
Google workers discussed tweaking search after travel ban - tysone
https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-workers-discussed-tweaking-search-function-to-counter-travel-ban-1537488472
======
untog
This is an absurdly inaccurate headline. From the article:

> The email traffic, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, shows that employees
> proposed ways to “leverage” search functions and take steps to counter what
> they considered to be “islamophobic, algorithmically biased results from
> search terms ‘Islam’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Iran’, etc.” and “prejudiced,
> algorithmically biased search results from search terms ‘Mexico’,
> ‘Hispanic’, ‘Latino’, etc.”

So, employees saw that the existing algorithm was inappropriately prioritising
prejudiced results, and discussed tweaking the algorithm accordingly. I don't
see what's controversial about that, unless your understanding of Google is so
basic that you really think results are calculated by a magic computer program
in the sky. It's always been programmed by humans, within various parameters.
It isn't objective and it never has been.

Now, is it worth discussing the enormous power Google has over people's
perceptions as a result of their market dominance? Absolutely. But using a
headline like that just plays into conspiracy theory.

~~~
127
The end result still remains: introducing bias.

~~~
untog
Google is nothing but a collection of biases. Even in the early days, PageRank
meant that Google was biased towards sites that get linked to more than
others. That was a value judgement they made about what best served their
customers. This is no different.

~~~
jlawson
This is a dangerous general-purpose justification which allows mega-
corporations to manipulate global information flow in any way they like.

Now Google leadership doesn't just get to be wealthy, they get to manipulate
how everyone else sees the world, with no limits or accountability, because
hey everything is biased right?

It may sound good because they agree with you on this particular issue.

But this justification applies to any other government or corporation who can
manage to seize the reins of technological power. You're making a memetic
weapon that, soon, will be turned against you.

No. Neutrality is a real thing and it should be upheld as a serious goal and
principle. Especially when we're taking about a group with such insane amounts
of unjustified and undemocratic control over other people. We need to do
everything we can culturally to make that influence less unequal.

~~~
jtmcmc
I think this is a weird view of how bias works. statistical models are
imperfect models and are always going to have lots of bias or variance. We
typically want to bias models using domain expertise or other external
factors.

This is like being mad at a company for using L1 regularization

~~~
_dps
These are different uses of the word "bias". In the statistical sense there is
an objectively true right answer and "bias" refers to the difference between a
model's average answer and the average true answer. It has little to do with
the lay use of the word to mean the application of an inappropriate subjective
value judgement in a situation with no one true answer (unless you take an
extremely anthropomorphic view of statistical formulas).

------
kstenerud
It's bad enough to foster an echo chamber to your personal biases, as is
currently standard operating procedure. But to actively engage in hidden
manipulation of public views strikes at the very heart of democracy. Democracy
only works because of the wisdom of crowds [1], and the wisdom of crowds only
works if each participant has independent knowledge. The more people rely upon
a shared source of knowledge and truth, the less accurate their collective
wisdom becomes.

Practically, this means that anyone with wide enough influence can directly
affect democratic outcomes, which defeats the entire purpose, and the level of
influence possible these days is unprecedented.

So regardless of what actually did or did not happen, the fact that a few
companies ARE in a position to wield this kind of influential power should
strike fear into the heart of every free citizen of every democratic nation.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-James-
Surowiecki/dp/038...](https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-James-
Surowiecki/dp/0385721706)

~~~
jlebar
> to actively engage in hidden manipulation of public views strikes at the
> very heart of democracy.

Indeed, Fox News, Britebart, and friends are terrifying.

~~~
parthdesai
Let's be honest, all media organizations are biased. Be it Fox News,
Britebart, or CNN. Heck even r/politics is biased af.

~~~
komali2
/r/politics is a subforum on a news aggregator. While media organizations
definitely buy upvotes, as of yet there's no actual evidence of Reddit itself
artificially promoting/demoting content _within a subreddit_

(Tweaking the algorithm to get bot-propogated t_d content off the front page
doesn't count, it's a different subforum)

Brietbart is an entirely different category than Fox news. It will publish
straight up conspiracy theories with no evidence. I'm talking "moon landing
didn't happen" level shit. It's an insult to tabloids, to call it a tabloids.

Fox News is so comically biased to compare it to CNN is dishonest. CNN has
liberal bias, sure, but it doesnt sink to the level of claiming Hillary
Clinton had Seth rich assassinated
([https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/may/23...](https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/may/23/newt-
gingrich/claim-slain-dnc-staffer-seth-rich-gave-emails-wiki/)) or completely
makes shit up about supreme court candidates whole-cloth
([https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2016/mar/18...](https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2016/mar/18/bill-
oreilly/bill-oreilly-wrongly-says-merrick-garland-voted-ba/)).

Sure, they're gonna spend a lot of airtime on the "kavanaugh allegedly raped a
girl in high school" story, or when the president says some messed up ish
they're gonna go ahead and play that clip again and again, but that is a far
cry from outright lying, which fox news does again and again, and which
Breitbart does every breath.

~~~
spaginal
Unfortunately this is a false assessment. CNN has been caught plenty of times
lying about stories and making up news, many examples on Youtube can bear this
out, as well as recent stories they’ve had to retract. I’m no fan of Fox News,
but CNN’s hands are not clean, they are in fact one of the worst offenders out
there.

~~~
komali2
CNN doesn't lie at anywhere near the level fox news does. Please take a look
at a hard comparison of the times both organizations have been caught lying.

[https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/tv/fox/](https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/tv/fox/)

[https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/tv/cnn/](https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/tv/cnn/)

~~~
simula67
I don't think this is proof that Fox lies more than CNN unless you can prove
this is the comprehensive list of all statements made on both networks.

Read about the leftward movement of Politifact here :
[https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/politifact/](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/politifact/)

This does not mean Politifact cannot be trusted, but it potentually makes
analysis like yours less accurate

~~~
komali2
Ah, I disagree. You've engaged in blanket ad hominem against politifact
without analysing the contents of the two articles themselves.

I believe this is proof that CNN lies less than Fox.

To convince me otherwise, you'd need to put the work in that politifact has
done here, and compile your own list of statements, analyzed for truthfulness,
from each organization.

My email is in my profile if you ever do this work. I'm happy to be convinced.

------
paultopia
How many employees does Google have?

What precisely are a few emails from employees supposed to show about the
company? I mean, seriously WSJ. What if some employees sent around emails
saying they approved of cannibalism, would people be like "Google is about to
start eating humans!"

~~~
mc32
Imagine there was an email thread on how to dampen search results for Chinese
ops in Tibet or Xinjiang because to many staff from China this was offensive,
would that just be swept aside? Oh, just a few employees and it never went
into production...

~~~
komali2
Wait, I thought Google will comply with Chinese censorship rules? Isn't that
what "Phoenix" was all about?

~~~
mc32
That’s different. That’s about tailoring results to conform with Chinese
authorities in order to operate in China.

My hypothetical example was random employees at the MTV campus emailing ideas
to influence US SERPs to propagate their PoV on a political issue they have an
interest in.

------
dooglius
I get the impression that this was just chatter on some internal mailing list,
not anything that was seriously considered by Google management. Aside from
the meta-questions of "Who gave the WSJ these emails and why?" this seems like
a non-story.

------
neuronexmachina
I remember there was some news at the time about Googlers rallying against the
Muslim ban, in part because it directly impacted a couple hundred Googlers:

[https://www.recode.net/2017/1/30/14446690/google-rallying-
se...](https://www.recode.net/2017/1/30/14446690/google-rallying-sergey-brin-
trump-immigration-ban)

[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/williamalden/nearly-200...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/williamalden/nearly-200-google-
employees-are-affected-by-trumps-immigrati)

~~~
komali2
Yea I don't find it surprising at all that any company with technical
employees was opposed to the Muslim ban, I specifically remember a bunch of
high profile cases of engineers stuck after making the "mistake" of visiting
home.

H1b and other travel is still a mess. My old recruiter friends back in Texas
are just about as conservative as possible but they're still pissed off about
all the random executive orders surrounding immigration, it's making their
jobs a lot harder.

~~~
kart23
I was travelling at the time of the ban. Thankfully I wasn't affected by it,
but the laptop ban was even more boneheaded. No electronics larger than a
cellphone. What does that even mean? Had to go thru another security check
right at the gate. Everyone was annoyed, especially the airline staff. Got
lucky because I had a check in and I heard about it beforehand. But what if I
only had a carry on? My laptop would still be stuck in dubai.

------
agildehaus
Sounds like a couple employees wanted to add banner links to pro-immigration
charities when someone searched for immigration-related terms, similar to
donation links they add when a natural disaster hits. This is incredibly far
from modifying the search algorithm.

Hard to even say what this means because WSJ is sitting on the actual email
chain so they can editorialize it in any way they please.

------
redm
“Google has never manipulated its search results or modified any of its
products to promote a particular political ideology." \-- "Our processes and
policies would not have allowed for any manipulation of search results to
promote political ideologies.”

This is a carefully worded statement, because the fact is, Google does
manipulate search results for its business purposes. I expect most companies
to follow their corporate ethos and justify change as its expedient for their
business. In Google's case, they may even feel a change is a moral imperative,
without realizing how subjective that is. I think what people need to
recognize is, that Google isn't above these problems, buyer beware.

------
pfschell
It's time to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Either
internet companies can exert editorial control like this, or they can be free
of the consequences of the libel, criminal threats, and intellectual property
crimes they are party to. But not both.

~~~
ChrisSD
Note that they didn't exert any control. It was discussed between colleagues.
The email chain contained many warnings not to do this. Ultimately nothing
came of it.

~~~
ww520
Is that considered conspiracy?

~~~
ChrisSD
No. Why would it be? At an absolute minimum conspiracy requires some
agreement. Which they didn't have here. This also seems to have been an open
discussion so there was no secrecy amongst those who did agree.

~~~
ww520
IANAL, according to Section 1(1) in [1] for UK, the threshold is for two
persons to agree to have the law applied to them. It doesn't require all to
agree. And from 1(1)(b), it's not necessarily for the conspired act to be
carried out under some circumstance.

For U.S. [2], the threshold for conspiracy against the U.S. government is
similar or lower. Item (2) "they interfere or obstruct legitimate Government
activity" sounds a lot like what the Google employees were doing.

[1]
[https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1977/45/section/1](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1977/45/section/1)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_against_the_United_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_against_the_United_States)

------
DanCarvajal
Hmmm, a banner with a call to action does not seem out of the question on
issues like this, tweaking the results not so much.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Where does one have a guarantee against unbiased internet search results?

------
utopcell
I see a lot of coordinated attacks against Google right before the elections.

------
goblekitepe
"Prejudice" and "Hate Speech" are necessarily subject to interpretation.
Whoever gets to decide what is and isn't prejudice will necessarily inject
their personal biases, political or otherwise, into the decision. Recognition
of this during the Enlightenment fueled the political philosophy behind the
First Amendment in the American Constitution.

It is a dangerous day when a monopolistic corporation like Google can casually
insert their own biases into search results, because they feel they know best.

Is Google a private company, and do private companies have the freedom to do
what they want? Generally yes, but in the case of companies like Google that
act as the gatekeepers of information to billions of people, the values of
free speech AND free thought must supercede the the freedom of private
Enterprise.

------
emmelaich
Maybe it's time to have a _politically_ safe search. I'm not interested in
racist results. If I want them I'm pretty sure I'll know how to find them.

------
trumped
Only Google doesn't want to admit that the search results are rigged and/or
biased...

------
tgsovlerkhgsel
Paywalled, does someone have a copy?

~~~
jey
Just prepend "outline.com/" to the URL:
[https://outline.com/https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-
work...](https://outline.com/https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-workers-
discussed-tweaking-search-function-to-counter-travel-ban-1537488472)

(For now. Why does this work, anyway?)

~~~
rayvy
+1 This is so funny
"[https://outline.com/[url]"](https://outline.com/\[url\]")

I'm guessing outline.com has a subscription to WSJ, and can therefore share
the content?

~~~
sdinsn
Ha, no that's not the reason.

------
jchrisa
Too bad they weren't able to follow through.

------
propman
Regardless of whether this is a true story or not, Google needs to be
regulated. I firmly believe that now. What’s stoppimg them from tweaking
algorithms 2 days before an election? If I search Trump and see 80 women
accusing him of sexual assault as the first thing popping up or his $3B net
worth and great business deals is a huge difference in results. I know it’s
not that simple at all but just making a general point how much power that is.

One counter example, every atttempt at censorship and media bias works
oppositely. Look at yahoo article content, tilts quite a bit left and the
comments are significantly right wing. Makes them more distrustful of true
news.

