8 ms·

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

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.
- sonnyblarney 7y ago
  Those are all legitimate points. I don't think anyone is concerned about Google trying to get past fake news (or rather, surely there are few voices there) The issues are more disconcerting, like senior executives trying to make sure that 'Trump never happens again', the assumption being either 'voters were so deeply misinformed' or that 'Trump is illegitimate because of who he is'. If the former, well, ok, possibly, but I feel that G will end up leaning on the bias to try to tell us 'how bad Trump' is. If it's the later, well, this would be deeply anti-democratic. The new policy sheds light on how they'll go about this - in the article they reference to how, when people type 'Clinton emails' that there should be no reference to the ostensible scandal. This is possibly problematic as Hillary Clinton was asked to produce emails by the Feds and decided to delete most of them: this is a legit scandal. Arguably, G is suppressing this information because they don't deem it factual? Or newsworthy? More extensively, they gave examples of how they are going to move from 'truth' to 'fair' in an intersectional manner by offering ups suggestions that 'balance historical injustice'. Open google.com right how, if you type 'women can' you get suggestions such as 'vote, fly, do anything'. If you type 'men can' you'll get as a first suggestion 'have babies'. While the former is uncontroversial (i.e of course women can vote and fly), is this really Google's place to start to suggest such things unless they are material to historical searches? And the male suggestion, doesn't really line up with the female example. 'Men can have babies'? Well, this a very narrow and specifically intersectional ideal, while maybe it's technically true, I don't see how bringing up that issue in the context of someone searching is relevant to anything at all (again, unless it fits some kind of algorithmic purpose i.e. it's a popular search). The notion that Google, the manger of the world's information, is going to 'right historical wrongs' is in some ways very good, I mean, who doesn't want to make 'wrong things right'? But of course it's utterly Orwellian in practice, with a small group of ideologues deciding what we should see and not, based on their unique worldview. The implications of this new 'right the wrongs of history' worldview on search results is beyond scary. So yes: getting rid of fake news, trying to point out narrative, calling out lies - sure. Problematic: trying to feed people content that Google deems 'more appropriate'. Scary: modifying search results and suggestions to be consistent with their worldview and to 'right the wrongs of history'. I don't trust the talent and overall goodwill of Google anymore, I think they need to be regulated and there needs to be more transparency. I also think it would be ideal to end the monopoly and try on actual diversity, i.e. real competition.

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.

sonnyblarney 7y ago
Those are all legitimate points. I don't think anyone is concerned about Google trying to get past fake news (or rather, surely there are few voices there) The issues are more disconcerting, like senior executives trying to make sure that 'Trump never happens again', the assumption being either 'voters were so deeply misinformed' or that 'Trump is illegitimate because of who he is'. If the former, well, ok, possibly, but I feel that G will end up leaning on the bias to try to tell us 'how bad Trump' is. If it's the later, well, this would be deeply anti-democratic. The new policy sheds light on how they'll go about this - in the article they reference to how, when people type 'Clinton emails' that there should be no reference to the ostensible scandal. This is possibly problematic as Hillary Clinton was asked to produce emails by the Feds and decided to delete most of them: this is a legit scandal. Arguably, G is suppressing this information because they don't deem it factual? Or newsworthy? More extensively, they gave examples of how they are going to move from 'truth' to 'fair' in an intersectional manner by offering ups suggestions that 'balance historical injustice'. Open google.com right how, if you type 'women can' you get suggestions such as 'vote, fly, do anything'. If you type 'men can' you'll get as a first suggestion 'have babies'. While the former is uncontroversial (i.e of course women can vote and fly), is this really Google's place to start to suggest such things unless they are material to historical searches? And the male suggestion, doesn't really line up with the female example. 'Men can have babies'? Well, this a very narrow and specifically intersectional ideal, while maybe it's technically true, I don't see how bringing up that issue in the context of someone searching is relevant to anything at all (again, unless it fits some kind of algorithmic purpose i.e. it's a popular search). The notion that Google, the manger of the world's information, is going to 'right historical wrongs' is in some ways very good, I mean, who doesn't want to make 'wrong things right'? But of course it's utterly Orwellian in practice, with a small group of ideologues deciding what we should see and not, based on their unique worldview. The implications of this new 'right the wrongs of history' worldview on search results is beyond scary. So yes: getting rid of fake news, trying to point out narrative, calling out lies - sure. Problematic: trying to feed people content that Google deems 'more appropriate'. Scary: modifying search results and suggestions to be consistent with their worldview and to 'right the wrongs of history'. I don't trust the talent and overall goodwill of Google anymore, I think they need to be regulated and there needs to be more transparency. I also think it would be ideal to end the monopoly and try on actual diversity, i.e. real competition.