely use it to hide their past indiscretions. People can also use internet search engines to determine when the German government is lying to them, scandalous!
- rmc 10y ago
  > Europe already does this through their 'right to be forgotten' laws. Criminals routinely use it to hide their past indiscretions. EU "right to be forgotten" only applies to things which are no longer relevant. If someone's done the crime, and the time, and it's not relevant anymore, then they're done. No point in them being constantly punished for minor crimes.
  - drakonandor 10y ago
    and they want it to be the rule globally https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/10/19/petition-right-to-be-forgotten/ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/10/19/petition-right-to-be-f...
    - rmc 10y ago
      Well the USA is able to enforce it's laws globally
oldmanjay 10y ago
It's sort of like the very serious risk that public officials will try to influence public affairs by directly misleading, or classifying information that should be freely available because it is embarrassing or illegal, and then using their monopoly on violent coercion to keep things as they like. I have a hard time getting riled up about the lesser actions companies may potentially take confronted with the reality of the actions governments do take.
SixSigma 10y ago
> if Google, Facebook or Twitter's leadership decides to try to influence public affairs by hiding some things and showing others. that line was crossed a long time ago
debt 10y ago
zuck shadowed no tech execs early on his ceo career. he followed though the ceo of the wall street journal because he viewed fb, this is early days too like 2005, as more of a news organization. he knows what's up. so to know the future of google/facebook etc. just read about about the previous tumultuous 100+-year history of the media particularly that beginning part with william randolph hearst. zuck don't give a fuck.
jondubois 10y ago
Totally agree. It's very easy for Google to tweak their algorithm little by little to affect public opinion over time. I think if the change happens slowly enough; nobody, would notice. I doubt that Google would tweak their algorithm in such a way that it would work against their interests (if this happened, I bet they would just roll back the change) - That alone gives Google an advantage over everybody else. It's a bit like how some manufacturers were able to slowly lower the quality of their products over time and still retain or improve market share because people just didn't notice...
kofejnik 10y ago
this is already happeing, Google has a noticeable pro-Clinton bias
- warlox 10y ago
  Unfortunately for you, reality itself and events that actually occurred have a pro-Clinton bias. Trump did actually shit all over himself during the debates. Google is merely reflecting reality in this case.
  - kofejnik 10y ago
    The bias I'm talking about has been in effect long before the debates, i.e. "crooked hillary" autocomplete, etc. But it's funny how you jumped to conclusions I am a Trump voter and asserted ultimate knowledge of "reality", you must be a liberal I guess.
flukus 10y ago
> or Twitter's leadership decides to try to influence public affairs by hiding some things and showing others. Twitter is already banning people from a particular side of politics.

oh_sigh 10y ago

Many tech engineers are extremely principled, to the point where it would be impossible to pull something like that off without someone finding out about it and blowing the whistle.

hackuser 10y ago
Many very bad things have happened in large organizations, and have persisted for years or decades without someone blowing the whistle. The Catholic Church, intelligence agencies, and many police forces come to mind. I don't think engineers are more principled than others, and thinking we are exceptional is, IMHO, the number one way to expose ourselves to these human frailties.
- dlss 10y ago
  I think oh_sigh might have meant to say "the rate of extremely principled individuals seems higher in geeks vs non-geeks" -- which I think is true, even if the average rate of principledness is around the same for both groups. So I'd like to add to your rebuttal that extremely principled people are also capable of awful actions. All it takes is a good theory.
  - TillE 10y ago
    I'd agree that "principledness" seems unusually high in geeks, except that those principles are often bad ones which lead to bad outcomes. Which is a lot more dangerous than a hypothetical average amoral schlub.
4ad 10y ago
> Many tech engineers are extremely principled Extremely principled about who should win the election. I don't want to turn this discussion into the presidential mess, but it's no secret that virtually almost everyone working for a particular search engine, from employee to executive support one particular candidate and not the other.
- oh_sigh 10y ago
  I work for a particular search engine and I support the other candidate. A small group of people here are very vocal about who they support, but probably 90+% of people never mention politics and don't seem to like to talk about it at work.
eeZah7Ux 10y ago
When organizations do something highly questionable it usually happens in teams where people have been selected, through time, to accept the ethical or legal consequences.
- oh_sigh 10y ago
  That's a good point. I guess I'll say I only know the google model of things, where pretty much 99.9% of the codebase is open to FTEs. It would be very very difficult to slip anything into the code there without someone catching on and causing a shitstorm.
mzw_mzw 10y ago
Being extremely principled is exactly why many of these companies and/or their engineers might be tempted to put their thumb on the scales. After all, this election or this issue or this whatever is just so super important that it would be immoral not to take a stand...
- tikhonj 10y ago
  I mean, just think about how many people have been saying literally that for this election! If anything, the strongly principled are the ones I'd worry about the most.
- oh_sigh 10y ago
  Find me any significant system in a company like facebook or google where only 1 person or even only 3 or 4 can sneak something in without anyone else finding out about it.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-secret-yahoo-security-2016-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-secret-yahoo-se... It's not about nobody finding out about it. It's about having enough people in key positions who are OK with doing it.
    - oh_sigh 10y ago
      My point is that many of these systems have hundreds of eyes on them. If one person finds out, and doesn't like it, they can blow the whistle.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  The most dangerous leaders have often been people who truly believed that they were doing the right thing "for the good of the people"

Florin_Andrei 10y ago

I think everyone is missing a key point here: those algorithms are essentially incomprehensible to the layperson. What if you demand full disclosure of the science that drives the accelerator at CERN? Well, it's "disclosed" already, just read the papers. Quantum-electrodynamics-something-something. Now what? Might as well be magic. This is a core issue with democracy. You're asking average individuals to express a choice on matters that are orders of magnitude above their cognitive abilities.

hackuser 10y ago
A good point, but experts can review the algorithms and report on them to laypeople. Almost everything in the world that we understand is a result of that process, other than some things (not all) in the field we have expertise in. Nobody has time to review the source material in more than a tiny fraction of the things they know.
- k__ 10y ago
  Just look at the "Science Must Fall" movement in South Africa. The problem with this is simply, that if some people don't understand the science, other that ALSO don't understand it can tell them they DO understand it. Who should tell the differens, besides the people wo really understand it?
  - freshhawk 10y ago
    Excellent example! There are three groups or movements in question: Rhodes Must Fall: protestors unhappy with having a large statue of Cecil Rhodes (founder of De Beers, "architect of apartheid", extreme white supremacist) on their campus. Fees Must Fall: Large protests against university fee increases that used the naming convention Shackville-TRC: advocates for alternative dispute resolution for those students who were expelled for participating in the protests. "Science Must Fall": a hashtag made to mock one single student who said very crazy stuff in a video on youtube. There is no "science must fall" movement documented, there was one viral story about one single person saying one single dumb thing. It went viral on Reddit in the /r/videos and /r/rage sub-reddits (those bastions of coherent discourse). It was picked up by click-bait sites who implied the existence of a movement because the angrier you are the more likely you are to click "share". This is an excellent example of the exact problem being discussed, although I'm not convinced transparency into the algorithms is the solution here. We already know exactly why these stories were pushed out to people's feeds: this type of disinformation makes money.

r00fus 10y ago

Other side of the coin: is it Google/Facebook/Twitter's responsibility to eliminate spam? Because that's what a lot of output of "news" organizations is these days... one might say it's very close to propoganda. What about safe-browsing filters? To shape your users' traffic - is that not exactly what's occurring? The question is whether they're doing it on our behalf, or for their own ends (and what happens when those two align?) The hypothetical you pose is not nearly so cut and dry - in fact, I argue it's happening now, but it just so happens in more cases than not, that it aligns with what users want. Just take a look at the Facebook "trending" issue.

DominikR 10y ago

> What if a powerful business partner, such as the Chinese or Indian governments or a large company, wants search results 'made more fair and balanced' in return for their business? Hollywood studios, Bloomberg, and (IIRC) Fox already have censored themselves for the Chinese government. Advertisers' influence on the news is well-known. This is what _every_ business would do and actually does when it is offered a significant advantage over all potential competitors in the market. That's what lobbying is all about. Large corporations pay politicians so they create laws in order to suppress competition. Everyone loves free markets as a consumer, but a business is never interested in the kind of competition that could put it out of existence, its employees fired and leave its founders bankrupt. The solution here is not to create new regulations which make it even harder to do business than it already is, or to enact laws that make this kind of bribery illegal (it would continue no matter what you do) but to impose serious limitations on government power so it can't rig the system for a handful of powerful corporations that can afford engaging in this kind of bribery.

hackuser 10y ago
Rather than address these points individually, I think it will be more efficient to get to the heart of the issue: It seems (forgive me if I'm wrong) that the comment is based on the libertarian/Objectivist ideology that everyone is driven by greed only and that that's a desirable or necessary order of things; and that government, including regulation and law, is bad and ineffective. I don't agree with that premise, so I'd need to hear arguments that address these specific situations. > This is what _every_ business would do and actually does Google and the NY Times refused the Chinese government's proposals and were kicked out of that market. > to impose serious limitations on government power so it can't rig the system for a handful of powerful corporations that can afford engaging in this kind of bribery. I don't see how limiting government power to regulate large businesses will help; it will shift power to the large businesses, worsening the situation. I don't think Google and Facebook's success is due to government rigging the market, nor do I think their influence will now diminish if government regulatory power is reduced.
- DominikR 10y ago

drakonandor 10y ago

> Merkel may not say it directly, but a very serious risk is if Google, Facebook or Twitter's leadership decides to try to influence public affairs by hiding some things and showing others. Amusingly enough, Europe already does this through their 'right to be forgotten' laws. Criminals routinely use it to hide their past indiscretions. People can also use internet search engines to determine when the German government is lying to them, scandalous!

rmc 10y ago
> Europe already does this through their 'right to be forgotten' laws. Criminals routinely use it to hide their past indiscretions. EU "right to be forgotten" only applies to things which are no longer relevant. If someone's done the crime, and the time, and it's not relevant anymore, then they're done. No point in them being constantly punished for minor crimes.
- drakonandor 10y ago
  and they want it to be the rule globally https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/10/19/petition-right-to-be-forgotten/ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/10/19/petition-right-to-be-f...
  - rmc 10y ago
    Well the USA is able to enforce it's laws globally

oldmanjay 10y ago

It's sort of like the very serious risk that public officials will try to influence public affairs by directly misleading, or classifying information that should be freely available because it is embarrassing or illegal, and then using their monopoly on violent coercion to keep things as they like. I have a hard time getting riled up about the lesser actions companies may potentially take confronted with the reality of the actions governments do take.

SixSigma 10y ago

> if Google, Facebook or Twitter's leadership decides to try to influence public affairs by hiding some things and showing others. that line was crossed a long time ago

debt 10y ago

zuck shadowed no tech execs early on his ceo career. he followed though the ceo of the wall street journal because he viewed fb, this is early days too like 2005, as more of a news organization. he knows what's up. so to know the future of google/facebook etc. just read about about the previous tumultuous 100+-year history of the media particularly that beginning part with william randolph hearst. zuck don't give a fuck.

jondubois 10y ago

Totally agree. It's very easy for Google to tweak their algorithm little by little to affect public opinion over time. I think if the change happens slowly enough; nobody, would notice. I doubt that Google would tweak their algorithm in such a way that it would work against their interests (if this happened, I bet they would just roll back the change) - That alone gives Google an advantage over everybody else. It's a bit like how some manufacturers were able to slowly lower the quality of their products over time and still retain or improve market share because people just didn't notice...

kofejnik 10y ago

this is already happeing, Google has a noticeable pro-Clinton bias

warlox 10y ago
Unfortunately for you, reality itself and events that actually occurred have a pro-Clinton bias. Trump did actually shit all over himself during the debates. Google is merely reflecting reality in this case.
- kofejnik 10y ago
  The bias I'm talking about has been in effect long before the debates, i.e. "crooked hillary" autocomplete, etc. But it's funny how you jumped to conclusions I am a Trump voter and asserted ultimate knowledge of "reality", you must be a liberal I guess.

flukus 10y ago

> or Twitter's leadership decides to try to influence public affairs by hiding some things and showing others. Twitter is already banning people from a particular side of politics.