9 ms·

A key part of this legislation is the requirements for tech companies to provide selected news organisations with advance notice about changes to ranking algori

by gkmcd 6y ago

A key part of this legislation is the requirements for tech companies to provide selected news organisations with advance notice about changes to ranking algorithms. This has been generally overlooked in the reporting and discussion but I believe it is the actually the most important part of the legislation. It will give the selected news organisations an enormous advantage over other companies not included and protect them from new competitors, basically entrenching the current media landscape for the foreseeable future. Given the current Australian government's cosy relationship with a particular media company that currently dominates the media landscape here, I don't think it is coincidence.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
The only problem I have with this requirement is that it requires giving only news organizations access to this information. Your concerns can adequately be addressed by ensuring everyone has even access to that information. Google and Facebook's algorithms should be required to be publicly disclosed. As a society, we should demand that we are able to see the algorithms that every web property lives and dies based on, that lives are built and destroyed by.
- Jonanin 6y ago
  These algorithms are not human readable code. They are massively complex interconnected systems of many black box ML models. I don't understand what clarity people think releasing the "algorithms" will bring. In fact, describing ranking as a single algorithm is pretty misleading.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    I also believe any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned. If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm. The fact that technology companies have been grossly negligent and irresponsible isn't a reason to not regulate them: It's proof regulation needs to be much, much stronger.
    - drstewart 6y ago
      >If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm. This is quite a bizarre claim as there is famously an entire category of problems that are hard to solve but easy to verify: P vs NP
    - Isinlor 6y ago
      Do you apply the same standard to people? Tell me, how did your brain come up with what you wrote? How do I validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm?
      - xemoka 6y ago
        By asking them. You can't just ask an algorithm, it must be designed to show its own work. Credibility is another problem...
        ACow_Adonis 6y ago
        lol. sorry, but that reminds me of a skit by an Australian comedian: male guest: "now first of all, let me just start by saying I'm not racist..." female guest: "pfft..." host: "ah see you made a noise there, but a lot of people accuse him of being a racist, so I think it's very helpful to know that he actually isn't one..."
        xemoka 6y ago
        Right, like I said, credibility is a different problem. But at this point, we don't even get a lie from them, we get nothing. At least a lie can be checked and examined. There's nothing available at all currently.
        vaidhy 6y ago
        We actually have a reasonable way to test for human biases in AI - perturb the input a bit and see how the AI responds - For e.g., change the name, change the gender etc. and we use them to measure if AI is fair. It is different question whether all AI can be subject to such tests. For e.g., how will you detect a human bias in a page ranking algorithm? but for where it matters, you can test them and we do test them.
  - zmmmmm 6y ago
    As you say, explaining the intracicies of the algorithm is a fools errand. I guess it is more reasonable if you turn it around: these changes have drastic impact on businesses, so there is a duty to behave responsibly in administering them. If Google really has no idea what the impact of a change will be then it is fairly irresponsible to make that change given the real world harm it can cause. But I suspect in general it does have at least a reasonable idea what the effect of changes will be - that is why it is making them. So the more reasonable version of this is that they need to submit human interpretable descriptions of the effect of changes based on reasonable evidence and validation of their models.
    - not2b 6y ago
      In many cases they (Google) don't know the impact of changes until they try deploying the changes, and there's ML in the picture, not just algorithms. As I understand it, they often run tests that expose the change to a limited subset of users first.
      - xg15 6y ago
        Yes, but they don't just do random stuff. They make changes with the intention to adjust the experience in certain ways, so making those intentions public is important.
    - visarga 6y ago
      Monitoring search engine and social network ranking and filtering updates should be more efficient than complaining about biased parrots (language models). This is a tip to certain ethics researchers who are raising scandals about search bias, but not in the right place - go in the field, check the fucking feeds, leave your abstract ethical tower and measure the reality.
      - xg15 6y ago
        I'm sorry, but this post sounds pretty abstract itself. What exactly do you propose they should do?
  - philliphaydon 6y ago
    If it’s ML that is doing all the work to display articles. Then ML has a long way to go.
    - visarga 6y ago
      No, it's ML tasked with "user engagement" doing the work. Not ML in general.
- extropy 6y ago
  Publicly disclosing the algorithms would drastically increase the pace of gaming them and resulting in pay to play system where the fanciest SEO wins. Google and Facebook partially relies on the obscurity to keep the fighting the spam battle. IMO we don't have the technology yet to have fully open ranking algorithms that are not quickly broken. To think of it - similar to crypto around WW2.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    This excuse has been used to protect Google and Facebook for decades, but considering disinformation campaigns, civil unrest, and outright genocide has been the cost... I think the price of using obscurity to prevent SEO tactics is way too high.
    - uniqueid 6y ago
      The root cause isn't algorithms, it's a lack of accountability (both of companies and of users). The problem with 8chan wasn't some inadvertently harmful AI, it's that the site and its users damaged the world for several years without facing consequences.
  - nostromo 6y ago
    This isn't as true as it once was. Google's best asset for ranking is their user data. Even if you had the exact algorithm, you couldn't game it without massive amounts of user traffic. (At least not for popular searches.)
    - threeseed 6y ago
      No. Their best asset is their deep understanding of what makes a page "good" and the intent behind a search query. You could get rid of all their user data and it would still be a great search engine.
  - marshmallow_12 6y ago
    delegating the war against spam rather then being picked up by the user doesn't seem right. To give Big Tech such power to relieve ourselves of a mild annoyance is destructive. This is understood in other aspects of life Hence we have local governments which are inefficient and inconvenience people greatly. Yet it is found that selling all our problems is counterproductive. It ends with monopolies. The answer to this isn't to charge tech companies for the privilege of dictating our lives, rather, it's greater accountability on behalf of big tech and more responsibility on the part of consumers. The only cure for google domination is for the transfer of information online to become more democratised.
- xyzzy123 6y ago
  I'm curious how this advance update thing is supposed to work. What does disclosing those details look like, actually? The reason I'm asking is that as these things grow in complexity, it's quite possible that even if you join the team that works on these systems it will probably take you a pretty long time to understand how they really work. Their actual behaviour is likely to still be mysterious a lot of the time because they're driven by data. Is a high-level description in english OK? Do we need to see pseudocode? The source code code? Do they have to open source it? What parts, if it's tied to internal frameworks? If there is ML, do they have to disclose all their sauce there? The trained network / weights? The training data, if the alg alone is useless without a data set?
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    Any human-initiated change to search algorithms is presumably human-understandable. Someone writes a rule to downrank some terms or traits of a website, they presumably document it somewhere. That documentation will need to be shared, and the implementation of the rule change will need to be delayed until the disclosure window has passed.
    - xyzzy123 6y ago
      Human understandable, yes, but the details of particular changes might only make sense to humans familiar with the system. But yeah, the product manager view / documentation of intent sounds generally reasonable. I do wonder how useful that would be to the news orgs in practice.
      - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
        Honestly, first and foremost, I expect a firehose of documentation, if Google isn't lying about making dozens of changes to it's algorithms every day. News companies might need a full-time guy (or team) just to sit there and read through them all. But on the other hand, a bunch of journalists will have a ton of never-before-seen information about how the world's most powerful companies affect every other company on the planet. That alone is going to be worth some major exclusives. Also, by the mere nature of being forced to share it, Google and Facebook will have to clean up their acts, they'll have to assume any change they make that could open them up to legal scrutiny will be found.
teraflop 6y ago
It's even broader than that. The law applies to any "alterations to the ways in which a service distributes content". The law never actually defines what this means, but it gives a bunch of examples that go beyond ranking. For example, anything that affects a particular "class of content", such as deciding whether or not to make all videos auto-play, is an alteration. Basically, this law would prevent Facebook from deploying just about any non-trivial change to its product without first doing a detailed analysis of how it would affect the Australian news business, in order to determine whether a notification is required. See sections 52D and 52W of the bill: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bills/r6652_first-reps/toc_pdf/20177b01.pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi...
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  So it's just like GDPR? Guidelines intentionally kept vague so that some bureaucrat can slap a huge fine and collect the rent? I wonder if that rent-seeking attitude will accelerate or curb the current brain drain Australia faces.
  - SgtBastard 6y ago
    That’s not a fair characterisation of GDPR, nor one borne about by examples. And 2020 put pause to any Australian brain drain and given how well we’ve handled the pandemic, is likely to be seen significant increases in net migration.
  - nl 6y ago
    That is nothing like the GDPR.
  - donnythecroc 6y ago
    Google has been busy making major deals with news organisations. Facebook has chosen the opposite track. The problem Facebook has is government in Australia is wildly popular because of the pandemic. They can do what they want right now it won't lose them any votes. Ministers are already telling Facebook to leave the country completely!
DavidSJ 6y ago
> a particular media company that currently dominates the media landscape here What is this company, out of curiosity? My guess is ABC, but I don't know.
- nizmow 6y ago
  Murdoch’s News Corp.
- JauntyHatAngle 6y ago
  No, it's newscorp. They have a 55%ish(?) readership share for print media in Australia and are very cosy with the incumbent government. Afaik it's one of the most concentrated markets in the world. (Behind Egypt and China I believe). I'm not sure the exact online share.
  - dwd 6y ago
    It's only a cosy relationship with the incumbent government if said government does what it's told. Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull are examples of what happens when you try and dictate terms with NewCorp and they turn on you with negative press. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/nov/18/kevin-rudd-and-malcolm-turnbull-challenge-news-corp-over-reports-of-foreign-interference-in-petition https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/nov/18/kevin-rudd-and...
- gkmcd 6y ago
  As others have started, when looking at events in Australia, you can consider the currently-governing Liberal party (economically liberal, socially conservative) and News Corp as effectively the same organisation. On the other hand, the Liberal party is very hostile to the public service in general and the ABC in particular.
  - 0xy 6y ago
    They should be hostile to the ABC, because their journalistic standards are terrible. I've reported 3 factual inaccuracies to them and all of them took more than a month to retract. In one case, the inaccuracy affected the entire premise of the article. ABC's standards are that it's okay to lie as long as you retract it a month later in a tiny 10pt foot note. On the other hand, I've personally reported a similar article inaccuracy to a News Corp writer and he replied in 10 minutes, issuing a retraction. Similarly, I reported an article inaccuracy in a Fairfax website and they retracted in less than 2 days. No reply but as long as it's corrected I don't mind. SBS is even worse, they actually have zero accountability for online operations.
alfiedotwtf 6y ago
I wonder why Josh Frysenberg didn’t mention this at his presser today. Contrast this to him repeatedly saying “digital giants must pay traditional news”... I was waiting for him to slip once and say “tradition news must pay my boss Murdoch”
cush 6y ago
Nice try, Facebook.
curryst 6y ago
I actually suspect that new news carousel product they launched might be related. If they push news articles onto the carousel, they can apply a different algorithm to the carousel. Honestly, I think that makes sense and it doesn't immediately strike me as a negative for either side. These are articles coming from trusted sources. There's no need to apply the anti-spam parts of the algorithm. News agencies get a more stable algorithm, Google gets to keep their secret sauce. There is still an advantage to the incumbents. Those carousels are usually in prime real estate. Google would hold the keys to who is in the carousel though, so they could expand it without legislative changes. I like the flexibility, though I don't love handing Google the keys to more kingdoms.
xg15 6y ago
I mean, if not tied to particular news organisations, this could actually be a sensible requirement.
- silexia 6y ago
  No, I've lived in the SEO world my entire life and I guarantee you that if the ranking changes were published spam would be so bad is to make search engines or social media totally unusable.
  - xg15 6y ago
    Then publish the broad criteria behind the ranking and have the technical details be audited by the government behind closed doors.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      State-mandated news ranking controlled by the ruling party in secret! I'm sure nothing can go wrong with that.
      - KvanteKat 6y ago
        While I share your hesitation here, I think two points are important to keep in mind: 1. There is quite a difference between compulsory auditing (what the post you reply to refers to) and the government directly controlling industry. 2. In other industries this is quite commonplace and hasn't led to government takeover of industries (banking comes to mind. In their regulatory implementation on the Basel III accords developed in response to the 2008 financial crisis, both the UK and EU mandate government audits to ensure compliance with stress-testing and and leverage requirements; the US is also a signatory to these accords, but I am less familiar with their implementation into US law). I'm not personally a huge fan of this approach, but I don't find the argument that government oversight is a slippery slope to totalitarianism that persuasive. In my opinion, a much a stronger critique of mandatory government audits is that they are often not that effective at preventing the negative outcomes they set out to prevent but still massively increase the legal complexity of operating in (or entering) a given industry without falling afoul of the law.

by gkmcd 6y ago

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

The only problem I have with this requirement is that it requires giving only news organizations access to this information. Your concerns can adequately be addressed by ensuring everyone has even access to that information. Google and Facebook's algorithms should be required to be publicly disclosed. As a society, we should demand that we are able to see the algorithms that every web property lives and dies based on, that lives are built and destroyed by.

Jonanin 6y ago
These algorithms are not human readable code. They are massively complex interconnected systems of many black box ML models. I don't understand what clarity people think releasing the "algorithms" will bring. In fact, describing ranking as a single algorithm is pretty misleading.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  I also believe any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned. If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm. The fact that technology companies have been grossly negligent and irresponsible isn't a reason to not regulate them: It's proof regulation needs to be much, much stronger.
  - drstewart 6y ago
    >If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm. This is quite a bizarre claim as there is famously an entire category of problems that are hard to solve but easy to verify: P vs NP
  - Isinlor 6y ago
    Do you apply the same standard to people? Tell me, how did your brain come up with what you wrote? How do I validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm?
    - xemoka 6y ago
      By asking them. You can't just ask an algorithm, it must be designed to show its own work. Credibility is another problem...
      - ACow_Adonis 6y ago
        lol. sorry, but that reminds me of a skit by an Australian comedian: male guest: "now first of all, let me just start by saying I'm not racist..." female guest: "pfft..." host: "ah see you made a noise there, but a lot of people accuse him of being a racist, so I think it's very helpful to know that he actually isn't one..."
        xemoka 6y ago
        Right, like I said, credibility is a different problem. But at this point, we don't even get a lie from them, we get nothing. At least a lie can be checked and examined. There's nothing available at all currently.
        vaidhy 6y ago
        We actually have a reasonable way to test for human biases in AI - perturb the input a bit and see how the AI responds - For e.g., change the name, change the gender etc. and we use them to measure if AI is fair. It is different question whether all AI can be subject to such tests. For e.g., how will you detect a human bias in a page ranking algorithm? but for where it matters, you can test them and we do test them.
- zmmmmm 6y ago
  As you say, explaining the intracicies of the algorithm is a fools errand. I guess it is more reasonable if you turn it around: these changes have drastic impact on businesses, so there is a duty to behave responsibly in administering them. If Google really has no idea what the impact of a change will be then it is fairly irresponsible to make that change given the real world harm it can cause. But I suspect in general it does have at least a reasonable idea what the effect of changes will be - that is why it is making them. So the more reasonable version of this is that they need to submit human interpretable descriptions of the effect of changes based on reasonable evidence and validation of their models.
  - not2b 6y ago
    In many cases they (Google) don't know the impact of changes until they try deploying the changes, and there's ML in the picture, not just algorithms. As I understand it, they often run tests that expose the change to a limited subset of users first.
    - xg15 6y ago
      Yes, but they don't just do random stuff. They make changes with the intention to adjust the experience in certain ways, so making those intentions public is important.
  - visarga 6y ago
    Monitoring search engine and social network ranking and filtering updates should be more efficient than complaining about biased parrots (language models). This is a tip to certain ethics researchers who are raising scandals about search bias, but not in the right place - go in the field, check the fucking feeds, leave your abstract ethical tower and measure the reality.
    - xg15 6y ago
      I'm sorry, but this post sounds pretty abstract itself. What exactly do you propose they should do?
- philliphaydon 6y ago
  If it’s ML that is doing all the work to display articles. Then ML has a long way to go.
  - visarga 6y ago
    No, it's ML tasked with "user engagement" doing the work. Not ML in general.
extropy 6y ago
Publicly disclosing the algorithms would drastically increase the pace of gaming them and resulting in pay to play system where the fanciest SEO wins. Google and Facebook partially relies on the obscurity to keep the fighting the spam battle. IMO we don't have the technology yet to have fully open ranking algorithms that are not quickly broken. To think of it - similar to crypto around WW2.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  This excuse has been used to protect Google and Facebook for decades, but considering disinformation campaigns, civil unrest, and outright genocide has been the cost... I think the price of using obscurity to prevent SEO tactics is way too high.
  - uniqueid 6y ago
    The root cause isn't algorithms, it's a lack of accountability (both of companies and of users). The problem with 8chan wasn't some inadvertently harmful AI, it's that the site and its users damaged the world for several years without facing consequences.
- nostromo 6y ago
  This isn't as true as it once was. Google's best asset for ranking is their user data. Even if you had the exact algorithm, you couldn't game it without massive amounts of user traffic. (At least not for popular searches.)
  - threeseed 6y ago
    No. Their best asset is their deep understanding of what makes a page "good" and the intent behind a search query. You could get rid of all their user data and it would still be a great search engine.
- marshmallow_12 6y ago
  delegating the war against spam rather then being picked up by the user doesn't seem right. To give Big Tech such power to relieve ourselves of a mild annoyance is destructive. This is understood in other aspects of life Hence we have local governments which are inefficient and inconvenience people greatly. Yet it is found that selling all our problems is counterproductive. It ends with monopolies. The answer to this isn't to charge tech companies for the privilege of dictating our lives, rather, it's greater accountability on behalf of big tech and more responsibility on the part of consumers. The only cure for google domination is for the transfer of information online to become more democratised.
xyzzy123 6y ago
I'm curious how this advance update thing is supposed to work. What does disclosing those details look like, actually? The reason I'm asking is that as these things grow in complexity, it's quite possible that even if you join the team that works on these systems it will probably take you a pretty long time to understand how they really work. Their actual behaviour is likely to still be mysterious a lot of the time because they're driven by data. Is a high-level description in english OK? Do we need to see pseudocode? The source code code? Do they have to open source it? What parts, if it's tied to internal frameworks? If there is ML, do they have to disclose all their sauce there? The trained network / weights? The training data, if the alg alone is useless without a data set?
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  Any human-initiated change to search algorithms is presumably human-understandable. Someone writes a rule to downrank some terms or traits of a website, they presumably document it somewhere. That documentation will need to be shared, and the implementation of the rule change will need to be delayed until the disclosure window has passed.
  - xyzzy123 6y ago
    Human understandable, yes, but the details of particular changes might only make sense to humans familiar with the system. But yeah, the product manager view / documentation of intent sounds generally reasonable. I do wonder how useful that would be to the news orgs in practice.
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      Honestly, first and foremost, I expect a firehose of documentation, if Google isn't lying about making dozens of changes to it's algorithms every day. News companies might need a full-time guy (or team) just to sit there and read through them all. But on the other hand, a bunch of journalists will have a ton of never-before-seen information about how the world's most powerful companies affect every other company on the planet. That alone is going to be worth some major exclusives. Also, by the mere nature of being forced to share it, Google and Facebook will have to clean up their acts, they'll have to assume any change they make that could open them up to legal scrutiny will be found.

teraflop 6y ago

It's even broader than that. The law applies to any "alterations to the ways in which a service distributes content". The law never actually defines what this means, but it gives a bunch of examples that go beyond ranking. For example, anything that affects a particular "class of content", such as deciding whether or not to make all videos auto-play, is an alteration. Basically, this law would prevent Facebook from deploying just about any non-trivial change to its product without first doing a detailed analysis of how it would affect the Australian news business, in order to determine whether a notification is required. See sections 52D and 52W of the bill: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bills/r6652_first-reps/toc_pdf/20177b01.pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi...

908B64B197 6y ago
So it's just like GDPR? Guidelines intentionally kept vague so that some bureaucrat can slap a huge fine and collect the rent? I wonder if that rent-seeking attitude will accelerate or curb the current brain drain Australia faces.
- SgtBastard 6y ago
  That’s not a fair characterisation of GDPR, nor one borne about by examples. And 2020 put pause to any Australian brain drain and given how well we’ve handled the pandemic, is likely to be seen significant increases in net migration.
- nl 6y ago
  That is nothing like the GDPR.
- donnythecroc 6y ago
  Google has been busy making major deals with news organisations. Facebook has chosen the opposite track. The problem Facebook has is government in Australia is wildly popular because of the pandemic. They can do what they want right now it won't lose them any votes. Ministers are already telling Facebook to leave the country completely!

DavidSJ 6y ago

> a particular media company that currently dominates the media landscape here What is this company, out of curiosity? My guess is ABC, but I don't know.

nizmow 6y ago
Murdoch’s News Corp.
JauntyHatAngle 6y ago
No, it's newscorp. They have a 55%ish(?) readership share for print media in Australia and are very cosy with the incumbent government. Afaik it's one of the most concentrated markets in the world. (Behind Egypt and China I believe). I'm not sure the exact online share.
- dwd 6y ago
  It's only a cosy relationship with the incumbent government if said government does what it's told. Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull are examples of what happens when you try and dictate terms with NewCorp and they turn on you with negative press. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/nov/18/kevin-rudd-and-malcolm-turnbull-challenge-news-corp-over-reports-of-foreign-interference-in-petition https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/nov/18/kevin-rudd-and...
gkmcd 6y ago
As others have started, when looking at events in Australia, you can consider the currently-governing Liberal party (economically liberal, socially conservative) and News Corp as effectively the same organisation. On the other hand, the Liberal party is very hostile to the public service in general and the ABC in particular.
- 0xy 6y ago
  They should be hostile to the ABC, because their journalistic standards are terrible. I've reported 3 factual inaccuracies to them and all of them took more than a month to retract. In one case, the inaccuracy affected the entire premise of the article. ABC's standards are that it's okay to lie as long as you retract it a month later in a tiny 10pt foot note. On the other hand, I've personally reported a similar article inaccuracy to a News Corp writer and he replied in 10 minutes, issuing a retraction. Similarly, I reported an article inaccuracy in a Fairfax website and they retracted in less than 2 days. No reply but as long as it's corrected I don't mind. SBS is even worse, they actually have zero accountability for online operations.

alfiedotwtf 6y ago

I wonder why Josh Frysenberg didn’t mention this at his presser today. Contrast this to him repeatedly saying “digital giants must pay traditional news”... I was waiting for him to slip once and say “tradition news must pay my boss Murdoch”

cush 6y ago

Nice try, Facebook.

curryst 6y ago

I actually suspect that new news carousel product they launched might be related. If they push news articles onto the carousel, they can apply a different algorithm to the carousel. Honestly, I think that makes sense and it doesn't immediately strike me as a negative for either side. These are articles coming from trusted sources. There's no need to apply the anti-spam parts of the algorithm. News agencies get a more stable algorithm, Google gets to keep their secret sauce. There is still an advantage to the incumbents. Those carousels are usually in prime real estate. Google would hold the keys to who is in the carousel though, so they could expand it without legislative changes. I like the flexibility, though I don't love handing Google the keys to more kingdoms.

xg15 6y ago

I mean, if not tied to particular news organisations, this could actually be a sensible requirement.

silexia 6y ago
No, I've lived in the SEO world my entire life and I guarantee you that if the ranking changes were published spam would be so bad is to make search engines or social media totally unusable.
- xg15 6y ago
  Then publish the broad criteria behind the ranking and have the technical details be audited by the government behind closed doors.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    State-mandated news ranking controlled by the ruling party in secret! I'm sure nothing can go wrong with that.
    - KvanteKat 6y ago
      While I share your hesitation here, I think two points are important to keep in mind: 1. There is quite a difference between compulsory auditing (what the post you reply to refers to) and the government directly controlling industry. 2. In other industries this is quite commonplace and hasn't led to government takeover of industries (banking comes to mind. In their regulatory implementation on the Basel III accords developed in response to the 2008 financial crisis, both the UK and EU mandate government audits to ensure compliance with stress-testing and and leverage requirements; the US is also a signatory to these accords, but I am less familiar with their implementation into US law). I'm not personally a huge fan of this approach, but I don't find the argument that government oversight is a slippery slope to totalitarianism that persuasive. In my opinion, a much a stronger critique of mandatory government audits is that they are often not that effective at preventing the negative outcomes they set out to prevent but still massively increase the legal complexity of operating in (or entering) a given industry without falling afoul of the law.