5 ms·

It's bad enough to foster an echo chamber to your personal biases, as is currently standard operating procedure. But to actively engage in hidden manipulation o

It's bad enough to foster an echo chamber to your personal biases, as is currently standard operating procedure. But to actively engage in hidden manipulation of public views strikes at the very heart of democracy. Democracy only works because of the wisdom of crowds [1], and the wisdom of crowds only works if each participant has independent knowledge. The more people rely upon a shared source of knowledge and truth, the less accurate their collective wisdom becomes. Practically, this means that anyone with wide enough influence can directly affect democratic outcomes, which defeats the entire purpose, and the level of influence possible these days is unprecedented. So regardless of what actually did or did not happen, the fact that a few companies ARE in a position to wield this kind of influential power should strike fear into the heart of every free citizen of every democratic nation. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706 https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/038...

mc32 8y ago
Now imagine the conversations in newsrooms all over the world on how to present a particular event or newsstory. You can imagine how the different actors behave given their affiliations and editorial freedom (or control, depending) and this is why there is distrust since the ‘60s.
- EGreg 8y ago
  Have you read Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent?”
  - mc32 8y ago
    Manufacturing consent can mean a couple of things. One, where the state apparatus or industry are in cahoots with journalists to execute a conspiracy on information. The other has to do with journalists following their biases in reporting things --an agenda that is not dictated by outside third parties, but one of following an implicit ideology.
- failbuffer 8y ago
  Yeah, caught this on Fox News tonight, and the hypocrisy of their breathless hand-wringing about the "threat to democracy" really burned me up. Not because they're right wing, but because they coordinate a top-down propaganda machine and have spurred other news organizations (like MSNBC) to do the same. The magnitude of their crime and the devastating rifts it has helped widen in our country is so much greater in scope than what the Google employees were talking about doing.
Waterluvian 8y ago
For some reason I just had a sudden idea about democracy being like Monte Carlo localization. We don't need everyone to have the same, or even correct ideas. We need a whole lot of disagreeable perspectives to consider and explore. That way we don't get trapped in ideological local minima.
- ryanx435 8y ago
  Holy shit you've just discovered the reason behind the first amendment!
jlebar 8y ago
> to actively engage in hidden manipulation of public views strikes at the very heart of democracy. Indeed, Fox News, Britebart, and friends are terrifying.
- wtf_is_up 8y ago
  Agreed. For me, it's CNN, MSNBC, and HuffPo.
- parthdesai 8y ago
  Let's be honest, all media organizations are biased. Be it Fox News, Britebart, or CNN. Heck even r/politics is biased af.
  - beepboopbeep 8y ago
    to say that they are equally as bad is, actually, dishonest.
  - nraynaud 8y ago
    the difference is the number of deaths they produce.
  - komali2 8y ago
    /r/politics is a subforum on a news aggregator. While media organizations definitely buy upvotes, as of yet there's no actual evidence of Reddit itself artificially promoting/demoting content within a subreddit (Tweaking the algorithm to get bot-propogated t_d content off the front page doesn't count, it's a different subforum) Brietbart is an entirely different category than Fox news. It will publish straight up conspiracy theories with no evidence. I'm talking "moon landing didn't happen" level shit. It's an insult to tabloids, to call it a tabloids. Fox News is so comically biased to compare it to CNN is dishonest. CNN has liberal bias, sure, but it doesnt sink to the level of claiming Hillary Clinton had Seth rich assassinated (https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/may/23/newt-gingrich/claim-slain-dnc-staffer-seth-rich-gave-emails-wiki/ https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/may/23...) or completely makes shit up about supreme court candidates whole-cloth (https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2016/mar/18/bill-oreilly/bill-oreilly-wrongly-says-merrick-garland-voted-ba/ https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2016/mar/18...). Sure, they're gonna spend a lot of airtime on the "kavanaugh allegedly raped a girl in high school" story, or when the president says some messed up ish they're gonna go ahead and play that clip again and again, but that is a far cry from outright lying, which fox news does again and again, and which Breitbart does every breath.
cma 8y ago
>It's bad enough to foster an echo chamber to your personal biases, as is currently standard operating procedure. But to actively engage in hidden manipulation of public views strikes at the very heart of democracy. Democracy only works because of the wisdom of crowds [1], and the wisdom of crowds only works if each participant has independent knowledge. The more people rely upon a shared source of knowledge and truth, the less accurate their collective wisdom becomes. It may have always been that way in the US. From his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin controlled a newspaper and founded secret societies for wealthy business owners to collude together while getting business for his printing press from the government.
magicalist 8y ago
> the level of influence possible these days is unprecedented vs the past when we had the single newspaper, the single encyclopedia, their priest, the three TV networks, or the town gossip mill? > only works if each participant has independent knowledge So, can you name a time that this was more possible than it is now?
TomMckenny 8y ago
In this case what did or did not happen was that some employees noticed that search results for "Muslim" and "Latino" were almost exclusively anti-Muslim and anti-Latino. Since the typical person searching for those terms is obviously interested in a broader view, the algorithm was flawed or even gamed. The article title is click-baity. But I agree it is terrifying that there are companies devoted to an overt political stance that have vast reach and even monopolies in many markets like Sinclair [0] and others [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stations_owned_or_operated_by_Sinclair_Broadcast_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stations_owned_or_oper... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Networks_Group#International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Networks_Group#Internation...
- josephh 8y ago
  > Since the typical person searching for those terms is obviously interested in a broader view I don't find it obvious at all. Do you have any evidence to suggest that this is indeed the case? Why would those terms/results show up in the first place if only few are looking them up?
  - mikeyouse 8y ago
    Google's algorithm is biased toward recency. In a universe of "Foo Badbar", "Foo Neutralbar" and "Foo Goodbar" -- If a person searches for "Foo" after there's a bunch of stories in the press about "Foo Badbar", the results will all reflect that topic. For something like "Latino", it's crazy for all the results to reflect the border wall and not at all controversial for Google to want to promote "Foo Neutralbar" and "Foo Goodbar" to balance the results.
  - TomMckenny 8y ago
    >>Since the typical person searching for those terms is obviously interested in a broader view >Do you have any evidence to suggest that this is indeed the case? Only my apparently overly optimistic understanding of human nature.
  - danaris 8y ago
    It is almost trivially obvious that the average person, even in a polarized climate like America during the 2016 election cycle, is more likely to be interested in a reasonably balanced set of results on any given topic than they are to be interested in a set of results that exclusively favor one fairly extreme position. (Unfortunately, I would say this is even likely to be true of topics for which there is, in fact, an objectively true answer, like climate change, which many of the results will be opposing.)
chiefalchemist 8y ago
Two things to add: 1) You might be interested in the book The Influential Mind. While she doesn't come out and say it directly, the bizarre state of our digital lives (i.e., social media) has quite a bit of reasonable (scientific) explanation. https://www.amazon.com/Influential-Mind-Reveals-Change-Others/dp/1627792651 https://www.amazon.com/Influential-Mind-Reveals-Change-Other... 2) The irony of the homogenized "wisdom" is that these same entities are personalizing so much that the shared / collective experience is being diminished. Perhaps it's easier to build mono-minded on top of a disheveled and disorganized foundation?

mc32 8y ago

Now imagine the conversations in newsrooms all over the world on how to present a particular event or newsstory. You can imagine how the different actors behave given their affiliations and editorial freedom (or control, depending) and this is why there is distrust since the ‘60s.

EGreg 8y ago
Have you read Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent?”
- mc32 8y ago
  Manufacturing consent can mean a couple of things. One, where the state apparatus or industry are in cahoots with journalists to execute a conspiracy on information. The other has to do with journalists following their biases in reporting things --an agenda that is not dictated by outside third parties, but one of following an implicit ideology.
failbuffer 8y ago
Yeah, caught this on Fox News tonight, and the hypocrisy of their breathless hand-wringing about the "threat to democracy" really burned me up. Not because they're right wing, but because they coordinate a top-down propaganda machine and have spurred other news organizations (like MSNBC) to do the same. The magnitude of their crime and the devastating rifts it has helped widen in our country is so much greater in scope than what the Google employees were talking about doing.

Waterluvian 8y ago

For some reason I just had a sudden idea about democracy being like Monte Carlo localization. We don't need everyone to have the same, or even correct ideas. We need a whole lot of disagreeable perspectives to consider and explore. That way we don't get trapped in ideological local minima.

ryanx435 8y ago
Holy shit you've just discovered the reason behind the first amendment!

jlebar 8y ago

> to actively engage in hidden manipulation of public views strikes at the very heart of democracy. Indeed, Fox News, Britebart, and friends are terrifying.

wtf_is_up 8y ago
Agreed. For me, it's CNN, MSNBC, and HuffPo.
parthdesai 8y ago
Let's be honest, all media organizations are biased. Be it Fox News, Britebart, or CNN. Heck even r/politics is biased af.
- beepboopbeep 8y ago
  to say that they are equally as bad is, actually, dishonest.
- nraynaud 8y ago
  the difference is the number of deaths they produce.
- komali2 8y ago
  /r/politics is a subforum on a news aggregator. While media organizations definitely buy upvotes, as of yet there's no actual evidence of Reddit itself artificially promoting/demoting content within a subreddit (Tweaking the algorithm to get bot-propogated t_d content off the front page doesn't count, it's a different subforum) Brietbart is an entirely different category than Fox news. It will publish straight up conspiracy theories with no evidence. I'm talking "moon landing didn't happen" level shit. It's an insult to tabloids, to call it a tabloids. Fox News is so comically biased to compare it to CNN is dishonest. CNN has liberal bias, sure, but it doesnt sink to the level of claiming Hillary Clinton had Seth rich assassinated (https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/may/23/newt-gingrich/claim-slain-dnc-staffer-seth-rich-gave-emails-wiki/ https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/may/23...) or completely makes shit up about supreme court candidates whole-cloth (https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2016/mar/18/bill-oreilly/bill-oreilly-wrongly-says-merrick-garland-voted-ba/ https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2016/mar/18...). Sure, they're gonna spend a lot of airtime on the "kavanaugh allegedly raped a girl in high school" story, or when the president says some messed up ish they're gonna go ahead and play that clip again and again, but that is a far cry from outright lying, which fox news does again and again, and which Breitbart does every breath.

cma 8y ago

>It's bad enough to foster an echo chamber to your personal biases, as is currently standard operating procedure. But to actively engage in hidden manipulation of public views strikes at the very heart of democracy. Democracy only works because of the wisdom of crowds [1], and the wisdom of crowds only works if each participant has independent knowledge. The more people rely upon a shared source of knowledge and truth, the less accurate their collective wisdom becomes. It may have always been that way in the US. From his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin controlled a newspaper and founded secret societies for wealthy business owners to collude together while getting business for his printing press from the government.

magicalist 8y ago

> the level of influence possible these days is unprecedented vs the past when we had the single newspaper, the single encyclopedia, their priest, the three TV networks, or the town gossip mill? > only works if each participant has independent knowledge So, can you name a time that this was more possible than it is now?

TomMckenny 8y ago

In this case what did or did not happen was that some employees noticed that search results for "Muslim" and "Latino" were almost exclusively anti-Muslim and anti-Latino. Since the typical person searching for those terms is obviously interested in a broader view, the algorithm was flawed or even gamed. The article title is click-baity. But I agree it is terrifying that there are companies devoted to an overt political stance that have vast reach and even monopolies in many markets like Sinclair [0] and others [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stations_owned_or_operated_by_Sinclair_Broadcast_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stations_owned_or_oper... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Networks_Group#International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Networks_Group#Internation...

josephh 8y ago
> Since the typical person searching for those terms is obviously interested in a broader view I don't find it obvious at all. Do you have any evidence to suggest that this is indeed the case? Why would those terms/results show up in the first place if only few are looking them up?
- mikeyouse 8y ago
  Google's algorithm is biased toward recency. In a universe of "Foo Badbar", "Foo Neutralbar" and "Foo Goodbar" -- If a person searches for "Foo" after there's a bunch of stories in the press about "Foo Badbar", the results will all reflect that topic. For something like "Latino", it's crazy for all the results to reflect the border wall and not at all controversial for Google to want to promote "Foo Neutralbar" and "Foo Goodbar" to balance the results.
- TomMckenny 8y ago
  >>Since the typical person searching for those terms is obviously interested in a broader view >Do you have any evidence to suggest that this is indeed the case? Only my apparently overly optimistic understanding of human nature.
- danaris 8y ago
  It is almost trivially obvious that the average person, even in a polarized climate like America during the 2016 election cycle, is more likely to be interested in a reasonably balanced set of results on any given topic than they are to be interested in a set of results that exclusively favor one fairly extreme position. (Unfortunately, I would say this is even likely to be true of topics for which there is, in fact, an objectively true answer, like climate change, which many of the results will be opposing.)

chiefalchemist 8y ago

Two things to add: 1) You might be interested in the book The Influential Mind. While she doesn't come out and say it directly, the bizarre state of our digital lives (i.e., social media) has quite a bit of reasonable (scientific) explanation. https://www.amazon.com/Influential-Mind-Reveals-Change-Others/dp/1627792651 https://www.amazon.com/Influential-Mind-Reveals-Change-Other... 2) The irony of the homogenized "wisdom" is that these same entities are personalizing so much that the shared / collective experience is being diminished. Perhaps it's easier to build mono-minded on top of a disheveled and disorganized foundation?