
Trump attacks 'left-wing' Google search results - SmkyMt
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45331210
======
alphabettsy
Fox News features prominently, but other than stoking the fire why would
anyone be surprised that a global news outlet like CNN features prominently?

Even though I don’t personally watch CNN it’s usually the first site I visit
when I hear some major event has happened globally because I can usually be
certain they will have it covered.

One thing I find bizarre about FoxNews.com is how prominently they tend to
feature stories that would normally only be shared on Facebook, like crazy cat
stories or what this cute animal did.

------
VincentEvans
This immediately comes to mind as relevant on multiple levels.

[https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/old-man-yells-at-
cloud](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/old-man-yells-at-cloud)

But this old man being the President, I am honestly concerned about an effort
being made to "balance viewpoints" of Google results in a similar way to how
media tries to present both sides of the given argument as deserving equal
consideration, which leads to some interesting results when one side is
represented by flat-earthers.

~~~
tzs
I heard a discussion on NPR about this. One of their prominent hosts (I forget
who) said that they had decided not to run a lot of the newsworthy but
negative things they had on Trump during the campaigns, because Rubio, Kasich,
Cruz, and the rest did not generate anywhere near as many negative things (and
same for Clinton during the general election campaign).

If they just ran all the newsworthy items on all the candidates, they might
appear to be biased against Trump. So, to avoid the _appearance_ of bias
against Trump, they ended up without realizing it introducing _actual_ bias in
favor of him.

------
throwaway5752
It's disgraceful, obviously, but it's an entirely predictable pattern on some
level. He embarrassed himself and was forced to take an action he didn't want
with lowering the flags for his adversary, McCain. He's now lashing out to
distract people and to raise his own self-esteem.

The idea that there is a left/right divide in Google search results probably
says more about differences in today's American left and the right, rather
than anything about Google.

------
ur-whale
Whatever trump may say, no one knows what Google's algorithm do because there
is basically no way to check they haven't been gamed.

I'd even bet that most of the folks who work there don't have a clue
themselves.

[Edit] And the fact that Google is a leftist company with strong ties to the
democrats is a basic fact of life. It's therefore easy - or at the very least
tempting - to add two and two.

~~~
dazc
It's quite easy to add a penalty to some sites and, maybe, whitelist others
though?

Politics aside, it's hardly the first time that search neutrality has been
questioned?

~~~
burgermanjensen
I don't think there is any deep critique of the way Google operates here. If
the majority of the "MSM" is against Trump then, wow, look at that, there's a
lot of articles that critique him. Surprise surprise. Trump is whining that
some people don't like him, as usual.

~~~
ibeckermayer
Google is one of the main data pathways in our society and the public has
literally no idea what algorithms they're using to curate content. So, as per
usual, Trump is the only politician touching on foundational social issues in
his own dumb, self-serving way, while partisan hacks in the media completely
miss the point and try to make it out like Trump is the crank.

------
endymi0n
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance)

~~~
Yoric
Very much what I had in mind.

Climate skepticism was largely created by media attempting to balance out the
point of view of nearly-everybody-including-everybody-who-had-studied-the-
topic with that of that-guy-over-there-who-thinks-otherwise.

Showing the other point of view is generally good. Skewing the perspective to
show things as balanced isn't.

~~~
amaccuish
I just wanted to thank you two for pointing me in the direction of the
concept. :)

------
dev_north_east
Google don't provide neutral search results. Everyone knows that.

~~~
akmiller
Neutral search results is not possible!

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
True, but what is meant by "neutral"here is "search results that haven't been
tampered with from PC POV". Google has been heavily criticized for NOT messing
up with the results, so they finally did. Whatever they do, they'll never make
everybody happy.

[https://www.distractify.com/trending/2018/05/14/16jlb1/googl...](https://www.distractify.com/trending/2018/05/14/16jlb1/google-
searches-that-show-racism-embedded-in-the-algorithm)

------
amelius
Perhaps he got caught in someone else's filter bubble.

------
bovermyer
I had to laugh when I heard this.

I had to, because if I didn't laugh, I would cry.

------
kangnkodos
Of the 100 largest newspapers in America, 57 endorsed Clinton, and just 2
endorsed Trump.

Google search results rely heavily on those top 100 largest newspapers.

------
cascom
I believe this is the original news story that trump picked up on

[https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-search-results-show-
perv...](https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-search-results-show-pervasive-
anti-trump-anti-conservative-bias/)

------
dsfyu404ed
I'd be surprised if he wasn't seeing more left leaning results from his
presumably DC area IP than from his Florida IP. Google tries to make results
somewhat location based and the DC area leans lefter than Florida with the
exception of a few particular cities.

~~~
malandrew
If this is true, this has the deleterious impact of making red areas redder
and blue areas bluer and increasing the disagreement and conflict between red
and blue. This is one of the huge problems with Facebook.

------
kylnew
He probably spends so much time looking at negative press on him that his own
search results are skewed as such. I.e. for a guy who constantly says all
these companies like CNN and NYtimes are failing and fake news he seems to
always up to date on what they are saying

------
jlkj90809
Even if someone believes Google is biased, they are free to use another news
aggregation service. However the President publicly stating that they might be
breaking the law seems to me an clear example of a chilling effect.

------
paulddraper
Why was this flagged?

Neither
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858906](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858906)
nor
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17859353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17859353)
were flagged.

------
ape4
It takes in many factors (as we know). If it has profile of Trump it would
have him as a senior citizen who prefers right-wing media.

------
brickmort
He's right.

~~~
olavk
How do you know?

~~~
LyndsySimon
How do you know he's not?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying he is or he isn't - my concern is that I
don't see a way to prove or disprove either position.

Meanwhile, the entire firearms community is having trouble being demonetized,
suppressed, and outright banned from YouTube - a Google product, obviously -
for content that is legal and in most cases quite uncontroversial.

With no way of knowing for sure if Google is manipulating News rankings and
firm evidence that they are using their power to harass and deplatform based
on politically-charged issues elsewhere, why would you trust that they're not?

~~~
olavk
There is a big difference between "he is right" and "You can't prove he is
wrong". Is there _any_ evidence he is right?

~~~
LyndsySimon
That's what I'm trying to say - the problem is that I don't see any way to
disprove either assertion: "Google is manipulating News" or "Google is not
manipulating News"

There is evidence that Google has acted in a partisan† way in other areas,
though, which is what makes the assertion worthy of consideration.

†: "partisan" might not be the best word here. "Ideologically-driven" might be
better. Google has acted in its capacity as a content host to suppress content
that it finds inappropriate, even though that content was benign. Example:
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-21/youtube-b...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-21/youtube-
bans-firearm-sales-and-how-to-videos-prompting-backlash)

~~~
cannonedhamster
This right here is called "Muddying the waters" you're making an assertion
without proof but claiming that the lack between what we know and what we
don't know is evidence enough that we should believe the accusation without
proof. That's plainly absurd.

------
misiti3780
I had a conversation with family member yesterday who also took this story and
ran with it. I tried to explain to them that the google algorithm is a giant,
multi billion parameter organism that is changing in real-time as it continues
to spider new content and update it's weights as new content is posted on the
internet. The training takes place across multiple countries, timezones, and
data centers. I think it is safe to say it would be impossible for a team of
evil liberals scientist working at google to surreptitiously bias the
algorithm to only yeild liberal results, and penalize conservative content at
the same time. The person said I was wrong (they have no experience in
CS/Stats/ML, etc). I am not sure where we go from here, it seems like a nice
example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

~~~
repolfx
What makes you think your family member is wrong?

I used to work for Google, worked there for years. I am very familiar with how
it works internally.

For standard web search the algorithms are indeed very complex and the core
PageRank concept is pretty democratic. It wouldn't be easy to bias it
politically without it being widely known to employees.

But Trump isn't talking about generic web search results. He's talking about
news.

News is treated specially by Google. News-relevant queries trigger the Google
News oneboxes (well, universal search mixins). Google News does _not_ use
PageRank to rank news sources. News sources are whitelisted and I believe it's
not documented anywhere how it decides how to rank stories.

A simple test to decide whether News is biased or not is to look at its front
page and see how often stories from Breitbart show up. Like it or not,
Breitbart is (or appears to be) a popular and prolific news site:

[https://media.breitbart.com/media/2016/06/newswhip-may-
june-...](https://media.breitbart.com/media/2016/06/newswhip-may-june-
breitbart-640x480.jpg)

I have never, not once, seen News rank any story from Breitbart anywhere.

I just search [trump] on News. Here are the story sources it selected, in
order:

The Guardian, CNN, CNN, WashPo, CNN, CNN, The Guardian, CNN, CNN, Business
Insider, CNN, Fox News, NBCNews, Fox News, New York Times, the Independent,
CNN, WashPo, CNN, New York Times.

Do you think that it's at least understandable, why a family member who
observes such result lists might conclude that Google staff have an agenda?
And do you agree that explaining this conclusion as stupidity (the Dunning-
Kruger effect) is unnecessary given that neither you nor anyone else outside
of a small team at Google actually knows what their news ranking algorithm is?

~~~
misiti3780
maybe its not page rank, but as far as i can tell it is public information:
[https://www2007.org/papers/paper570.pdf](https://www2007.org/papers/paper570.pdf).
also, my family member was not talking about the news site, they were talking
about google searches themselves being biased, as well as google search
autocomplete being baised in favor a clinton (see this
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcvfNExG8kw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcvfNExG8kw))

~~~
repolfx
That paper is talking about user recommendations, not ranking.

Your family member was without a doubt talking about Google News even if they
weren't aware of it because results from News are mixed in to generic search
results. If you search [trump] on web search then the top part of the page is
dedicated entirely to results that come from News, not generic web search.

The idea that Google News is unbiased is unsustainable, simply because humans
whitelist news sources. It's not like web search where basically any web page
can appear at any location automatically. There is no algorithm for deciding
if a website is "news" or not. It's a human judgement.

Google employees have literally cried in company meetings when Trump was
elected, only someone very naive would believe these people are going to be
neutral about what sources they allow and how they decide which sources are
more authoritative than others. Do you believe it's a coincidence that
Breitbart never ranks, despite having an Alexa rank essentially the same as
the Washington Post, given how Google employees are reported to have acted
lately?

Your knowledge of maths is I'm afraid not very relevant to this topic because
mathematics is simply a tool. Your family member is evaluating humans and
their likely actions, not algorithms, and that is the correct thing to do
because it's ultimately humans that control the algorithms. Google employees
are perfectly capable of biasing its results and then lying about it to the
public, without even being aware that they're doing it.

~~~
misiti3780
so your stance is 1) neither of us know if this is the case, (and thus this
convo is pointless) or 2)i am universally wrong and google is biasing the new
results ?

~~~
repolfx
The conversation isn't pointless! It started with you stating your belief that
your family member is stupid (Dunning-Kruger effect) and that your knowledge
of maths means you "know" that Google's results are unbiased.

Well, honestly that concerned me because family relations are quite important.
If the outcome of this conversation is you realise neither of you two _know
for sure_ then perhaps your view of your family member will go back to what it
was, or even you may take their concerns more seriously and listen to them
more closely. That would be a healthier family! Certainly, knowing maths is
irrelevant to the debate you would have with them because maths has nothing to
do with whether Google News is biased or not.

~~~
misiti3780
i stand by my original statement that, mainly that

1) i was not talking about google news, i was talking about google search
results

2) (1) uses page rank which you need to understand basic linear algebra to
understand the paper (aka maths)

3) its not possible for a team of internal engineers to bias it nor would it
be in googles interest to do it

