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This is nothing new, given the statements made in the Google 'all-hands' immediately after the election, for which complete footage was leaked as well. Some lea

This is nothing new, given the statements made in the Google 'all-hands' immediately after the election, for which complete footage was leaked as well. Some leadership was less explicitly partisan, but one or two were more openly so, to the point that they were amenable to being more proactive in future elections.

darkpuma 7y ago
The problem is not so much that a corporation has political opinions (or rather that the executives have political opinions and don't keep work and politics separate.) None of that is particularly unusual. The problem in this case is this particular company believes they have enough power to decide the outcome of elections. Or more accurately, the problem is that they might be right.
- Isamu 7y ago
  >believes they have enough power to decide the outcome of elections. Or more accurately, the problem is that they might be right. But if so, they already spectacularly failed to prevent a Trump election. Or maybe they failed to predict it, but aren’t they uniquely positioned to do so? How does this paint a picture of dangerous political influence?
  - Fellshard 7y ago
    They actively discussed taking more steps to prevent it, instead of relying on failed predictions to justify inaction. As for why they failed to predict it in the first place: worldview bubbles strongly affected perception. No need to really examine data on something you and everyone around you believes is an impossibility. That's all part and parcel of what that All-hands meeting discussed; I'd highly recommend finding it and listening to it.
    - threeseed 7y ago
      Do you have evidence of where Google has stated that they are trying to prevent a future Trump government ?
      - drak0n1c 7y ago
        There are internal PDFs, interview with cooperating Google whistleblower, and undercover video footage of a separate executive on the topic - all accessible here: https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/24/insider-blows-whistle-exec-reveals-google-plan-to-prevent-trump-situation-in-2020-on-hidden-cam/ https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/24/insider-blows-whis...
        cromwellian 7y ago
        Veritas completely misunderstands and twists what 'fairness' and 'cognitive bias' in AI is. AI can only learn what you feed it. Choices in what data is given to AI can bias the outputs, and then bias people who become blinded that the inputs are biased. So for example, if I only ever feed an AI training data about doctors and nurses in which the male examples are only ever used for doctor, and the female examples are only ever used nurse, then when you or anyone else ask's what a doctor or nurse is, the output has a gender bias. This is Google Search becoming an unwitting amplifier in cognitive bias and stereotypes. Now you might counter that "most" doctors are male, and "most" nurses are female and that's reality, but when I ask for the definition of what a doctor is and what it does, I'm not asking for demographics. These guys are taking concerns that are openly discussed in AI conventions among experts and ethicists as a worry, and twisting it to fit their own scared political agenda. We've had examples of this already with image classification networks classifying dark-skinned people are gorillas, which is clearly because the training dataset itself is unconsciously biased. How do you detect when these biases occur? You need a diverse group of human evaluations to review the outcomes to make sure the AI hasn't learned the wrong biases. Or at the very least, you need that group of people to construct a good integration test set to look for misclassifications. Seems what's going on, is someone taking complex technical issues, twisting them, and feeding them to politicians like Gohmert who clearly won't understand any nuance. If Veritas wants government to regulate AI to protect conservative viewpoints, he may end up regretting getting the government involved.
    - bduerst 7y ago
      I'm not sure that's true. There's a leaked email between two developers joking about it, but that's far from proof the organization was considering it. They've demonetized/dropped ads for satire news websites, which also includes The Onion, but that was a response to the criticism that they are enabling fake news to become more prominent.
  - sonnyblarney 7y ago
    "they already spectacularly failed to prevent a Trump election." They were not trying to prevent it. Google was just a search engine, trying to do their best. Since Trump, their view on information has changed from 'neutral' to 'fairness'. Their view of 'fairness' is politically loaded, and examples are given in the docs. There is no doubt that Google can change the outcome of elections - this is for sure. If they really wanted to put their finger on the scales hard, they could. I'm very concerned about the recent revelations, and I don't think that their 'fairness' policy is actually fair, but I wonder how much effect it will actually have. It's so hard to measure.
- sangnoir 7y ago
  > Or more accurately, the problem is that they might be right. This has been true for a long time - it was true for multiple Murdoch companies since the 80's. Hearst declared, in 1898 "You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war"[1] edit: to be clear, I'm not condoning this reality, but it is not a new phenomenon. 1. https://www.iancfriedman.com/?p=29 https://www.iancfriedman.com/?p=29
  - seieste 7y ago
    Both Murdoch and Hearst ran publishing entities, whereas Google and other social media sites claim to be neutral platforms. This distinction is important because certain protections given to neutral platforms don’t necessarily apply to publishers. (For instance, Reddit can’t be held accountable for libel posted on their site by someone else since they’re just a platform. )
    - root_axis 7y ago
      This is an oft-repeated falsehood. There is no such distinction between platforms and publishers as far as online websites go. The law is very explicit about this, google section 230.
      - btilly 7y ago
        Please clarify what part of it you consider to be a falsehood. Google returned results such as https://www.minclaw.com/legal-resource-center/what-is-section-230-of-the-communication-decency-act-cda/ https://www.minclaw.com/legal-resource-center/what-is-sectio... and https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 which suggest that there is a difference. Very specifically, if a site has applied editorial discretion like a publisher does, it is then liable for what is said. If it just reposts content provided by others, it has a safe harbor. By my lay reading, automated filtering intended to support a specific point of view would seem to be a grey area.
        root_axis 7y ago
sonnyblarney 7y ago
I think it's relatively important. CEO's tend err on the side of hubris, and it'd seem they all have strong political views. I think power maybe does that. So in a more informal 'TGIF' setting, I'm not surprised to see some of it come out, however uncomfortable (whether or not I disagree with the position is different, but I definitely disagree with political dialogue at the office by CEO's). But today's revelation indicate more broadly material policy, i.e. 'not just off the cuff CEO's remarks'. Also, there's some information regarding the efforts of AI to 'rebalance' information, it's downright scary. I don't believe that their activity is remotely 'neutral' and given some of the statements it seems they are blissfully ignorant of how people could possibly disagree with them. It's definitely a bubble. Today's revelations have crossed the rubicon for me, I'm putting Google effectively in the 'bad company' camp. I used to trust Google's goodwill and talent more than government, but now I don't. I want Google to be broken up, and for there to be some kind of transparency and oversight into their algorithms.
- Fellshard 7y ago
  I agree. I'm just laying the foundation that the Veritas leak today is not merely an unprecedented statement, but rather that it has strong precedent in the company's leadership itself. Even if doctored to make some statements more damming, we have this initial point to shed some light. That said, I would caution against taking Veritas at face value. Sometimes their claims match what is said, sometimes a bit more context tones down the severity of the comments. For example, I have seen them take someone making a hypothetical quote, and then make it seem as if that was the person giving their own opinion, something made clearer when they posted the full video later.
- cromwellian 7y ago
  A large chunk of Google is non-American, and a large chunk of their US offices are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Brin and Pichai are immigrants. At the time of Trump's victory, many employees of the company were probably rightly worried from the campaign rhetoric, and that worry actually turned out to be right as one of Trump's first actions as President was to sign an executive order (the travel ban), that ended up stranding people outside the country, including say, Canadians who had dual-Iranian citizenship IIRC who simply returned home to visit family. There's a difference between everyone being rightly concerned with the apparent rise of fascism/nationalism, which doesn't mesh with the culture of a global cosmopolitan company. But the fact that people are concerned about it doesn't meant they're engineering outcomes. Almost all of the suggestions post-2016 that have been discussed in the tech sector have been around 1) stopping foreign interference from hacking, IRA/50-cent army, etc and 2) stopping the spread of outright falsehoods using the platform. Conservative movements are freaking out as if this has something to do with censoring posts, say, of calling for deregulation or tax cuts. Some of those boil down to deliberately labeling videos or articles that are paid for and funded by foreign governments (e.g. Chinese or Russian government "news" networks on YouTube) and some of those boil down to checking arguments against known fact checking databases. Is fact checking "anti-Trump"? Is trying to block online political bot spam "anti-Trump"? or is this anti-forces-that-undermine-democracy-with-propaganda? Should Facebook not vet foreign political ads which try to stir up a racial confrontation by using false claims that Antifa or BLM activists are going to appear and do something which they weren't? Because what I see is, attempts to block these activities are read as anti-conservative. And if I were a conservative, frankly, I'd be embarrassed if the way my party wins is that I have to defend the right of Macedonian spammers to spread fake memes about pedophilia dungeons. We are entering an era with Deepfakes that are going to make determining what is true and what isn't 10x harder for the average person. Trying to combat this, and activities of the IRA for example, should be seen as something that needs to be done on a large scale. Otherwise, there's a large Denial of Service attack coming for Democracy itself. The flip side of all of the conservatives whining about Google censorship, is the vast criticism from the left that YouTube is a platform for the spread of alt-right extremism. So which is it? If I go on YouTube right now, there are ample left-wing channels calling for Google to be broken up because it's a platform for the spread of hate. Both sides are claiming victim hood, and asking for the other side's content to be ranked below theirs. What are we going to end up with, a Fox-news like Google? When the big-3 news networks were broken up lots more cable news channels, are we better off, or worse off? Now partisans of the left can watch MSNBC all day, and partisans of the right can watch Fox news all day, and the 'filter bubble' has become more extreme now that media has been fragmented into 500 "news" channels. Thus breaking up the large media and tech could make things worse, could make combatting foreign propaganda injection much harder.
myko 7y ago
As they should be. Google, Twitter, and Facebook were in unique positions to see how heavily Russia worked to influence our elections. They should've been screaming from the rooftops about that. Instead it looks like they ignored it at best.
- colpabar 7y ago
  But wouldn't it be better for everyone if those companies weren't in those unique positions? Can't your point about them not "screaming from the rooftops" about fake news be used to argue that we can't allow these companies to have such power when we know that they will only ever act in their own self interest?
  - SeanAppleby 7y ago
    Playing as devils advocate; does decentralization of that power actually improve the situation of dealing with manipulation from nation states? And if that's not what you're saying, is it a proposal that the government manages our news diet, or what do you view as the solution? It would seem possible to me that if power was distributed widely over competitors it might be even harder to defend against, as fake news drives clicks which drives market share, everything about combatting fake news has been extremely polarizing (see this thread) and might drive bad PR to companies that take it seriously, a more diverse landscape might lead to a much more complicated regulatory landscape across competing products, and just a basic bystander effect of each executive team being more able to shirk responsibility because other people are too.
    - Fellshard 7y ago
      Yes, but it requires a populace that understands and acts on the risks from single sources of information. A centralized source of power means a single target is all that is needed for manipulation to be effective. This is the basic premise behind decentralization in the first place. Widely disturbed power is difficult to manipulate consistently without the manipulation becoming more easily visible, usually in the form of uncanny movement of many independent units as one, which most people can detect as suspicious.
mtgx 7y ago
It was obvious as daylight that Google supported Clinton through various algorithm tweaks in the search engine, not just against conservatives, but also against other Democratic candidates in the primary. There was even a paper released after the election showing that Google favored Clinton over Trump in about +20% of the searches. But nobody ever believes this stuff, because: 1) The vast majority don't pay attention/or are too biased for a certain political candidate to care/believe it 2) "The Algorithm™ can only ever be objective and true" (i.e. Google would never tweak the algorithm for its own interests; ignore the antitrust cases saying the opposite) 3) Google can do no evil. Google can only ever be the good guy in the story
- anth_anm 7y ago
  4) It's conspiracy theory nonsense constantly pushed by right wing advocates.
- UncleMeat 7y ago
  Surely, given the stupendous number of leaks over the past three years coming out of Google that somebody would have provided evidence of this if it were true. Especially since we've already seen at least one Googler post regular leaks on Medium under his own name.
- erklik 7y ago
  > There was even a paper released after the election showing that Google favored Clinton over Trump in about +20% of the searches. Could you possibly link this? It would be highly appreciated. The issue that most of these comments are usually coming from right-wing conpriacy theorists like Alex Jones etc. This means that although, the comment might actually be true, but the reputation that they have built up leads to it being instantly denied. I would love to read the paper and see how they found that out. Whether its the algorithm favoring Clinton or is it simply the case of their being more results favoring Clinton.

darkpuma 7y ago

The problem is not so much that a corporation has political opinions (or rather that the executives have political opinions and don't keep work and politics separate.) None of that is particularly unusual. The problem in this case is this particular company believes they have enough power to decide the outcome of elections. Or more accurately, the problem is that they might be right.

Isamu 7y ago
>believes they have enough power to decide the outcome of elections. Or more accurately, the problem is that they might be right. But if so, they already spectacularly failed to prevent a Trump election. Or maybe they failed to predict it, but aren’t they uniquely positioned to do so? How does this paint a picture of dangerous political influence?
- Fellshard 7y ago
  They actively discussed taking more steps to prevent it, instead of relying on failed predictions to justify inaction. As for why they failed to predict it in the first place: worldview bubbles strongly affected perception. No need to really examine data on something you and everyone around you believes is an impossibility. That's all part and parcel of what that All-hands meeting discussed; I'd highly recommend finding it and listening to it.
  - threeseed 7y ago
    Do you have evidence of where Google has stated that they are trying to prevent a future Trump government ?
    - drak0n1c 7y ago
      There are internal PDFs, interview with cooperating Google whistleblower, and undercover video footage of a separate executive on the topic - all accessible here: https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/24/insider-blows-whistle-exec-reveals-google-plan-to-prevent-trump-situation-in-2020-on-hidden-cam/ https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/24/insider-blows-whis...
      - cromwellian 7y ago
        Veritas completely misunderstands and twists what 'fairness' and 'cognitive bias' in AI is. AI can only learn what you feed it. Choices in what data is given to AI can bias the outputs, and then bias people who become blinded that the inputs are biased. So for example, if I only ever feed an AI training data about doctors and nurses in which the male examples are only ever used for doctor, and the female examples are only ever used nurse, then when you or anyone else ask's what a doctor or nurse is, the output has a gender bias. This is Google Search becoming an unwitting amplifier in cognitive bias and stereotypes. Now you might counter that "most" doctors are male, and "most" nurses are female and that's reality, but when I ask for the definition of what a doctor is and what it does, I'm not asking for demographics. These guys are taking concerns that are openly discussed in AI conventions among experts and ethicists as a worry, and twisting it to fit their own scared political agenda. We've had examples of this already with image classification networks classifying dark-skinned people are gorillas, which is clearly because the training dataset itself is unconsciously biased. How do you detect when these biases occur? You need a diverse group of human evaluations to review the outcomes to make sure the AI hasn't learned the wrong biases. Or at the very least, you need that group of people to construct a good integration test set to look for misclassifications. Seems what's going on, is someone taking complex technical issues, twisting them, and feeding them to politicians like Gohmert who clearly won't understand any nuance. If Veritas wants government to regulate AI to protect conservative viewpoints, he may end up regretting getting the government involved.
  - bduerst 7y ago
    I'm not sure that's true. There's a leaked email between two developers joking about it, but that's far from proof the organization was considering it. They've demonetized/dropped ads for satire news websites, which also includes The Onion, but that was a response to the criticism that they are enabling fake news to become more prominent.
- sonnyblarney 7y ago
  "they already spectacularly failed to prevent a Trump election." They were not trying to prevent it. Google was just a search engine, trying to do their best. Since Trump, their view on information has changed from 'neutral' to 'fairness'. Their view of 'fairness' is politically loaded, and examples are given in the docs. There is no doubt that Google can change the outcome of elections - this is for sure. If they really wanted to put their finger on the scales hard, they could. I'm very concerned about the recent revelations, and I don't think that their 'fairness' policy is actually fair, but I wonder how much effect it will actually have. It's so hard to measure.
sangnoir 7y ago
> Or more accurately, the problem is that they might be right. This has been true for a long time - it was true for multiple Murdoch companies since the 80's. Hearst declared, in 1898 "You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war"[1] edit: to be clear, I'm not condoning this reality, but it is not a new phenomenon. 1. https://www.iancfriedman.com/?p=29 https://www.iancfriedman.com/?p=29
- seieste 7y ago
  Both Murdoch and Hearst ran publishing entities, whereas Google and other social media sites claim to be neutral platforms. This distinction is important because certain protections given to neutral platforms don’t necessarily apply to publishers. (For instance, Reddit can’t be held accountable for libel posted on their site by someone else since they’re just a platform. )
  - root_axis 7y ago
    This is an oft-repeated falsehood. There is no such distinction between platforms and publishers as far as online websites go. The law is very explicit about this, google section 230.
    - btilly 7y ago
      Please clarify what part of it you consider to be a falsehood. Google returned results such as https://www.minclaw.com/legal-resource-center/what-is-section-230-of-the-communication-decency-act-cda/ https://www.minclaw.com/legal-resource-center/what-is-sectio... and https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 which suggest that there is a difference. Very specifically, if a site has applied editorial discretion like a publisher does, it is then liable for what is said. If it just reposts content provided by others, it has a safe harbor. By my lay reading, automated filtering intended to support a specific point of view would seem to be a grey area.
      - root_axis 7y ago

sonnyblarney 7y ago

I think it's relatively important. CEO's tend err on the side of hubris, and it'd seem they all have strong political views. I think power maybe does that. So in a more informal 'TGIF' setting, I'm not surprised to see some of it come out, however uncomfortable (whether or not I disagree with the position is different, but I definitely disagree with political dialogue at the office by CEO's). But today's revelation indicate more broadly material policy, i.e. 'not just off the cuff CEO's remarks'. Also, there's some information regarding the efforts of AI to 'rebalance' information, it's downright scary. I don't believe that their activity is remotely 'neutral' and given some of the statements it seems they are blissfully ignorant of how people could possibly disagree with them. It's definitely a bubble. Today's revelations have crossed the rubicon for me, I'm putting Google effectively in the 'bad company' camp. I used to trust Google's goodwill and talent more than government, but now I don't. I want Google to be broken up, and for there to be some kind of transparency and oversight into their algorithms.

Fellshard 7y ago
I agree. I'm just laying the foundation that the Veritas leak today is not merely an unprecedented statement, but rather that it has strong precedent in the company's leadership itself. Even if doctored to make some statements more damming, we have this initial point to shed some light. That said, I would caution against taking Veritas at face value. Sometimes their claims match what is said, sometimes a bit more context tones down the severity of the comments. For example, I have seen them take someone making a hypothetical quote, and then make it seem as if that was the person giving their own opinion, something made clearer when they posted the full video later.
cromwellian 7y ago
A large chunk of Google is non-American, and a large chunk of their US offices are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Brin and Pichai are immigrants. At the time of Trump's victory, many employees of the company were probably rightly worried from the campaign rhetoric, and that worry actually turned out to be right as one of Trump's first actions as President was to sign an executive order (the travel ban), that ended up stranding people outside the country, including say, Canadians who had dual-Iranian citizenship IIRC who simply returned home to visit family. There's a difference between everyone being rightly concerned with the apparent rise of fascism/nationalism, which doesn't mesh with the culture of a global cosmopolitan company. But the fact that people are concerned about it doesn't meant they're engineering outcomes. Almost all of the suggestions post-2016 that have been discussed in the tech sector have been around 1) stopping foreign interference from hacking, IRA/50-cent army, etc and 2) stopping the spread of outright falsehoods using the platform. Conservative movements are freaking out as if this has something to do with censoring posts, say, of calling for deregulation or tax cuts. Some of those boil down to deliberately labeling videos or articles that are paid for and funded by foreign governments (e.g. Chinese or Russian government "news" networks on YouTube) and some of those boil down to checking arguments against known fact checking databases. Is fact checking "anti-Trump"? Is trying to block online political bot spam "anti-Trump"? or is this anti-forces-that-undermine-democracy-with-propaganda? Should Facebook not vet foreign political ads which try to stir up a racial confrontation by using false claims that Antifa or BLM activists are going to appear and do something which they weren't? Because what I see is, attempts to block these activities are read as anti-conservative. And if I were a conservative, frankly, I'd be embarrassed if the way my party wins is that I have to defend the right of Macedonian spammers to spread fake memes about pedophilia dungeons. We are entering an era with Deepfakes that are going to make determining what is true and what isn't 10x harder for the average person. Trying to combat this, and activities of the IRA for example, should be seen as something that needs to be done on a large scale. Otherwise, there's a large Denial of Service attack coming for Democracy itself. The flip side of all of the conservatives whining about Google censorship, is the vast criticism from the left that YouTube is a platform for the spread of alt-right extremism. So which is it? If I go on YouTube right now, there are ample left-wing channels calling for Google to be broken up because it's a platform for the spread of hate. Both sides are claiming victim hood, and asking for the other side's content to be ranked below theirs. What are we going to end up with, a Fox-news like Google? When the big-3 news networks were broken up lots more cable news channels, are we better off, or worse off? Now partisans of the left can watch MSNBC all day, and partisans of the right can watch Fox news all day, and the 'filter bubble' has become more extreme now that media has been fragmented into 500 "news" channels. Thus breaking up the large media and tech could make things worse, could make combatting foreign propaganda injection much harder.

myko 7y ago

As they should be. Google, Twitter, and Facebook were in unique positions to see how heavily Russia worked to influence our elections. They should've been screaming from the rooftops about that. Instead it looks like they ignored it at best.

colpabar 7y ago
But wouldn't it be better for everyone if those companies weren't in those unique positions? Can't your point about them not "screaming from the rooftops" about fake news be used to argue that we can't allow these companies to have such power when we know that they will only ever act in their own self interest?
- SeanAppleby 7y ago
  Playing as devils advocate; does decentralization of that power actually improve the situation of dealing with manipulation from nation states? And if that's not what you're saying, is it a proposal that the government manages our news diet, or what do you view as the solution? It would seem possible to me that if power was distributed widely over competitors it might be even harder to defend against, as fake news drives clicks which drives market share, everything about combatting fake news has been extremely polarizing (see this thread) and might drive bad PR to companies that take it seriously, a more diverse landscape might lead to a much more complicated regulatory landscape across competing products, and just a basic bystander effect of each executive team being more able to shirk responsibility because other people are too.
  - Fellshard 7y ago
    Yes, but it requires a populace that understands and acts on the risks from single sources of information. A centralized source of power means a single target is all that is needed for manipulation to be effective. This is the basic premise behind decentralization in the first place. Widely disturbed power is difficult to manipulate consistently without the manipulation becoming more easily visible, usually in the form of uncanny movement of many independent units as one, which most people can detect as suspicious.

mtgx 7y ago

It was obvious as daylight that Google supported Clinton through various algorithm tweaks in the search engine, not just against conservatives, but also against other Democratic candidates in the primary. There was even a paper released after the election showing that Google favored Clinton over Trump in about +20% of the searches. But nobody ever believes this stuff, because: 1) The vast majority don't pay attention/or are too biased for a certain political candidate to care/believe it 2) "The Algorithm™ can only ever be objective and true" (i.e. Google would never tweak the algorithm for its own interests; ignore the antitrust cases saying the opposite) 3) Google can do no evil. Google can only ever be the good guy in the story

anth_anm 7y ago
4) It's conspiracy theory nonsense constantly pushed by right wing advocates.
UncleMeat 7y ago
Surely, given the stupendous number of leaks over the past three years coming out of Google that somebody would have provided evidence of this if it were true. Especially since we've already seen at least one Googler post regular leaks on Medium under his own name.
erklik 7y ago
> There was even a paper released after the election showing that Google favored Clinton over Trump in about +20% of the searches. Could you possibly link this? It would be highly appreciated. The issue that most of these comments are usually coming from right-wing conpriacy theorists like Alex Jones etc. This means that although, the comment might actually be true, but the reputation that they have built up leads to it being instantly denied. I would love to read the paper and see how they found that out. Whether its the algorithm favoring Clinton or is it simply the case of their being more results favoring Clinton.