7 ms·

This is an absurdly inaccurate headline. From the article: > The email traffic, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, shows that employees proposed ways to “lev

by untog 8y ago

This is an absurdly inaccurate headline. From the article: > The email traffic, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, shows that employees proposed ways to “leverage” search functions and take steps to counter what they considered to be “islamophobic, algorithmically biased results from search terms ‘Islam’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Iran’, etc.” and “prejudiced, algorithmically biased search results from search terms ‘Mexico’, ‘Hispanic’, ‘Latino’, etc.” So, employees saw that the existing algorithm was inappropriately prioritising prejudiced results, and discussed tweaking the algorithm accordingly. I don't see what's controversial about that, unless your understanding of Google is so basic that you really think results are calculated by a magic computer program in the sky. It's always been programmed by humans, within various parameters. It isn't objective and it never has been. Now, is it worth discussing the enormous power Google has over people's perceptions as a result of their market dominance? Absolutely. But using a headline like that just plays into conspiracy theory.

aphelion 8y ago
That it is incorrect to say that personal bias or subjective interpretation has never played any role whatsoever in search results is a vacuous truth. It's a meaningless tautology. And it's fallacious to use it to excuse for injecting any sort of political ideology into search results.
p1necone 8y ago
So many people seem to have this weird misconception that there can be no right answer to something just because one political party disagrees with another on it. I wish people would entertain the possibility that either side might actually just be wrong about things sometimes (often trivially). (hypothetically) It would not be "bias" to talk about one side being wrong much more than the other if that was actually the case. I think a lot of people use this fallacious call to "give both sides an un-'biased' chance" to derail discussion in a very intellectually dishonest way when we should be reasoning about things without turning them into political arguments.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- TheAdamAndChe 8y ago
  There are some subjects where this is correct and one side is definitely correct while the other isn't, global warming being the first subject that comes to mind. Global warming is real, there is scientific evidence of this, and anyone who doesn't believe in it is ignorant of this evidence. However, there are many subjects where there is no single correct way to do things. How do we manage our culture? How does our society handle immigration properly? Should we promote certain ideals or family values? For these issues, if you _don't_ give both sides an un-biased chance, then you are picking sides.
  - Agustus 8y ago
    Your motte and bailey arguments on global warming are not the way to approach this. Global warming is not the phrase used in nomenclature anymore, it is climate change because the worry is that humans are throwing the climate out of stability. However, where true disagreement occurs from those arguing against climate change is the level of impact humans have on the climate. The various models have to make a determination on the feedback loop of carbon dioxide into the overall earth system; it varies from model to model. This leads to the issue which an honest debate can be had: If anthropogenic climate change is occurring that will cause real damage to the planet, what is the range to adjust to and what should be done about it? If you believe strongly that the damage is occurring, would you be willing to wage war on countries who disregard the globe's needs and bring them to heel for their non compliance? China is throwing out massive amounts of air pollutants, getting them to compliance means shutting down the electrical means of them bringing themselves out of poverty.
greglindahl 8y ago
To put this into perspective, these algorithms, especially for autocomplete, have always been fiddled with by humans. Why? Because algorithms often produce terrible results, and few engineers want to stand behind an algorithm that coughs up bestiality results for vanilla queries about animals.
- wolco 8y ago
  Terrible? The autocomplete results were too honest. Sexual terms are more popular and that bestiality result has been proven to be the more popular site.
  - batiudrami 8y ago
    Popular is not what you want in a search engine. Precise interpretation of your query and retrieving relevant results is. Sometimes that's the most popular; sometimes it is an obscure journal article discussing exactly what you were after. In neither case should a vanilla animal query return bestiality. I'd argue that an algorithm which is only able to do a search for 'most common query starting with" ignoring all context is a terrible algorithm.
    - wolco 8y ago
      Why would an obscure link come up first for a simple word? Perhaps you are logged in and it relates to your profile but for generic searches it shouldn't but if it did the link would quickly lose the obscure label anyhow. Maybe the vanilla term isn't so vanilla if those terms are being used that way on the most popular sites.
127 8y ago
The end result still remains: introducing bias.
- untog 8y ago
  Google is nothing but a collection of biases. Even in the early days, PageRank meant that Google was biased towards sites that get linked to more than others. That was a value judgement they made about what best served their customers. This is no different.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    And in those early days, everyone knew that "citation clubs" were a way to attack Google's algorithm... just like how you attack academic citation indices or "impact factor". Then google defended against that, and then...
  - 127 8y ago
    It only became a problem after the rise of unwanted political opinions.
    - untog 8y ago
      It became a problem almost immediately. PageRank had issues because people got wise and formed link farms to cheat the system. So Google added more tweaks. Repeat this x10000 and you get to 2018.
      - wolco 8y ago
        The diversity of quality results has gone down. Page 2 use to have a few gems. Now one or two words will dominate and you see the same results for different queries that share two terms at the beginning.
  - jlawson 8y ago
    This is a dangerous general-purpose justification which allows mega-corporations to manipulate global information flow in any way they like. Now Google leadership doesn't just get to be wealthy, they get to manipulate how everyone else sees the world, with no limits or accountability, because hey everything is biased right? It may sound good because they agree with you on this particular issue. But this justification applies to any other government or corporation who can manage to seize the reins of technological power. You're making a memetic weapon that, soon, will be turned against you. No. Neutrality is a real thing and it should be upheld as a serious goal and principle. Especially when we're taking about a group with such insane amounts of unjustified and undemocratic control over other people. We need to do everything we can culturally to make that influence less unequal.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
beepboopbeep 8y ago
The article is trying to not-so-subtly prop up the conservative meme that google is a leftist empire out to censor conservative voices.
- livestyle 8y ago
  A meme? Did you happen to watch the video of the post election all hands?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - untog 8y ago
    Where in the video did they pledge to censor conservative voices?
    - buxtehude 8y ago
      They don't have to. The singular monotone reaction from the top echelon is message enough. I'm no fan of Trump or his policies, but neither am I a fan of an environment where it is assumed we all have the same political views. For a company of over 100k employees, an event like that can't be seen as inclusive.
      - komali2 8y ago
        CEOs can have political opinions. A couple conservative googlers have tried the "we don't feel welcome" here angle, one famously by posting a sexist rant that got him fired. So far for the other ones, seems like they're still happily collecting their paycheck. What's Google supposed to do, force its liberal employees to invite the conservative ones to their un-google-affiliated rock climbing night? The company itself is operating well within the law.
        remarkEon 8y ago
        >one famously by posting a sexist rant that got him fired. Did you even read what Damore wrote? It is neither sexist nor a rant.
zawerf 8y ago
> Now, is it worth discussing the enormous power Google has over people's perceptions as a result of their market dominance? Absolutely. There was a TED talk covering this titled "We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads"[1]. It talks about how the same ad serving infrastructure that can segment populations into whether they are likely to buy X, can also segment people by political affiliation. Then you can simply target them and remind them to vote on election day (and it actually works and statistically affects voter turnout/results). It is kind of crazy to think that the next election might be won by whoever can make a deal with Google/Facebook to target the precise swing voters they need. Facebook/google might even do the kingmaking themselves if they can figure out how to do it without backlash/leaks. [1] https://youtu.be/iFTWM7HV2UI?t=820 https://youtu.be/iFTWM7HV2UI?t=820
- wolco 8y ago
  Great idea. On election day run get out and vote adwords ads for terms that target favourable voting blocks
  - zaroth 8y ago
    Did you miss the part where that’s exactly what they did last election? (see leaked memo from Eliana Murillo) Or did the sarcasm fly right over my head?
    - wolco 8y ago
      Sarcasm seems to be lost these days.
gwern 8y ago
> So, employees saw that the existing algorithm was inappropriately prioritising prejudiced results, and discussed tweaking the algorithm accordingly. I can well believe that those employees believed those results were 'prejudiced' and 'inappropriately prioritized', but I would point out that you are merely redescribing the WSJ's claims in different words and at no point have you offered a counter-argument or shown evidence that their discussed tweaks would have been non-partisan. --- > The Google emails were written on Sunday, Jan. 29, two days after Mr. Trump signed the first version of his travel order, which generally restricted immigration to the U.S. from several majority-Muslim countries. One of the emails, from an employee of the Search Product Marketing division, explained that there was a “large brainstorm” going throughout the company’s marketing division over how to respond. “Overall idea: Leverage search to highlight important organizations to donate to, current news, etc. to keep people abreast of how they can help as well as the resources available for immigrations [sic] or people traveling,” the email says. > “Can we launch an ephemeral experience that includes Highlights, up-to-date info from the US State Dept, DHS, links to donate to ACLU, etc?” the email added. > Several officials responded favorably to the overall idea. “We’re absolutely in…Anything you need,” one wrote. > “To the extent of my knowledge, we’d be breaching precedent if we only gave Highlights access to organizations that support a certain view of the world in a time of political conflict,” the public-affairs executive said. “Is that accurate? If so, would we be willing to open access to highlights to [organizations] that…actually support the ban?”
- refurb 8y ago
  Wow! So basically Google employees were using what most people believe is an apolitical search engine to push their particular political view? Maybe not so surprising after the TGIF post-election video.
  - untog 8y ago
    It sounds a lot more like Google employees were trying to remove overtly political content from apolitical search terms, but you do you.
    - 8y ago
jdoliner 8y ago
What's inaccurate about the headline? > the existing algorithm was inappropriately prioritising prejudiced results, and discussed tweaking the algorithm accordingly This, to me, is perfectly described by the headline. The only difference is that you're applying the value judgments to the results by calling them inappropriate and prejudiced (which is fine). But if Google employees feel that results that support the travel ban are inappropriate or prejudiced, well then, yeah, they were discussing tweaking the algorithm to counter the travel ban. And it seems they were well aware they were doing this, and that it was fraught with peril, and decided against it, which I applaud them for. I don't see how you can describe the headline as absurdly inaccurate though, it's completely accurate.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
qubax 8y ago
> I don't see what's controversial about that Really? You don't see what's controversial about a pro-life employee seeing pro-choice results and deciding to alter the search results? Or what if a republican employee decided to scrub prejudiced anti-republican results and pro-democrat results? What about a chinese employee seeing prejudice "tiannamen square" results and deciding it needed to be removed? You don't like prejudiced results but you are okay with prejudiced google employees creating prejudiced results for you? > It isn't objective and it never has been. Actually it was. Google of the 2000s was nothing like what it is today. Google used to be fairly agnostic and served the results honestly when they were desperate to gain market share. Now they are intentionally altering results for a political agenda. That is very dangerous. But you are right. The headline is incorrect. It should be "Prejudiced Google Workers Discussed Tweaking Search Function..." Google used to be an honest representation of the internet. Now it's just a prejudiced representation of their prejudiced employees. > Absolutely. But using a headline like that just plays into conspiracy theory. Stop it. It isn't a conspiracy theory just because you don't like the truth. We have actual video footage of google leaders and their employees openly talking about manipulating the public. We know they tried to manipulate the 2016 election. They are pretty open about their agenda. It's one of the reasons why I use duckduckgo. Better search results and less spying and less data collecting.
- p1necone 8y ago
  > What about a chinese employee seeing prejudice "tiannamen square" results Facts that you don't agree with are not prejudice.
  - turtlecloud 8y ago
    Exactly. Imagine the uproar if the first result of “holocaust” was a site saying it is a hoax
  - qubax 8y ago
    > Facts that you don't agree with are not prejudice. Who is disagreeing with facts. It's the interpretation that people disagree with. "Tiannamen square massacre" vs "Bringing order to tiannamen square"? I believe all interpretations should be allowed. You believe biased google employees should get to choose. So you are for biased chinese employees altering google search results then?
nyolfen 8y ago
>So, employees saw that the existing algorithm was inappropriately prioritising prejudiced results, and discussed tweaking the algorithm accordingly. I don't see what's controversial about that, unless your understanding of Google is so basic that you really think results are calculated by a magic computer program in the sky. It's always been programmed by humans, within various parameters. It isn't objective and it never has been. sorry, you're straight up wrong here: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/found-out-about-jew/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/found-out-about-jew/ > “We find this result offensive, but the objectivity of our ranking function prevents us from making any changes,” the results were not manually massaged for political reasons in the past. i don't have as much confidence in that remaining the case these days, though.
factsaresacred 8y ago
> inappropriately prioritising prejudiced results Inappropriate to whom? Google search reflects relevance and to tweak the results would be to replace relevant results with biased ones. In the emails they admit that it would be an act of political activism.

by untog 8y ago

aphelion 8y ago

That it is incorrect to say that personal bias or subjective interpretation has never played any role whatsoever in search results is a vacuous truth. It's a meaningless tautology. And it's fallacious to use it to excuse for injecting any sort of political ideology into search results.

p1necone 8y ago

So many people seem to have this weird misconception that there can be no right answer to something just because one political party disagrees with another on it. I wish people would entertain the possibility that either side might actually just be wrong about things sometimes (often trivially). (hypothetically) It would not be "bias" to talk about one side being wrong much more than the other if that was actually the case. I think a lot of people use this fallacious call to "give both sides an un-'biased' chance" to derail discussion in a very intellectually dishonest way when we should be reasoning about things without turning them into political arguments.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
TheAdamAndChe 8y ago
There are some subjects where this is correct and one side is definitely correct while the other isn't, global warming being the first subject that comes to mind. Global warming is real, there is scientific evidence of this, and anyone who doesn't believe in it is ignorant of this evidence. However, there are many subjects where there is no single correct way to do things. How do we manage our culture? How does our society handle immigration properly? Should we promote certain ideals or family values? For these issues, if you _don't_ give both sides an un-biased chance, then you are picking sides.
- Agustus 8y ago
  Your motte and bailey arguments on global warming are not the way to approach this. Global warming is not the phrase used in nomenclature anymore, it is climate change because the worry is that humans are throwing the climate out of stability. However, where true disagreement occurs from those arguing against climate change is the level of impact humans have on the climate. The various models have to make a determination on the feedback loop of carbon dioxide into the overall earth system; it varies from model to model. This leads to the issue which an honest debate can be had: If anthropogenic climate change is occurring that will cause real damage to the planet, what is the range to adjust to and what should be done about it? If you believe strongly that the damage is occurring, would you be willing to wage war on countries who disregard the globe's needs and bring them to heel for their non compliance? China is throwing out massive amounts of air pollutants, getting them to compliance means shutting down the electrical means of them bringing themselves out of poverty.

greglindahl 8y ago

To put this into perspective, these algorithms, especially for autocomplete, have always been fiddled with by humans. Why? Because algorithms often produce terrible results, and few engineers want to stand behind an algorithm that coughs up bestiality results for vanilla queries about animals.

wolco 8y ago
Terrible? The autocomplete results were too honest. Sexual terms are more popular and that bestiality result has been proven to be the more popular site.
- batiudrami 8y ago
  Popular is not what you want in a search engine. Precise interpretation of your query and retrieving relevant results is. Sometimes that's the most popular; sometimes it is an obscure journal article discussing exactly what you were after. In neither case should a vanilla animal query return bestiality. I'd argue that an algorithm which is only able to do a search for 'most common query starting with" ignoring all context is a terrible algorithm.
  - wolco 8y ago
    Why would an obscure link come up first for a simple word? Perhaps you are logged in and it relates to your profile but for generic searches it shouldn't but if it did the link would quickly lose the obscure label anyhow. Maybe the vanilla term isn't so vanilla if those terms are being used that way on the most popular sites.

127 8y ago

The end result still remains: introducing bias.

untog 8y ago
Google is nothing but a collection of biases. Even in the early days, PageRank meant that Google was biased towards sites that get linked to more than others. That was a value judgement they made about what best served their customers. This is no different.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  And in those early days, everyone knew that "citation clubs" were a way to attack Google's algorithm... just like how you attack academic citation indices or "impact factor". Then google defended against that, and then...
- 127 8y ago
  It only became a problem after the rise of unwanted political opinions.
  - untog 8y ago
    It became a problem almost immediately. PageRank had issues because people got wise and formed link farms to cheat the system. So Google added more tweaks. Repeat this x10000 and you get to 2018.
    - wolco 8y ago
      The diversity of quality results has gone down. Page 2 use to have a few gems. Now one or two words will dominate and you see the same results for different queries that share two terms at the beginning.
- jlawson 8y ago
  This is a dangerous general-purpose justification which allows mega-corporations to manipulate global information flow in any way they like. Now Google leadership doesn't just get to be wealthy, they get to manipulate how everyone else sees the world, with no limits or accountability, because hey everything is biased right? It may sound good because they agree with you on this particular issue. But this justification applies to any other government or corporation who can manage to seize the reins of technological power. You're making a memetic weapon that, soon, will be turned against you. No. Neutrality is a real thing and it should be upheld as a serious goal and principle. Especially when we're taking about a group with such insane amounts of unjustified and undemocratic control over other people. We need to do everything we can culturally to make that influence less unequal.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

beepboopbeep 8y ago

The article is trying to not-so-subtly prop up the conservative meme that google is a leftist empire out to censor conservative voices.

livestyle 8y ago
A meme? Did you happen to watch the video of the post election all hands?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- untog 8y ago
  Where in the video did they pledge to censor conservative voices?
  - buxtehude 8y ago
    They don't have to. The singular monotone reaction from the top echelon is message enough. I'm no fan of Trump or his policies, but neither am I a fan of an environment where it is assumed we all have the same political views. For a company of over 100k employees, an event like that can't be seen as inclusive.
    - komali2 8y ago
      CEOs can have political opinions. A couple conservative googlers have tried the "we don't feel welcome" here angle, one famously by posting a sexist rant that got him fired. So far for the other ones, seems like they're still happily collecting their paycheck. What's Google supposed to do, force its liberal employees to invite the conservative ones to their un-google-affiliated rock climbing night? The company itself is operating well within the law.
      - remarkEon 8y ago
        >one famously by posting a sexist rant that got him fired. Did you even read what Damore wrote? It is neither sexist nor a rant.

zawerf 8y ago

> Now, is it worth discussing the enormous power Google has over people's perceptions as a result of their market dominance? Absolutely. There was a TED talk covering this titled "We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads"[1]. It talks about how the same ad serving infrastructure that can segment populations into whether they are likely to buy X, can also segment people by political affiliation. Then you can simply target them and remind them to vote on election day (and it actually works and statistically affects voter turnout/results). It is kind of crazy to think that the next election might be won by whoever can make a deal with Google/Facebook to target the precise swing voters they need. Facebook/google might even do the kingmaking themselves if they can figure out how to do it without backlash/leaks. [1] https://youtu.be/iFTWM7HV2UI?t=820 https://youtu.be/iFTWM7HV2UI?t=820

wolco 8y ago
Great idea. On election day run get out and vote adwords ads for terms that target favourable voting blocks
- zaroth 8y ago
  Did you miss the part where that’s exactly what they did last election? (see leaked memo from Eliana Murillo) Or did the sarcasm fly right over my head?
  - wolco 8y ago
    Sarcasm seems to be lost these days.

gwern 8y ago

> So, employees saw that the existing algorithm was inappropriately prioritising prejudiced results, and discussed tweaking the algorithm accordingly. I can well believe that those employees believed those results were 'prejudiced' and 'inappropriately prioritized', but I would point out that you are merely redescribing the WSJ's claims in different words and at no point have you offered a counter-argument or shown evidence that their discussed tweaks would have been non-partisan. --- > The Google emails were written on Sunday, Jan. 29, two days after Mr. Trump signed the first version of his travel order, which generally restricted immigration to the U.S. from several majority-Muslim countries. One of the emails, from an employee of the Search Product Marketing division, explained that there was a “large brainstorm” going throughout the company’s marketing division over how to respond. “Overall idea: Leverage search to highlight important organizations to donate to, current news, etc. to keep people abreast of how they can help as well as the resources available for immigrations [sic] or people traveling,” the email says. > “Can we launch an ephemeral experience that includes Highlights, up-to-date info from the US State Dept, DHS, links to donate to ACLU, etc?” the email added. > Several officials responded favorably to the overall idea. “We’re absolutely in…Anything you need,” one wrote. > “To the extent of my knowledge, we’d be breaching precedent if we only gave Highlights access to organizations that support a certain view of the world in a time of political conflict,” the public-affairs executive said. “Is that accurate? If so, would we be willing to open access to highlights to [organizations] that…actually support the ban?”

refurb 8y ago
Wow! So basically Google employees were using what most people believe is an apolitical search engine to push their particular political view? Maybe not so surprising after the TGIF post-election video.
- untog 8y ago
  It sounds a lot more like Google employees were trying to remove overtly political content from apolitical search terms, but you do you.
  - 8y ago

jdoliner 8y ago

What's inaccurate about the headline? > the existing algorithm was inappropriately prioritising prejudiced results, and discussed tweaking the algorithm accordingly This, to me, is perfectly described by the headline. The only difference is that you're applying the value judgments to the results by calling them inappropriate and prejudiced (which is fine). But if Google employees feel that results that support the travel ban are inappropriate or prejudiced, well then, yeah, they were discussing tweaking the algorithm to counter the travel ban. And it seems they were well aware they were doing this, and that it was fraught with peril, and decided against it, which I applaud them for. I don't see how you can describe the headline as absurdly inaccurate though, it's completely accurate.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

qubax 8y ago

> I don't see what's controversial about that Really? You don't see what's controversial about a pro-life employee seeing pro-choice results and deciding to alter the search results? Or what if a republican employee decided to scrub prejudiced anti-republican results and pro-democrat results? What about a chinese employee seeing prejudice "tiannamen square" results and deciding it needed to be removed? You don't like prejudiced results but you are okay with prejudiced google employees creating prejudiced results for you? > It isn't objective and it never has been. Actually it was. Google of the 2000s was nothing like what it is today. Google used to be fairly agnostic and served the results honestly when they were desperate to gain market share. Now they are intentionally altering results for a political agenda. That is very dangerous. But you are right. The headline is incorrect. It should be "Prejudiced Google Workers Discussed Tweaking Search Function..." Google used to be an honest representation of the internet. Now it's just a prejudiced representation of their prejudiced employees. > Absolutely. But using a headline like that just plays into conspiracy theory. Stop it. It isn't a conspiracy theory just because you don't like the truth. We have actual video footage of google leaders and their employees openly talking about manipulating the public. We know they tried to manipulate the 2016 election. They are pretty open about their agenda. It's one of the reasons why I use duckduckgo. Better search results and less spying and less data collecting.

p1necone 8y ago
> What about a chinese employee seeing prejudice "tiannamen square" results Facts that you don't agree with are not prejudice.
- turtlecloud 8y ago
  Exactly. Imagine the uproar if the first result of “holocaust” was a site saying it is a hoax
- qubax 8y ago
  > Facts that you don't agree with are not prejudice. Who is disagreeing with facts. It's the interpretation that people disagree with. "Tiannamen square massacre" vs "Bringing order to tiannamen square"? I believe all interpretations should be allowed. You believe biased google employees should get to choose. So you are for biased chinese employees altering google search results then?

nyolfen 8y ago

>So, employees saw that the existing algorithm was inappropriately prioritising prejudiced results, and discussed tweaking the algorithm accordingly. I don't see what's controversial about that, unless your understanding of Google is so basic that you really think results are calculated by a magic computer program in the sky. It's always been programmed by humans, within various parameters. It isn't objective and it never has been. sorry, you're straight up wrong here: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/found-out-about-jew/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/found-out-about-jew/ > “We find this result offensive, but the objectivity of our ranking function prevents us from making any changes,” the results were not manually massaged for political reasons in the past. i don't have as much confidence in that remaining the case these days, though.

factsaresacred 8y ago

> inappropriately prioritising prejudiced results Inappropriate to whom? Google search reflects relevance and to tweak the results would be to replace relevant results with biased ones. In the emails they admit that it would be an act of political activism.