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I guess it would be an open and shut case if Silicon Valley, Google included, wasn't either actively censoring conservatives or if "algorithm mistakes" always h

I guess it would be an open and shut case if Silicon Valley, Google included, wasn't either actively censoring conservatives or if "algorithm mistakes" always happened to apply to them. I'm not a conservative - but I'm not so short sighted to see that censorship could turn around on me quickly. ... Consider this from yesterday, where one of the foremost experts on the field of transsexualism, a major contributor to the DSM-V was suspended from twitter [0] for explaining transsexualism. [0] https://pjmedia.com/trending/expert-psychologist-blocked-on-twitter-for-expressing-clinical-opinion-on-transgenderism/ https://pjmedia.com/trending/expert-psychologist-blocked-on-... If "the algorithm" is ready to block anyone for anything that could be offensive to one group but actively allows threats, doxxing, and attacks on another - you aren't talking about RC Cola vs Coke. It's not at all unreasonable to say that Google and SV as a whole are clearly biased. We don't need more ways to make a bubble, and we certainly don't need Google deciding the narrative themselves. I think the analogy to physical sodas don't really hold up to digital delivery of news. Sodas range has a phsyical limitation, digital news does not, if sodas were a digital resource you would sometimes get to try RC Cola. Try and consider how fast it could turn around on you. Cool, today you agree that coke and pepsi are better than RC Cola. What happens when RC Cola is politically tied to Google's fate and they push that instead?

VikingCoder 7y ago
> Google included, wasn't either actively censoring conservatives or if "algorithm mistakes" always happened to apply to them I disagree with your assessment about "always". Frequently Google results are very anti-liberal as well. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/03/joe-biden-parody-website-is-beating-official-campaign-site-on-google.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/03/joe-biden-parody-website-is-... https://www.mic.com/articles/165540/googling-martin-luther-king-returns-neo-nazi-propaganda-why-won-t-google-fix-it https://www.mic.com/articles/165540/googling-martin-luther-k... I can find more examples if you like. YouTube suggests awful right-wing content ALL THE TIME.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  You claim falls apart that, joebiden.info seems to have better SEO than the real site. Just because you or I disagree with it, doesn't make it Google pushing an anti-left narrative, it could just be organic. The other article from 2017 doesn't give me the fake MLK result, so does that mean Google DID adjust their search results? Should Google be manually currating results? Sometimes, but I think they've proven they don't draw the line exactly straight.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    You're stating your opinion in an unfalsifiable way: mistakes that follow your narrative are a conspiracy, even if later fixed. Mistakes that don't are glitches, yet to be corrected, even if they never are. What would convince you that you were wrong?
    - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
      You might be presuming too much. Look at the examples given. One is Google doing nothing to "fix a problem" (http://www.joebiden.info http://www.joebiden.info) and the other demanding Google fix an issue which they seem to have done - as being anti-left. Google being agnostic and not protecting Joe Biden is not them being Anti-Left. I will not be bullied into thinking that Google doing nothing is them being anti-left. I disagree with many of the conservatives Google that have been deplatformed, but I recognize how quickly that pendulum could swing.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
freedomben 7y ago
A few months ago I would have dismissed what you are saying, but now I could have written it myself. It's getting easier than ever to test the bias for yourself. I actively wanted to read some of the extreme right wing stuff. (I believe strongly that we do everyone a disservice by silencing people. It harms the rest of us by isolated us from anything not "mainstream" and it further pushes the silenced into radicalism and vindicates/bolsters their argument that they are mistreated). I literally could not find it on Google, but just moving over to Duck Duck Go I found what I was looking for right away. To everyone down-voting the parent, try it yourself. Think about some polarizing political topic and plug it into Google and then do the exact same search in Duck Duck Go (and maybe Bing, I haven't tried that but I will). You'll be shocked at the difference.
- elliekelly 7y ago
  > (I believe strongly that we do everyone a disservice by silencing people. It harms the rest of us by isolated us from anything not "mainstream" and it further pushes the silenced into radicalism and vindicates/bolsters their argument that they are mistreated). I absolutely agree that being "silenced" and feeling "persecuted" only serves to make extreme views more extreme. But I'm also not sure the bias is only directed one way as many of the far-right pundits would have people believe. I also use DDG and avoid all things google as much as I can but the other day I searched "atlas" on YouTube (looking for the Greek mythological figure) and stumbled across a clip from the movie "Atlas Shrugged." I had read the book in high school and I know it's a favorite among conservatives so I figured it couldn't hurt to watch so I did, without thinking much of it. When I went back to my YouTube homepage later the recommend videos were very different from any content I would ever seek out: Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, the Ayn Rand Institute, and even one called "Why Immigration is Bad for Britain." From watching one movie clip. I think Google's algorithms, for better or for worse, can very quickly discern what content a user "wants" and filters out the rest. I'm the last person to have anything nice to say about Google but I do genuinely believe it's more a case of algorithms enforcing the unconscious bias/preferences of our brains than anyone at Google maliciously "silencing" certain points of view.
  - 7y ago
ceejayoz 7y ago
> ... Consider this from yesterday, where one of the foremost experts on the field of transsexualism, a major contributor to the DSM-V was suspended from twitter [0] for explaining transsexualism. Which was revoked as soon as a human got a look. This happens all the time on Twitter. Here's a liberal Twitter user who got suspended for saying "you really wanna die on this hill huh", which the algorithm interpreted as a death threat. https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/1125287351192698882 https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/1125287351192698882 The current AI state-of-the-art is extremely stupid, and once you get past that the first level of human review isn't much better - it's unrelentingly boring minimum wage work. Confirmation bias turns this random capriciousness into conspiracies.
- briandear 7y ago
  > This happens all the time on Twitter. What also happens all the time is that accounts from conservatives get banned, while people like Louis Farrakhan can be openly and virulently anti-Jew.[1] Bruce Carroll gets banned for referring to Chelsea Manning as Bradley Manning. Apparently that's more terrible than comparing an entire race of people to termites as Farrakhan did. [1] https://nypost.com/2018/10/18/twitter-has-a-huge-louis-farrakhan-problem/ https://nypost.com/2018/10/18/twitter-has-a-huge-louis-farra...

VikingCoder 7y ago

> Google included, wasn't either actively censoring conservatives or if "algorithm mistakes" always happened to apply to them I disagree with your assessment about "always". Frequently Google results are very anti-liberal as well. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/03/joe-biden-parody-website-is-beating-official-campaign-site-on-google.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/03/joe-biden-parody-website-is-... https://www.mic.com/articles/165540/googling-martin-luther-king-returns-neo-nazi-propaganda-why-won-t-google-fix-it https://www.mic.com/articles/165540/googling-martin-luther-k... I can find more examples if you like. YouTube suggests awful right-wing content ALL THE TIME.

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
You claim falls apart that, joebiden.info seems to have better SEO than the real site. Just because you or I disagree with it, doesn't make it Google pushing an anti-left narrative, it could just be organic. The other article from 2017 doesn't give me the fake MLK result, so does that mean Google DID adjust their search results? Should Google be manually currating results? Sometimes, but I think they've proven they don't draw the line exactly straight.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  You're stating your opinion in an unfalsifiable way: mistakes that follow your narrative are a conspiracy, even if later fixed. Mistakes that don't are glitches, yet to be corrected, even if they never are. What would convince you that you were wrong?
  - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    You might be presuming too much. Look at the examples given. One is Google doing nothing to "fix a problem" (http://www.joebiden.info http://www.joebiden.info) and the other demanding Google fix an issue which they seem to have done - as being anti-left. Google being agnostic and not protecting Joe Biden is not them being Anti-Left. I will not be bullied into thinking that Google doing nothing is them being anti-left. I disagree with many of the conservatives Google that have been deplatformed, but I recognize how quickly that pendulum could swing.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

freedomben 7y ago

A few months ago I would have dismissed what you are saying, but now I could have written it myself. It's getting easier than ever to test the bias for yourself. I actively wanted to read some of the extreme right wing stuff. (I believe strongly that we do everyone a disservice by silencing people. It harms the rest of us by isolated us from anything not "mainstream" and it further pushes the silenced into radicalism and vindicates/bolsters their argument that they are mistreated). I literally could not find it on Google, but just moving over to Duck Duck Go I found what I was looking for right away. To everyone down-voting the parent, try it yourself. Think about some polarizing political topic and plug it into Google and then do the exact same search in Duck Duck Go (and maybe Bing, I haven't tried that but I will). You'll be shocked at the difference.

elliekelly 7y ago
> (I believe strongly that we do everyone a disservice by silencing people. It harms the rest of us by isolated us from anything not "mainstream" and it further pushes the silenced into radicalism and vindicates/bolsters their argument that they are mistreated). I absolutely agree that being "silenced" and feeling "persecuted" only serves to make extreme views more extreme. But I'm also not sure the bias is only directed one way as many of the far-right pundits would have people believe. I also use DDG and avoid all things google as much as I can but the other day I searched "atlas" on YouTube (looking for the Greek mythological figure) and stumbled across a clip from the movie "Atlas Shrugged." I had read the book in high school and I know it's a favorite among conservatives so I figured it couldn't hurt to watch so I did, without thinking much of it. When I went back to my YouTube homepage later the recommend videos were very different from any content I would ever seek out: Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, the Ayn Rand Institute, and even one called "Why Immigration is Bad for Britain." From watching one movie clip. I think Google's algorithms, for better or for worse, can very quickly discern what content a user "wants" and filters out the rest. I'm the last person to have anything nice to say about Google but I do genuinely believe it's more a case of algorithms enforcing the unconscious bias/preferences of our brains than anyone at Google maliciously "silencing" certain points of view.
- 7y ago

ceejayoz 7y ago

> ... Consider this from yesterday, where one of the foremost experts on the field of transsexualism, a major contributor to the DSM-V was suspended from twitter [0] for explaining transsexualism. Which was revoked as soon as a human got a look. This happens all the time on Twitter. Here's a liberal Twitter user who got suspended for saying "you really wanna die on this hill huh", which the algorithm interpreted as a death threat. https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/1125287351192698882 https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/1125287351192698882 The current AI state-of-the-art is extremely stupid, and once you get past that the first level of human review isn't much better - it's unrelentingly boring minimum wage work. Confirmation bias turns this random capriciousness into conspiracies.

briandear 7y ago
> This happens all the time on Twitter. What also happens all the time is that accounts from conservatives get banned, while people like Louis Farrakhan can be openly and virulently anti-Jew.[1] Bruce Carroll gets banned for referring to Chelsea Manning as Bradley Manning. Apparently that's more terrible than comparing an entire race of people to termites as Farrakhan did. [1] https://nypost.com/2018/10/18/twitter-has-a-huge-louis-farrakhan-problem/ https://nypost.com/2018/10/18/twitter-has-a-huge-louis-farra...