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Trump Accuses Google of Burying Conservative News in Search Results
- PoarNeemn 8y agoAbout time someone starting calling Google out
- KarenSatantsby 8y agodoesnt this depend on the person or ip of the person searching? I think a generic person search would bring up the more general view that Trump is a crazy old man screaming at his tv
- i_am_nomad 8y agoSurely there’s a way to study this and generate some meaningful statistics on whether Google (and others) actually bury conservative stories. Or maybe it’s already been studied, and either supported or rebutted.
- dagenix 8y agoFirst you have to figure out what a "consevative story" is. Then, you need to figure out why a search for "Trump News" shouldn't bury partisan hackery on both the left and the right. "News" used to / ought to mean something about a presentation of facts, not some particular party's preference for what it would like the facts to be.
- traviscj 8y agoI guess the world used to have less facts, and now they have to choose which ones to publish? Jk. Money talks, and outrage sells better than dry facts.
- yostrovs 8y agoYou can open up a private tab in your browser, go to Google News and do a search for yourself.
- takeda 8y agoLooks like either all search engines are biased (not just Google) or Trump is.
- loganekz 8y agoThis started from an article [1] posted on Drudge Report recently. [1] - https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-search-results-show-pervasive-anti-trump-anti-conservative-bias/ https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-search-results-show-perv...
- giardini 8y agoThis came out the 25 August 2018: "96 Percent of Google Search Results for 'Trump' News Are from Liberal Media Outlets" https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-search-results-show-pervasive-anti-trump-anti-conservative-bias/ https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-search-results-show-perv... Google supported Clinton and threw resources behind her campaign: "However, one can't help but be skeptical considering that just before the 2016 presidential election, among the many leaks published by Wikileaks as part of its Podesta email campaign was Google's "strategic plan" to help democrats win the election and track voters." from https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-28/google-responds-trump-says-doesnt-bias-search-results https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-28/google-responds-tr... More at https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-01/wikileaks-reveals-googles-strategic-plan-help-democrats-win-election https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-01/wikileaks-reveals-... I fail to see how that does not continue today.
- dagenix 8y agoWhat's the proof? > Mr. Trump’s criticism appeared to be inspired by a segment last night from Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs. During the program, Mr. Dobbs highlighted an article by a conservative website, PJ Media, that said that it had conducted an unscientific study in which 96 percent of Google search results for the word “Trump” were articles from “left-leaning sites.” Oh boy: an "unscientific study", whatever that is.
- PoarNeemn 8y agoIf Google can build a censored search engine for China they can do it for America. Most likely they already have done so. It's not a secret that Google, Facebook, Twitter etc are run by leftist cucks.
- nkozyra 8y ago> Oh boy: an "unscientific study", whatever that is. Otherwise known as an "anecdote."
- Gys 8y agoTrump loves anecdotes. Probably a lot of people prefer anecdotes to anything scientific :-(
- cimmanom 8y agoSo "left leaning" meaning anything to the left of Breitbart and thus even vaguely fact-based?
- ebikelaw 8y agoGoogle should go all-in and just run factual blurbs about Trump's various crimes on the Chrome new tab page. I don't know why anybody puts up with the abuse from this guy.
- yostrovs 8y agoTry searching for "American inventors" or "American scientists" on Google and tell me if you notice anything odd.
- tango24 8y agoWhat is your suspicion here?
- rory 8y agoI think the poster's referring to the overrepresentation of black scientists in that result, implying political motivation. It's pretty clear that it's just an artifact of the collision with the common search term "african american scientists". The result for "united states scientists" more or less proves this to be the case.
- autokad 8y agoby "overrepresentation of black scientists", in my case it means 100%.
- rory 8y agoHuh I see Einstein and Feynman in the top few results. Again, if you just switch the term to start with "united states" there are literally zero black people in the top results so seems unlikely it's a conspiracy.
- moonka 8y agoMaybe we should bring back the FCC fairness doctrine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
- repolfx 8y agoI don't think that would help. The UK has such a regulation still, for TV broadcasters only. It also has the BBC which is committed to such fairness and neutrality in its charter. In practice it is not enforced. For example the senior management of Channel 4 news have routinely made tweets that indicate they hate the Conservative party. And I mean really hate. Their head of output retweeted a message that said, "Writing from America & I can assure you that conservatives will absolutely keep needed medicine out of the hands of those who require it, if you let them" One of their most famous and senior journalists (Jon Snow) went to a music festival, someone who partied with him claimed he shouted "fuck the Tories" and "I'm supposed to be neutral". He claims he can't remember if he said it or not. The chief editor of C4 News liked a tweet that said simply, "Boris Johnson is a cunt". Johnson is one of the most well known conservative politicians in the UK and was a cabinet minister until he resigned quite recently over a policy dispute. You can see a pattern - journalists who are supposed to be neutral by law have no problem with broadcasting to the whole world personal insults against conservative politicians on Twitter. They get away with it because the regulator stands by and does nothing. The FCC fairness doctrine is unlikely to work out much differently. The USA is right to avoid it.
- michaelmrose 8y agoEven if news programs report the news in an unbiased fashion people are bound to have personal opinions and express them on their own time. In response to "Writing from America & I can assure you that conservatives will absolutely keep needed medicine out of the hands of those who require it, if you let them" Wouldn't it be a greater crime to ignore this? It seems as if the only reason you don't want a fairness doctrine is not because its a terrible idea but because it wouldn't be effective enough at distorting reality to the peasants.
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- vitro 8y agoNot me, not me, always them.
- Dwolb 8y agoYikes this is a complex topic. There’s a couple of things at play: Google does control (unbiased or biased) a significant portion of what internet users see This control has the potential to sway public opinion, direct discourse, and economically make or break businesses (even those that extend beyond media) Personally I believe gigantic internet companies like Google require more regulation because they can’t be trusted to act responsibly indefinitely. However I do not believe the current administration has shown thoughtfulness and care for the republic in a way that I would trust them to enact this regulation.
- YinglingLight 8y agoI do not believe Silicon Valley has shown thoughtfulness and care for the republic in a way that I would trust them to enact this regulation.
- mindcrime 8y agoI do not believe Silicon Valley has shown thoughtfulness and care for the republic in a way that I would trust them to enact this regulation. I trust Silicon Valley a hell of a lot more than I trust our government...
- YinglingLight 8y agoOne is enacting mass surveillance and censorship programs, and the other one isn't. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2018/08/27/google-is-on-the-verge-of-making-a-huge-mistake-with-china/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.d504d7f65fa1 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2018/0...
- chriselles 8y agoI would largely agree. Although I find it quite troubling that I often feel like I have to hold my tongue when visiting Silicon Valley when discussion turns to politics. I’m slightly right of center politically but range quite broadly issue by issue, including a couple issue where I Lean to the left. I feel incredibly uncomfortable discussing most anything right of the political center based on common narratives and what I perceive to be the local/cultural group think average. I’m decidedly a non tech founder, but tech conversant. I’m trying to learn more about algorithm fundamentals and design and have been reading an article or two about bias in algorithms. Would there be public service value in auditing/monitoring commercial algorithms? I would never wish to hinder the velocity and quality of commercial innovation, but a few algorithms at a few companies have a massively outsized influential impact on our lives.
- wilsonnb3 8y ago"Old man shouts at cloud" This has been a conservative talking point for a while. I'm surprised it's taken him this long to publicly complain about it.
- itbeho 8y agoSeems like conservative news sites that are claiming this ought to be able to use Google’s own analytic tools to highlight any trends against them.
- repolfx 8y agoThere's a dupe that got flagged here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858874 Perhaps this story will also get flagged - it seems there's a lot of people who don't like discussion of political bias in Silicon Valley companies on HN. It's pretty easy to see why Trump thinks this. Just go to Google News and search Trump, then look at which news sources are selected. Or just look at this helpful pie chart: https://static.pjmedia.com/trending/user-content/51/files/2018/08/chart-4.png https://static.pjmedia.com/trending/user-content/51/files/20... The way News selects and ranks sources is even more opaque than web search. Web search at least has some papers describing how it works, but News searches only over a subset of the web selected by humans. What policies do they use to decide what gets to be included? https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/6204050?hl=en-GB&ref_topic=9010378&authuser=0 https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/6204... They state: We do not allow content that sends messages intended to harass, bully, or physically or sexually threaten others. We do not allow sites or accounts that engage in coordinated activity to mislead users We do not allow content that promotes violence or harassment against an individual or group based on ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, sexual orientation or gender identity. Well, that's going to be a problem for Google because by now everyone got the memo that the student generation that Google has been hiring extensively from for years now is willing to define almost any kind of viewpoint that isn't extremely liberal as "harassment" or "hate". Including fairly anodyne policies Trump has, like there being limits on immigration. How will Google credibly argue they aren't biased when their inclusion policy for Google News reads like a list of guidelines to a university safe space?
- pacerwpg 8y agoCNBC, Politico and the Atlantic being flagged as liberal is evidence of the bias in the study.
- danjoc 8y agoAccording to The Atlantic, The Atlantic endorsed Clinton. Only the third candidate they've endorsed since 1860. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-case-for-hillary-clinton-and-against-donald-trump/501161/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-cas... Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, Hillary Clinton.
- dx87 8y agoWhether or not the bias is intentional, this reminds me of the fairly recent accusations that claimed twitter was deliberatley preventing republican congressman from showing up on the front page. They said it wasn't deliberate, it was all done by an algorithm...that just happened to be written in a way that only flagged members of one political party. Looking at the bigger picture, this may be a case of big tech companies not caring about political diversity while hiring, creating a cultural bias in their products. Just like the Usenix talk by the Harvard professor citing a study that facial recognition developed by a Japanese company had trouble recognizing non-asian faces, if a company's culture is mostly homogenous and leans heavily toward one end of the political spectrum, the developers could be adding an unconcsious bias to their algorithms that ranks people and websites at the other end of the political spectrum as untrustworthy or malicious. Normally political bias doesn't matter when it comes to products, a chair functions the same whether a liberal or conservative made it, but when the product is a list of relevant and trustworthy sites in response to a query, political bias can be very evident in the product. An example I've seen of the news bias was shortly after Trump was elected, their was a covert raid on an Al Qaeda compound in Yemen. On CNN, the headline was something like "Trump authorizes covert raid that results in multiple Navy SEAL casualties." The Fox headline was something like "Trump authorizes covert raid of Al Qaeda stronghold that results in trove of intelligence data". Both are true, but the focus and tone of the articles was wildly different. If Google's algorithm results in only sites with a negative bias against Trump being pushed to the top of search results, I don't see why it shouldn't be investigated for the same reason that pro-Trump Russian influence is being investigated on social media sites. I think everyone can agree that covert meddling in politics, whether intentional or not, is a threat to democracy and fair elections. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentation/mickens https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentat...
- michaelmrose 8y agoIt shouldn't be shocking to find that google can only afford to hire intelligent educated people for the 7K people who drive its multi multi billion dollar business. It also ought not to be shocking to find that these people lean left once you redefine left to mean anyone left of Attila the hun. 60% of republicans believe that the Earth and the human race were created ex nihilo recently. 20% of trump fans support SLAVERY.
- legitster 8y agoThe tweets in question: > Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of.... >....results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!
- lovehashbrowns 8y agoIsn't this the same administration/party that is desperate to get rid of Net Neutrality so that the government isn't meddling in private business? But then there's this: > “This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!” Wonder what makes Google different/worse from an ISP.
- tj-teej 8y agoWhy isn't the problem that Google has a monopoly on search? IF (a big IF) Google was actually biased, you could go to their competitor. But if there's no other real competitor then IMO the solution isn't to regulate Google, but to fix root cause problems which led to there only being one company controlling all search (AKA breaking up monopolies)
- lovehashbrowns 8y agoWhy is something like Bing not a real competitor?
- Eridrus 8y agoThe issue here isn't that conservatives can't go somewhere else to get their news, the issue is that everyone involved in this debate wants to have their view of what people should read imposed on others. So while doing something to spread out eyeballs among various search engines would make this argument moot because there is no longer a single entity you can pressure, I think it misses the heart of why people complain about bias. Despite a wide variety of media outlets, conservatives regularly complain about liberal bias in the media - there's just no single entity they can pressure. Maybe that's for the best, but I think it's important to realise that this is not really a good faith argument.
- funwie 8y agoWhich data is this accusation based on? I see google as a mirror that reflects what the world says about you. Of course, they moderate results but I don’t think that they do it to such an extend that only negative results will show for a person seen as positive in the world. Trump is denying his reflection in the mirror (Google search). He doesn’t want to accept that Google’s result is how the world sees him now. Google does not write the negative content
- nitwit005 8y agoMy grandmother is currently watching MSNBC, which is constant Trump bashing, and she quite enjoys it. The New York Times most read almost always includes negative stories about Trump. I suspect the "problem" is just that people enjoy reading these negative articles. Google is trying to point people to what they're likely to click on.
- factsaresacred 8y agoWhether or not Google are doing this, keep in mind: - Facebook's short-lived 'trending News' came under fire after employees admitted to routinely suppressing conservative news stories. - Every newspaper endorsed Trump's opponent so any news source is potentially anti-Trump. Some, like CNN, aren't even trying to be objective (every article reads like an editorial with a little too much snark), while others like the NYT released a post-election letter that just fell short of admitting their bias ("we believe we reported on both candidates fairly"). - Twitter was found to hide many Republican politicians from autosearch results. None of this makes Trump's accusation true, but it highlights that there is a precedent.
- mullingitover 8y agoSo what. Google should be able to blacklist every conservative (or liberal) site if they feel like it. They're a private business, and we have a Constitution that prohibits would-be tyrants from interfering with free speech. Trump should be run out of town on a rail for even hinting that he'd like to undermine freedom of speech.
- reversecs 8y agoIt's complex because if a single corporation has a monopoly on all the news, a single company can filter all speech. There are alternatives currently but it doesn't make it less of a monopoly.
- mullingitover 8y agoThis is really simple, however: Google does not have a monopoly on news.
- reversecs 8y agoMaybe not about news, but what about content provided at search, and videos. Youtube and google search. Everything else is dwarfed by Google in that sense.
- mullingitover 8y agoIt still boils down to a first amendment issue: can the government tell Google what it can and can't say? If Google is using its market position illegally, that's one thing, but there's no such thing as an illegal use of its free speech rights (except as legally prohibited, e.g. libel). Google could keep a 'We think Trump is a traitor' banner on every single one of their pages and be within their rights under the Constitution.
- thomk 8y agoI wonder if he saw this article? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/17/trump-idiot-google-images-search https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/17/trump-idiot-... Also, you should try it. Its remarkable really, search for idiot in google images.
- dddw 8y agoI wish they actually did... can't open the newspaper anyday now without this twerp popping up all the time.