
Google rewards reputable reporting, not left-wing politics - nabla9
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/06/08/google-rewards-reputable-reporting-not-left-wing-politics
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repolfx
My own eyes disagree. I read a lot of news. I read left wing news like the
guardian, I read news that claims to be neutral but isn't like the NYT or BBC,
I read right wing news like the Telegraph and Breitbart. I can't honestly say
any are more reputable than the others - all of them tend to publish things
that I fact check personally and find to be false.

But oddly enough, Google's mobile recommendations for me are utterly dominated
by the Guardian. They push Guardian stories on me multiple times per day. Know
which site never appears? Breitbart. It's clearly blacklisted.

I don't find them to vary in quality or "hateyness", at least for the British
editions. The Guardian hates white men, Breitbart pushes a lot of stories
about illegal immigration and variants (e.g. asylum seekers lying about their
age and origin). They both have their pet hates and slanted views.

But Google only thinks I should be reading the article that pushes globalism,
the EU, unlimited migration, Clinton and social justice politics.

Unbiased, hah. To believe that you'd have to be blind.

~~~
RickJWagner
I agree.

For my uses, I read 'RealClearPolitics' daily. It contains outrageous
headlines from left and right-- the reader is left to sort out which to read,
and what to believe.

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rbanffy
Did we get to the point we are flagging articles from the Economist?

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mieses
Yes, we got to the point that we question the orthodoxy.

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DuskStar
Wouldn't this also be the result you'd expect if the fact checking orgs in
question are also biased towards the left? All this really shows is that IF
fact checking orgs are unbiased, Google is unbiased.

And I'm sure there are a lot of people on the right who would claim that fact
checkers are very much not unbiased. (Not in the "blatant falsehood" sense of
things, but in the "this is iffy but we'll give benefit of the doubt to people
on the left but not the right" sense) An example of this would be the recent
"did Trump call Meghan Markle nasty" series - if you give Trump the benefit of
the doubt then it's easy to argue that he called Markle's _comments_ nasty,
but you're not going to see that on politifact [0].

Everything is relative, nothing is absolute. (And I really wish that fact
checking sites were more charitable towards _everyone_ )

0: [https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/article/2019/jun/02...](https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-
meter/article/2019/jun/02/context-donald-trumps-nasty-comment-about-meghan-m/)

~~~
cromwellian
I think that’s being overly charitable given what he’s said in the past and
that he has a penchant for sledgehammer as hominem attacks and ridicule
against people who criticize him as opposed to being precise in his
counterpunches.

Taken in context, the sheer volume of his falsehoods weighs against his
credibility in terms of giving him the benefit of the doubt.

~~~
DuskStar
Perhaps, but I'd still like politifact or snopes or whomever to fact check
everyone without regard to their past, even if that includes people like David
Duke or Richard Spencer. The mere appearance of bias makes it easier for them
to point at the rest of the fact-checking org and say "now that you know that
the fact checkers lie, let me tell you what really happened in the
'Holocaust'", and that's not something most people want to enable.

And since when are 'facts' dependent on the person who said them? Perhaps if
they do depend on such, those 'facts' shouldn't be included in the purview of
a fact-checking org.

~~~
cromwellian
But your own article talks about facts. Speculating about what he actually
meant as opposed to what he actually said is outside the realm of facts.

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CapitalistCartr
The potential, unintended bias of algorithms need constant oversight such as
this. We are obviously going to use them more and more, and for more important
decisions.

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skilled
Google loves to reward bullshit platforms like Express and The Daily Mail. It
is an absolute disgrace that those two tabloids exist as promoted search
results.

~~~
M2Ys4U
Though a recent change has almost halved the Daily Mail's search traffic,
which is good news.

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infiniteseeker
The Economist itself has a left wing bias.

~~~
cromwellian
Funny, a lot of left wingers would say Economist has a neo-liberal (right
wing) bias. It seems the Overton window has shifted the right so far to the
extreme that someone like Milton Friedman would probably be considered left
wing.

~~~
baud147258
Perhaps they have different bias, depending on the subject? (I don't know, I
haven't opened one since leaving school)

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dagw
I think they'd argue that they have a consistently liberal "bias" in all
subjects, it's just they don't map cleanly onto modern left-right politics.
For example they favor deregulation and privatization which are traditional
"right wing" stances, while also favoring gay marriage and drug legalization
which is an issues that has recently been more championed by the left. The
Economist would argue that their stance in both issues is "liberal" thus there
being no contradiction.

~~~
baud147258
Thank you.

From the two comments above, I guessed it was something like this

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kortilla
Those two categories aren’t mutually exclusive. “Reputable reporting” outlets
are usually made up of a large majority of reporters with left-wing biases
because the majority of journalists have left-wing biases.

The NYTimes obviously has a left-wing bias but they are still considered
reputable.

~~~
twic
As Stephen Colbert observed, reality has a well-known liberal bias.

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AmericanBlarney
Ehhh... Google Finance's news section has become a total crap fest, lately
featuring user generated sales pitches from SeekingAlpha and some shady
looking crypto currency sites. Seems less political them desperate (not that
most of the big financial sites have paywalls), but it sure doesn't seem to
prioritize reputable reporting.

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tootahe45
To decide for yourself just watch the Google leadership meeting which happened
after the election, where some of them even started sulking about the results.
"Google after the election" renders no results on Youtube unsurprisingly, even
though it was a fairly popular video.

~~~
Angostura
The question is whether personal feelings were translated into algorithmic
bias. The simple fact that that some employees were upset by a result doesn't
necessarily mean they took some underhand action.

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andrenth
Don’t we talk here all the time about how algorithms can be biased (even
racist) due to programmers being biased in ways they may not even be aware of?

Then we must consider the possibility of bias in this case too.

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threatofrain
People talk about how your data’s perspective is biased, and how algorithms
can lead to cyclic effects. Or in what manner does someone exercise racial
bias in their data model?

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andrenth
Surely the same can happen for politics? Especially when sources of data are
preemptively blacklisted?

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headsoup
I'm pretty sure there's a wide range of reporting that different people call
'reputable,' so who is the authority on reputable? Is it the centrist?

Google rewards whichever ad purchaser pays them.

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lostmymind66
How is doing no research besides what you can find on a tweet, and heavily
biasing an article towards one way considered 'reputable reporting'?

I just can't believe that all right-leaning articles are false and all left-
leaning articles are reputable.

~~~
gjm11
Just as well no one is saying that all right-leaning articles are false or
that all left-leaning articles are reputable, then.

Your first paragraph sounds as if it's intended as a callout of some specific
bit of sloppy reporting, but you haven't said what. Would you care to?

