7 ms·

Of course it doesn't make sense. I think it's just a dog whistle to the people who believe google have a guy in a room somewhere turning the "conservative searc

• tyingq 5y ago
  Not saying Google is turning down conservative search results, but they absolutely can. Using the same cycle of human raters and tweaking weights they used to push down comparison shopping sites. See http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/ http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/
  • mhh__ 5y ago
    It's the man in a room part I was emphasising. It's simultaneously massively incorrect about how software actually works, misunderstands social dynamics inside companies, and massively stokes the fire when it comes to conspiracy theories along these lines (in this case at least)
    • nullc 5y ago
      So you're saying google doesn't have infrastructure to allow a human specified list of keywords or domain names to "Twiddle" the results returned in varrious services such as news, search, and youtube for the purpose of artificial promotion or de-boosting?
    • mistermann 5y ago
      Are you claiming that you have comprehensive objective knowledge of what did and did not happen in privileged Twitter operations across time, or is this more like your opinion on the matter? And if the latter, how is it that some people's opinions "don't make sense" or "are dog whistles", but yours are epistemically flawless (assuming you actually believe them to be true, of course)?
    • lupire 5y ago
      There absolutely are explicit lists of controversial words that get weights on the models for up/down ranking or hiding content or flagging for manual review. It's also true that these lists are only a small part of what affects your fringe website or twitter accounts.
• commandlinefan 5y ago
  > turning the "conservative search results" lever It may not have been algorithmic, but it definitely happened.
  • anothernewdude 5y ago
    • dev_by_day 5y ago
      Source needed, plenty of liberal disinformation gets into search results as well and all kind of spammy SEO bullshit. Google search results have been getting shittier across the board is my intuition on this, censorship is less relevant. IMO they just stopped caring about accuracy along time ago and have shifted into "engagement" and recommendation based results instead of accurate ones. Now when you search for something and very few results come back or they think your search terms should be something else, your given a shitty recommendation instead of what you actually searched for.
    • EricE 5y ago
      [flagged]
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • akhmatova 5y ago
    You know this how? Because you were that guy?
    • mellosouls 5y ago
      A quick Google (ironically) confirms this has happened, beyond the anecdotal evidence of people (including me) who remember it on several occasions. https://www.mediaite.com/news/ex-google-engineer-says-glitch-blocking-websites-including-drudge-breitbart-could-have-revealed-a-mysterious-list/ https://www.mediaite.com/news/ex-google-engineer-says-glitch... I'm not making any comment on the theory in the article, but it has certainly happened. Edit: more context in thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31161790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31161790
• KrishnaShripad 5y ago
  Was it the algorithm or was it a "guy in a room" which/who decided to block New York Post's article on Hunter Biden's laptop scandal?
  • triyambakam 5y ago
    To those that are probably triggered by this and likely even uninformed, the "left" view has been that the laptop story was fake, but it turns out it was real.
    • Yoric 5y ago
      Oh, was this finally confirmed? I stopped following that story a long time ago.
      • KrishnaShripad 5y ago
        Yep it was!
        • lupire 5y ago
          "it" is carrying a lot of weight.
          • mardifoufs 5y ago
            What do you mean? The laptop has been proven to be hunter's, and most sources agree that the contents are real (especially the emails, which have been proven to be true). So what gives?
          • KrishnaShripad 5y ago
            I have seen the videos of Hunter nude and engaging in sexual intercourse. You are telling me that what I saw is fake? The emails are legit as well. What exactly is "not true" except for your assertion? Even the laptop has been proven to belong to him. The onus is on you to prove it isn't Hunters laptop.
• tonguez 5y ago
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • butterlesstoast 5y ago
    Ok cool
  • weakfish 5y ago
    Why?
• asabjorn 5y ago
  • jjulius 5y ago
    Got a link to some actual peer reviews of his research? I've seen him trotted out before, but at most the only data people seem to be able to produce related to his work are interviews like the one you linked, and his website (which is just request for donation after request for donation).
    • asabjorn 5y ago
      The article summarize his research. He had published many articles on the topic, and most have linked pdfs you can download for free in his bibliography here: https://drrobertepstein.com/pdf/vita.pdf https://drrobertepstein.com/pdf/vita.pdf
      • jjulius 5y ago
        A news article is not a peer review. A link to his own website and his bibliography is not a peer review. You said his work has been peer-reviewed, but when asked to provide such peer-reviews, you only cited a news article about him, and his self-published bibliography. Interestingly enough, his own bibliography doesn't even link to peer reviews of the Google/election-focused research.
        • asabjorn 5y ago
          Just his foundational study, where he discuss methodology, is cited by 470 others. Double check for “The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections” here https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=robert+epstein&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&t=1650952417089&u=%23p%3D18qw7fvwIOwJ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=robe... In his bibliography you can see many follow up papers. So you are just wrong saying his methodology and approach is the work of a lone warrior. If you are asking me to summarize his research body that’s unreasonable to show my claim that it’s peer reviewed, which it as shown above demonstrably is.
• memish 5y ago
  "Among the elite, and within Twitter specifically, there is much more inclination to ban the right. I say this as someone whose political views, if you force them onto the left-right spectrum, probably end up about 80% toward the left. E.g. I've spent millions over the past several elections supporting the Democrats. It used to be that censorship was something the right did, and free speech was something the left were in favor of. But over the last few decades, banning "problematic" ideas has become a huge component of left culture (http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html). Plus tech companies in general, and especially Twitter, lean to the left. Imagine walking around Twitter pre-Covid. You'd find plenty of openly far-left employees. How many openly far-right employees would you find? I don't think you'd find any. The combination of (a) the left's recent focus on banning heretical ideas, (b) the leftward lean of tech companies generally, and (c) the leftward lean of Twitter even among tech companies, means that right-wing speech is much more likely to get banned on Twitter than left. That's why people on the far right keep starting lame Twitter alternatives. You don't see people on the far left doing that. They don't need to. They have Twitter." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1515235822890532864 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1515235822890532864
  • bscphil 5y ago
    > That's why people on the far right keep starting lame Twitter alternatives. You don't see people on the far left doing that. They don't need to because they have cool Twitter alternatives. Like Mastodon.
    • Yoric 5y ago
      Which is also the Trump alternative, iirc. Just the far left seems to respect the license.
      • vrfvr 5y ago
        No, it's not THE trump alternative. It existed before. Open source, such that anyone can use it
• throwaway894345 5y ago
  It's not a dog whistle, it's just a simplification because it's easier to say "the algorithm" than describing the system. Moreover, this nomenclature was mainstreamed by left-wing concern about "racist algorithms", especially in law enforcement, so it's not a partisan phrase at all.
  • beepbooptheory 5y ago
    That isn't very fair though, because its very different concern isn't it? The racist algorithms critique isn't that their is a shadowy conspiracy of people pushing buttons behind the curtain, getting the results they want with conscious decisions, it is a concern about datasets mainly, as well as sociological questions about unconscious bias in testing and verifying the correctness of programs, which can cascade into social effects. It is a completely different thing, and one grounded in actual research.
    • throwaway894345 5y ago
      My point wasn’t that these theories are equal, but that “the algorithm” isn’t a right-wing dog whistle because it’s used in left-wing contexts as well.
• NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  A comparison I did from four months ago across google, ddg, yandex, and search.brave, searching for "are conservatives being silenced by big tech" https://i.imgur.com/MVlshAT.png https://i.imgur.com/MVlshAT.png You don't have to be conservative to see there's a pretty significant bias, just in the headlines. I'm a Pacific Green and I can still see it.
  • lupire 5y ago
    that's kind of a silly meta search query, not checking for bias in coverage of climate or race or religion or whatever.
    • NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
      Oh the racial bias is much easier to find, just start typing for "are white people". The suggestion list is perfectly happy with "are white p" and "are white pe", but literally vanishes as you type "peo". It does not do the same thing as you type "are black peo" (...ple more athletic, "what is a blue black person", "is wearing black bad", "how does wearing black affect you"). It's like they don't think white people are people, or don't want you talking about them as a group. If it were objective, you'd think it would try and suggest something for all queries just to be maximally useful. But it doesn't. I mean surely people have asked questions that start with "are white people" why not show the most common one, or the most controversial, or the "highest quality" whatever that is. But no, absolutely nothing. Someone clearly has their thumb on the scale. >religion Nah, this one is super obvious in the lack of an Easter doodle, but every other religion gets a shoutout on their important days. Just like the lack of one for International Men's day. Google's bias is as predictable as every other (D-CA).
  • mhh__ 5y ago
    Top result from google for me is: "Big Tech’s Conservative Censorship Inescapable and Irrefutable" from the Heritage foundation.
  • Sirened 5y ago
    I think HN, as a largely technical audience, should see the clear problem with that query. Of course search engines certain results when you use terms like "big tech". It's a term that is largely used by conservative groups in criticism of the tech industry and for little else, and so the bias there is hardly surprising. Like, say I drum up a conspiracy about how the government is putting Glupkleins in the water. Since it's not a real word, the only results that'll show up will be the conspiracy nonsense that I myself am peddling. People who "do their own research" on Glupkleins by punching it into a search engine will come away with the impression that the entire community is unified on whatever stance I want purely because nobody else knows or cares enough about it enough to write their own articles debunking it. This is the same thing here, just at a murkier scale. Nobody uses the term big tech except in this context, and so using that term to find something which disproves the context around the term is a losing battle
• briandear 5y ago
  And that hasn’t happened? Google got fined by the EU for manipulating search results. It definitely happens. https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/1248099002 https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/1248099002 https://www.vox.com/2017/6/27/15878980/europe-fine-google-antitrust-search https://www.vox.com/2017/6/27/15878980/europe-fine-google-an...
  • lupire 5y ago
    That EU fine is a totally different issue, about defining the barrier between Google Search and other Google products.
• MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago
  > I think it's just a dog whistle to the people who believe google have a guy in a room somewhere turning the "conservative search results" lever down a notch during elections. Even if that's precisely true, is it not good to be creating a more trusted space for everyone? The grievances, regardless of merit, are mostly coming from the right. If you want to create a service that caters to all you're going to have to address their concerns. If he can do that in a way that is fair to all, it sounds like a win to me.
  • nickstinemates 5y ago
    Perception is reality and right now the perception is a clear bias toward the left on Twitter. Anything that can be done to combat this fairly is a good thing.
    • etchalon 5y ago
      Everyone seems to think that accept for the left on Twitter who believe there's a clear bias towards the right.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • mhh__ 5y ago
    My whole point is that the task is sufficiently impossible (either technically or in terms of satisfying people) that aiming to do it feels like pure bluster. It will never be fair - you can interpret that sentence however you see fit.
    • MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago
      > It will never be fair But couldn't it at least be better?