27 ms·

It's the Information, Stupid

22 points by ricardo81 3y ago

gipp 3y ago
If nothing else, this post is kind of conflating 2 different things: (a) do search rankings display a bias, and (b) is a "revolving door" and close relationships leading tech companies to deliberately induce such bias. I think it's important to distinguish them, because I think (a) is obviously true, and (b) is probably mostly false. Managing bias is a wildly difficult thing to do, especially with something as complex and correlated with everything as politics. There is no such thing as an "unbiased" ranking, just like there's no such thing as "unbiased" journalism.
- ColinHayhurst 3y ago
  > There is no such thing as an "unbiased" ranking, just like there's no such thing as "unbiased" journalism. Correct. But you can use techniques, to reduce bias. And not use others, notably tracking, so eliminating what can be bias or perhaps better put influence. Besides that the bias of publishers and platforms matters less the more diversity we have. We have many news publishers for example, but in search the dominance of Google means we have little diversity.
- hnben 3y ago
  > to deliberately induce such bias I don't think big companies do such "deliberately" (in the sense that a human made the explicit decision to do it). But when there is a certain behavior that performs better in practice, then such behavior will proliferate. I say, that when the effect is known, and the company chooses not to reduce it, they are acting deliberately. The purpose of a system is what it does. I agree, that the relation between the effect and the specific behavior may not be obvious, as you pointed out ("Managing bias is a wildly difficult..."). But it seems that google does not even acknowledge, that this effect exists [1]. Beside the intention, I think the more interesting questions would be: Do the induce such a bias (deliberately or not)? Do the induce any bias at all? [1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/google-2016-election-121766/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/google-2016-...
swatcoder 3y ago
Stepping back a couple thousand feet, much of what makes us vulnerable to all the purported bias, capture, and revolving door manipulation in media and technology is our ongoing choice to seek an intermediary between ourselves and our community. Rather than directly engaging with our local (and immediate but non-local) community to learn about its needs and support its health, we've increasingly oriented ourselves almost exclusively towards abstract regional, national, and international concerns that we might only experience through some media intermediary. We invite ourselves to develop anger or pity or righteousness towards figures that enter our lives through the same channels and with the same illistration techniques of theatrical characters while barely knowing the names of our neighbors let alone the challenges that they're facing this week or this month. An simple off-ramp is to stop doing that, taking a stroll around the block to see if somebody needs help or company instead of scrolling through social media or watching TV news for the latest recounting of some faraway and universally misrepresented drama. As citizens in regional and national democracies, it's important for us to be informed about issues at those scales but becoming sufficiently informed about those issues requires no more than an occasional exercise in research when it's approaching time to make a vote or when someone we're personally connected to asks us to contribute concretely towards a cause. Removing bias and manipulation from the media and technology platforms is a Sisyphian task, but disempowering biased media and technology platforms only requires ignoring them. And once you do so, you get a lot of energy back for supporting individuals you actually know and who can support you in return.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - fcarraldo 3y ago
    “Productive” is an interesting word choice, because so many people seek out new causes, problems and politics in an attempt to be exactly that. Whether it is productive or not is up for debate, but what if the problem is the societal focus on productivity, which is an individual pursuit, rather than on community and relationships?
roenxi 3y ago
The ideal here would be if there was some sort of model to build up a big centralised generic index and then different providers do different tweaks to the rankings on top of that (kinda like DuckDuckGo, at the moment I like their operating model). However, even in the worst case, assuming everyone just uses Google and Google continues their path of political activism ... this is still an almost incomprehensible improvement over the absolute disaster that has been the mainstream media over identifiable history. It is interesting to look at something like the Trump presidency in the US and compare how effectively it would have been buried by the media in ages past vs today where they just can't shut a vocal minority up. We'll see the same effect across every other minority group too - on topics that a significant number of people care about it is nigh impossible to kill off a message and marginalise the messenger these days. Things like Assange and Snowden, Epstein, the Panama papers, or the various other political scandals that break are harder to clamp down on. The fake consensus on how great all the wars are is also under constant pressure and getting harder to maintain. It doesn't really matter if a group like Google puts their thumb on the scale, they can't control the pressure that all the free speech is bringing to bear in any sort of half-free market for search even with the benefits of incumbency.
- immibis 3y ago
  The media is actually fueling the vocal minority. If they weren't reported on, they would just be yet another fringe group.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  I think your underlying assumption is that the results of search engines are uncorrelated, and therefore aggregating them will minimize bias. But they are not. Most news in English will be written by American or British news outlets for example.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    It isn't, I explicitly rejected that idea. 2nd paragraph.
- kelseydh 3y ago
immibis 3y ago
To see an example of mass media manipulation, one only has to compare Palestine coverage in social media to Palestine coverage in online mainstream newspapers.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- janalsncm 3y ago
  Which one of those is supposed to reflect the non-biased viewpoint? Most mainstream newspapers for example basically take the US government’s stance on geopolitical matters, but the US government is anything but unbiased.
  - immibis 3y ago
    You just answered your own question.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kelseydh 3y ago
Does Mojeek use Google or Bing to get its results? Or is it separately crawling the web for search results?
- mitchbob 3y ago
  From https://www.mojeek.com/about/why-mojeek https://www.mojeek.com/about/why-mojeek : > Is Mojeek just another Bing or Google syndicate? > No. Mojeek’s web search results are 100% independent. They come from our crawler (MojeekBot) and index of the web, and are ordered using our own ranking algorithms. My question: how do they expect to make money?
  - ColinHayhurst 3y ago
    We can run contextual ads, and have API customers: https://www.mojeek.com/services/search/web-search-api/ https://www.mojeek.com/services/search/web-search-api/
    - hnben 3y ago
      how does mojeek compare to kagi in general?
      - ColinHayhurst 3y ago
        Kagi uses the Mojeek API as one of it's main sources.

22 points by ricardo81 3y ago

gipp 3y ago

If nothing else, this post is kind of conflating 2 different things: (a) do search rankings display a bias, and (b) is a "revolving door" and close relationships leading tech companies to deliberately induce such bias. I think it's important to distinguish them, because I think (a) is obviously true, and (b) is probably mostly false. Managing bias is a wildly difficult thing to do, especially with something as complex and correlated with everything as politics. There is no such thing as an "unbiased" ranking, just like there's no such thing as "unbiased" journalism.

ColinHayhurst 3y ago
> There is no such thing as an "unbiased" ranking, just like there's no such thing as "unbiased" journalism. Correct. But you can use techniques, to reduce bias. And not use others, notably tracking, so eliminating what can be bias or perhaps better put influence. Besides that the bias of publishers and platforms matters less the more diversity we have. We have many news publishers for example, but in search the dominance of Google means we have little diversity.
hnben 3y ago
> to deliberately induce such bias I don't think big companies do such "deliberately" (in the sense that a human made the explicit decision to do it). But when there is a certain behavior that performs better in practice, then such behavior will proliferate. I say, that when the effect is known, and the company chooses not to reduce it, they are acting deliberately. The purpose of a system is what it does. I agree, that the relation between the effect and the specific behavior may not be obvious, as you pointed out ("Managing bias is a wildly difficult..."). But it seems that google does not even acknowledge, that this effect exists [1]. Beside the intention, I think the more interesting questions would be: Do the induce such a bias (deliberately or not)? Do the induce any bias at all? [1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/google-2016-election-121766/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/google-2016-...

swatcoder 3y ago

Stepping back a couple thousand feet, much of what makes us vulnerable to all the purported bias, capture, and revolving door manipulation in media and technology is our ongoing choice to seek an intermediary between ourselves and our community. Rather than directly engaging with our local (and immediate but non-local) community to learn about its needs and support its health, we've increasingly oriented ourselves almost exclusively towards abstract regional, national, and international concerns that we might only experience through some media intermediary. We invite ourselves to develop anger or pity or righteousness towards figures that enter our lives through the same channels and with the same illistration techniques of theatrical characters while barely knowing the names of our neighbors let alone the challenges that they're facing this week or this month. An simple off-ramp is to stop doing that, taking a stroll around the block to see if somebody needs help or company instead of scrolling through social media or watching TV news for the latest recounting of some faraway and universally misrepresented drama. As citizens in regional and national democracies, it's important for us to be informed about issues at those scales but becoming sufficiently informed about those issues requires no more than an occasional exercise in research when it's approaching time to make a vote or when someone we're personally connected to asks us to contribute concretely towards a cause. Removing bias and manipulation from the media and technology platforms is a Sisyphian task, but disempowering biased media and technology platforms only requires ignoring them. And once you do so, you get a lot of energy back for supporting individuals you actually know and who can support you in return.

Dalewyn 3y ago
[flagged]
- fcarraldo 3y ago
  “Productive” is an interesting word choice, because so many people seek out new causes, problems and politics in an attempt to be exactly that. Whether it is productive or not is up for debate, but what if the problem is the societal focus on productivity, which is an individual pursuit, rather than on community and relationships?

roenxi 3y ago

The ideal here would be if there was some sort of model to build up a big centralised generic index and then different providers do different tweaks to the rankings on top of that (kinda like DuckDuckGo, at the moment I like their operating model). However, even in the worst case, assuming everyone just uses Google and Google continues their path of political activism ... this is still an almost incomprehensible improvement over the absolute disaster that has been the mainstream media over identifiable history. It is interesting to look at something like the Trump presidency in the US and compare how effectively it would have been buried by the media in ages past vs today where they just can't shut a vocal minority up. We'll see the same effect across every other minority group too - on topics that a significant number of people care about it is nigh impossible to kill off a message and marginalise the messenger these days. Things like Assange and Snowden, Epstein, the Panama papers, or the various other political scandals that break are harder to clamp down on. The fake consensus on how great all the wars are is also under constant pressure and getting harder to maintain. It doesn't really matter if a group like Google puts their thumb on the scale, they can't control the pressure that all the free speech is bringing to bear in any sort of half-free market for search even with the benefits of incumbency.

immibis 3y ago
The media is actually fueling the vocal minority. If they weren't reported on, they would just be yet another fringe group.
janalsncm 3y ago
I think your underlying assumption is that the results of search engines are uncorrelated, and therefore aggregating them will minimize bias. But they are not. Most news in English will be written by American or British news outlets for example.
- roenxi 3y ago
  It isn't, I explicitly rejected that idea. 2nd paragraph.
kelseydh 3y ago

immibis 3y ago

To see an example of mass media manipulation, one only has to compare Palestine coverage in social media to Palestine coverage in online mainstream newspapers.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
janalsncm 3y ago
Which one of those is supposed to reflect the non-biased viewpoint? Most mainstream newspapers for example basically take the US government’s stance on geopolitical matters, but the US government is anything but unbiased.
- immibis 3y ago
  You just answered your own question.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kelseydh 3y ago

Does Mojeek use Google or Bing to get its results? Or is it separately crawling the web for search results?

mitchbob 3y ago
From https://www.mojeek.com/about/why-mojeek https://www.mojeek.com/about/why-mojeek : > Is Mojeek just another Bing or Google syndicate? > No. Mojeek’s web search results are 100% independent. They come from our crawler (MojeekBot) and index of the web, and are ordered using our own ranking algorithms. My question: how do they expect to make money?
- ColinHayhurst 3y ago
  We can run contextual ads, and have API customers: https://www.mojeek.com/services/search/web-search-api/ https://www.mojeek.com/services/search/web-search-api/
  - hnben 3y ago
    how does mojeek compare to kagi in general?
    - ColinHayhurst 3y ago
      Kagi uses the Mojeek API as one of it's main sources.