
Angela Merkel: internet search engines are 'distorting perception' - azuajef
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/27/angela-merkel-internet-search-engines-are-distorting-our-perception
======
hackuser
Merkel may not say it directly, but a very serious risk is if Google, Facebook
or Twitter's leadership decides to try to influence public affairs by hiding
some things and showing others.

You may think the current leadership of those organizations wouldn't do that,
but they are human beings.

* What if a powerful business partner, such as the Chinese or Indian governments or a large company, wants search results 'made more fair and balanced' in return for their business? Hollywood studios, Bloomberg, and (IIRC) Fox already have censored themselves for the Chinese government. Advertisers' influence on the news is well-known.

* What if one of the big platform's leaders feels very strongly about an issue, feels attacked, or thinks they are doing the right thing? IIRC, Jimmy Wales used his power to alter articles in Wikipedia to suit his preferences and to cover up the changes. What if a highly critical, maybe even partly false story about Zuckerberg or his wife goes viral? Will it get treated the same as other such stories?

* What happens when a big platform's leadership changes? Maybe the new people will be highly politicized. Maybe the Koch brothers or Fox/Murdoch (or Peter Thiel?) or another politicized investor will buy in - precisely to gain that influence, as many have done before.

These platforms have the responsibilities of journalists, without the
institutional or professional norms and training, and with far more power than
any news organization ever had. Rush Limbaugh, Fox, CNN or the NY Times each
(or even together) have nothing compared to the breadth and depth of influence
of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, in the U.S. and around the world.

~~~
oh_sigh
Many tech engineers are _extremely_ principled, to the point where it would be
impossible to pull something like that off without someone finding out about
it and blowing the whistle.

~~~
mzw_mzw
Being extremely principled is exactly why many of these companies and/or their
engineers might be tempted to put their thumb on the scales. After all, this
election or this issue or this whatever is just so super important that it
would be immoral not to take a stand...

~~~
oh_sigh
Find me any significant system in a company like facebook or google where only
1 person or even only 3 or 4 can sneak something in without anyone else
finding out about it.

~~~
CaptSpify
[http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-secret-yahoo-
se...](http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-secret-yahoo-
security-2016-10)

It's not about _nobody_ finding out about it. It's about having enough people
in key positions who are OK with doing it.

~~~
oh_sigh
My point is that many of these systems have hundreds of eyes on them. If _one_
person finds out, and doesn't like it, they can blow the whistle.

------
Kurtz79
It is an interesting and valid point, but hasn't this been always the case ?

Media distort perception almost by definition, the difference is that now
there are new actors and technologies, which are mostly outside of
governments' influence, unlike traditional newspapers and television.

I'm not saying that it is an improvement upon the old status-quo, but let's
not pretend that before it was much different.

~~~
hackuser
> hasn't this been always the case ?

No media organizations in history have had anything approaching the influence
of Google and Facebook, unless you count state-controlled media in
totalitarian countries.

> the difference is that now there are new actors and technologies, which are
> mostly outside of governments' influence, unlike traditional newspapers and
> television.

I don't see how German or U.S. news media are more under government influence
than Google and Facebook.

~~~
vkou
Chomsky would strongly disagree with you - he is of the opinion that market
pressures, and more importantly, access to people of power, turns mass media
into an echo chamber, parroting narratives that do not diverge very far from
the orthodoxy.

It's a form of soft influence - nobody needs to walk into a CNN office with a
baseball bat in order to keep them on the straight-and-narrow. CNN does a good
enough job policing itself.

~~~
hackuser
It's an intriguing theory and worth bringing up, but it's also a conspiracy
theory in that it's impossible to substantiate or disprove, which is a little
too convenient.

I'm sure it happens to some degree, but perhaps Chomsky is unhappy that most
people disagree with his views and attributing it to some hidden force.

------
jerf
Broadly speaking, the search engines aren't disclosing these algorithms
because we know then people will abuse them. Disclosing them publicly may have
the paradoxical effect of introducing even more distortion into the system.

The only solution I can see is just ensuring there's more competition, and
even that isn't a perfect one.

~~~
ksk
>Broadly speaking, the search engines aren't disclosing these algorithms
because we know then people will abuse them

That sounds like an argument that would apply against open sourcing anything.

~~~
ori_b
Yes, it does. however, it carries more weight when applied to a product where
the core problem is a cat and mouse game of fighting abuse.

~~~
ksk
But again, you could also argue that there would be fewer Linux exploits if it
were closed source. And Linux exploits have definitely caused loss of revenue
for web hosting companies, and preventing that kind of abuse does carry weight
too.

With search engines, there's two things. If the core goal of a search engine
is to link to ads, (or pages with ads) then bad-actors will be incentivized
because there's money to be made. If the core goal was simply to link to
content then the incentive goes away, and so does the problem.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _If the core goal was simply to link to content then the incentive goes
> away, and so does the problem._

No, it doesn't, because the core goal of even a perfectly non-profit search
engine is to _sort_ content by relevance. That's ultimately a general-AI-
complete problem that would require your computer to read your mind in order
to solve it perfectly. So necessarily, a search engine is using some
heuristics to approximate relevance, and those heuristics are open to gaming.
Thus the cat-and-mouse game between search engines and SEO people.

There's _way_ too much content to just link to all of it.

~~~
ksk
The SEO people are only involved because google links to ads, or pages with
ads. For the sake of argument lets say google opensources their engine. One
could create a forked search portal that never linked to ads or pages with
ads. The motivation to game such an engine would be greatly reduced IMO.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I disagree. Outside the startup world, a lot of SEO is done simply to drive
traffic to you so that you have chance to convert some of it into paying
customers. All the small businesses that pay SEO companies to spam the shit
out of the Internet don't do it for ad revenue, they do it just for organic
traffic.

This motivation won't go away as long as people can use the Web to make money,
so we're stuck with the pressure to game search results.

~~~
ksk
Maybe I should have differentiated between link-farm type SEO and web
marketing. The former is more likely to cause people to abuse the system
because simply getting people to visit your website or click a link provides
monetary compensation. If you drove traffic to your website I could make a
hand-wavy free market argument that if your product wasn't good, it wouldn't
sell and you wouldn't have money to pay someone to drive traffic to your
website. I fully accept that its my own opinion.

------
jwtadvice
There's a reason the US military put a psychological operations center next to
the Googleplex.

Merkle is absolutely on the right track. It's been shown study after study and
history after history that information providers - be they news, aggregators
or indexers - have an incredible amount of power over large populations.

I'm just afraid that what Merkle means is that they could 'distort perception'
away from the perception she'd like to see people have and that this may
justify working with these companies to "undistort perception".

~~~
SilasX
>There's a reason the US military put a psychological operations center next
to the Googleplex.

Wait, what center are you referring to here?

~~~
jwtadvice
[https://goo.gl/maps/PQeunyb77Y72](https://goo.gl/maps/PQeunyb77Y72)

Trying to redetermine the Psyops Unit positioned there. Keep coming up with
Fort Bragg units, and I'm on an (ending) lunchbreak.

~~~
jwtadvice
The 63th Regional Support Command (linked above) hosts the 12th and 14th
Psychological Operations Battalions out of the 7th Psychological Operations
Group.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7th_Psychological_Operations_G...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7th_Psychological_Operations_Group)

~~~
agency
That page seems to suggest the facility has been around a half a century
longer than the Googleplex...

~~~
jwtadvice
Right, but not the Psychological Operations Battalions.

------
Cpoll
I'm reminded of the argument in 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' that the
predominant medium shapes the culture. It presents the argument as a
juxtaposition between a pre-telegraph textual culture and a modern-day visual
one: The textual culture encourages slow reasoning, contemplation and logic,
the visual culture encourages sound bytes and de-emphasizes contemplation and
reasoning; a TV show simply won't give you enough time for thought before it
moves to the next idea.

I think the point I'm trying to make is that all media has a "selection
algorithm" that distorts reality - TV and the news are great examples of this.

~~~
lordCarbonFiber
I hear that line of reasoning frequently and Im not sure it has a leg to stand
on. Telegrams by their nature are going to be terse and infrequent certainly
not a ponderous essay you can mull over. And are we seriously arguing that in
the, comparatively, "larger" world of the early 20th century where many
communities could be completely isolated from differing ideas there was some
how greater access to a wider variety of information?

My personal hypothesis (although Im not as familiar with more rigorous
investigation into the subject) is reactionary culture in the "first world" is
less to do with content accessibility and more to do with availability of time
as compared to the signal to noise ratio of our information sources. It's not
that people are becoming less informed than the past, just that we have many
more tools at our disposal to find conflicting information.

It's certainly a dangerous thing to put on the rose colored glasses and look
to the past.

~~~
coldtea
> _Telegrams by their nature are going to be terse and infrequent certainly
> not a ponderous essay you can mull over._

Which is beside the point, since the parent talks of a pre-telegraph terse
text culture, not a telegraph one.

> _And are we seriously arguing that in the, comparatively, "larger" world of
> the early 20th century where many communities could be completely isolated
> from differing ideas there was some how greater access to a wider variety of
> information?_

No, the idea is that there was deeper involvement into the available
information -- instead of always skimming it, which ends up not delving enough
into anything.

> _It 's certainly a dangerous thing to put on the rose colored glasses and
> look to the past._

It's even more dangerous to think of history as a kind of monotonic progress
across all sectors (as opposed to just the technological one).

------
m3ta
Merkel seems to be conflating the issue of search engine algorithms with
social network algorithms. Search engine algorithms do their best to find what
you are probably looking for -- it is a self-selecting filter bubble and they
are working as intended.

Additionally, there are numerous search engines, unlike Facebook and Twitter
which have effective monopolies over social media news sites.

In the case of social networks, Zuckerberg is 100% on the money on this one.
Anecdotally, I've noticed my Twitter and Facebook feeds are extremely diverse
in opinion and philosophy. The articles linked to and discussions had on each
of my home pages are wildly different than what I would find if I were only
searching through the news sites I habitually visit.

~~~
kuschku
> Search engine algorithms do their best to find what you are probably looking
> for

Actually, Google is heavily using personalized results nowadays, and
especially with the news search.

Depending on who you personally support, you might only get results confirming
your PoV on any topic you Google.

~~~
m3ta
I think Google's personalization of search is good for filtering out noise in
most day-to-day searching.

If an individual finds personalization of search to be a barrier to finding
diversified news, they could always use incognito and search among many
different search engines for the most diversified results.

Merkel's solution to the problem is to add another roadbump via government
intervention. The real solution is already in the users' hands.

~~~
hackuser
> If an individual finds personalization of search to be a barrier to finding
> diversified news, they could always use incognito and search among many
> different search engines

Few people will do those things. Most people do not understand Icognito and
won't look at the second page of search results, much less use multiple search
engines. I wonder how many are even aware of other search engines.

The reality is that the search engines' personalization algorithms determine
what users see.

~~~
m3ta
The reality is also that the quality of users' search results is directly
correlated to the skill of the searcher and consequently the quality of their
searching process.

Our two statements are not mutually exclusive.

------
lambdaphagy
Meanwhile, what this is really about:

[http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/27/angela-merkel-caught-on-
hot-m...](http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/27/angela-merkel-caught-on-hot-mic-
pressing-facebook-ceo-over-anti-immigrant-posts.html)

~~~
krona
If only I had a dime for each time a politician tried to explain their own
downfall through supposed distortions of reality, or people's inability to
swallow a particular narrative.

------
idlewords
This belief that there is an always an understandable algorithm you could look
at is an interesting one. More and more decisions are being made by systems
that are opaque even to their designers, who can only shrug and point to the
training data. Among other things, it's a very effective way to disclaim
responsibility.

------
elpocko
What is actually distorting perception is pressuring Facebook to delete free
speech without any legal basis, because the government defines it as "hate
speech". No one knows the exact definition of "hate speech" though. Political
correctness to the extreme.

She's not exactly a fan of freedom of expression.

~~~
brutos
Please do not assume that US-American ideals are universal.

Germany has a complicated history, which it has and will always struggle with.
Restricting hate speech and symbols is completely legal and also seen as an
important and good thing. The modern German constitution was built especially
to defend its democracy even against a majority hostile towards it (Artikel
20). Germany has learned its own lessons from history.

~~~
elpocko
I'm actually german and I do not agree with those laws at all. I'm not even
affected by them, I just happen to think that free and unrestricted speech is
most important and should apply to everyone and anyone, regardless of what is
being said. Private law is a different matter though.

If the speech Facebook is forced to delete is illegal, there must be criminal
investigation, by law. So it can't be illegal, which means the government is
actually suppressing freedom of speech.

> Restricting hate speech and symbols is completely legal

"But it is legal" is not exactly a helpful response to criticism of a law.

~~~
brutos
> If the speech Facebook is forced to delete is illegal, there must be
> criminal investigation, by law.

I agree with that. Facebook should not be the instance deciding what is to be
deleted or not. The german judicial system should be involved and offenders be
prosecuted within the judicial system.

------
aqp
When I want to read a contrary view, I don't subscribe to a new magazine or
type in the address of a blog I've never seen. How would I know which one to
look at? So I Google it.

I don't want the algorithms released to the public where spammers can read
them. That won't help diversity, I'll just get articles from the best
spammers.

I wonder if Merkel already knows better but thinks this statement helps her
politically somehow.

------
cheriot
>The term, coined by activist Eli Pariser, refers to the algorithms on social
media sites and search engines that show users information based on things
they have previously liked or searched for. As a result, many people who
follow news in social media are exposed to a world view similar to their own,
without being shown opposing views.

People happily segment themselves by only watching newsertainment they agree
with. A lecture series on search algorithms won't change a thing.

------
drivingmenuts
Are people really interested in seeing how the sausage is made or just
politicians?

Sure, the average slightly-more-technical-than-thou person gripes about Google
and Facebook being biased, and in some cases they're right, but ... would they
actually be capable of discerning the truth correctly?

Or would they just be more overloaded with more information?

------
h4nkoslo
Angela Merkel is extremely upset that the population management techniques she
is familiar with from East Germany are no longer effective when people are
able to search out opposing points of view. That's why she's leaning so
heavily on tech companies to implement censorship apparatuses, with the threat
of "audits" and "transparency" monitoring should they not comply.

[http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/27/angela-merkel-caught-on-
hot-m...](http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/27/angela-merkel-caught-on-hot-mic-
pressing-facebook-ceo-over-anti-immigrant-posts.html)

~~~
vetinari
The "population management techniques" are not working on East Germans,
because they are inoculated (see Saxony). Wessies do not have that experience
and cannot read between lines yet.

------
matt4077
I'm all for it, but only because I'd love to poke around in the google-brain.
For the problem of filter bubbles, I don't really see how it would actually
help?

I mean, I know Facebook will avoid showing me articles from breitbart, and
google knows that 'python' is a mostly a language for me, and not a snake.
Both companies have said that, repeatedly. Opening the algorithm would help if
there were a secret conspiracy to influence people via search ranking, but
nobody is seriously alleging that.

------
lucian1900
That would be entirely impractical.

Search engines heavily rely on obscurity to fight SEO and spam in general.

~~~
matt4077
So that argument is ok to protect the integrity of your SERPS, but people get
all red in the face when it's used for safekeeping the nuclear launch codes?

~~~
jasode
I don't believe gp was talking about _security_ by obscurity[1] and it would
be wrong to frame it that way.

Instead, it's _ranking and weighting_ by obscurity and it's a valid position
to prevent gaming by bad actors. Statistical weighting is not the same topic
as security such as closed-source cryptography.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity)

------
cromwellian
Since Google uses RankBrain now as a signal which is trained on the web
itself, how would the outputs of this be described as an algorithm? I think
politicians are imagining that search is like some step by step recipe when
it's incredibly complex now.

I don't think even Google engineers fully understand DNN results on such a
large corpus.

------
Kinnard
Same goes for other ranking sites like HN.

~~~
khattam
Correct. At least Microsoft[1] and Clinton Camp[2][3] have been known to use
it on reddit.

1\. [http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-positive-reddit-
com...](http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-positive-reddit-
comments-2013-6)

2\. [http://correctrecord.org/barrier-breakers-2016-a-project-
of-...](http://correctrecord.org/barrier-breakers-2016-a-project-of-correct-
the-record/)

3\. [https://wikileaks.org/podesta-
emails/emailid/141](https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/141)

~~~
ksk
There was no evidence of your claims in your citations.

~~~
khattam
I am not here to provide evidence for someone else. If you need evidence, look
for it.

~~~
ksk
I see, then you seem to be a person who makes wild claims and pastes random
links in their comments unrelated to anything. In that case its easier to just
ignore you. Thanks for clarifying that.

------
zizzles
If Angela Merkel had it her way with search engine algorithms, every news
source within the first 50 pages of Google.com would paint Germany in a
positive-light (especially her barbaric open-door immigration policy)

But we all know the actual reality:

[https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UoJIDgTKc6k/maxresdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UoJIDgTKc6k/maxresdefault.jpg)

This isn't about making informed decisions or having an "expanse of
information", anybody who buys that for even a split-second is under an
illusion.

------
aaron695
This is simply bullshit.

Because of the internet people are finally hearing the news without a filter.
They are no longer getting news they don't care about or don't want to hear.

So they are actually controlling the politicians as they want. Not as the old
news/system told them to.

This is what is actually scary. Having the peoples voices heard isn't the
utopia we thought it would be.

~~~
Neeek
I don't think it's as clear as you're making it out to be. Any kind of
targeted content grooming is inevitably going to form a bubble of advertising
and news that, according to the algorithm, fits your profile the best. Is that
not altering the way people perceive the world? Intentional or not, it's still
self reinforcing; is that not creating a sort of bias?

------
honkhonkpants
I take it that in Germany when I go to the news stand I hand over my money and
the shopkeeper gives me a randomly selected newspaper? Or do I still get to
distort my perception by choosing my favorite newspaper? Are the daily
editorial meetings of German newspapers subject to government oversight?

------
vkou
Of course, so are newspapers.

------
payne92
In the US, I would expect this to run afoul of the First Amendment. The
freedom of speech is protected, and you cannot be compelled to explain how you
decided to say what you said.

------
billy8988
I ask a dude standing on a corner to give me directions to a place. Now,the
dude is supposed to publish his logic as to how he arrived at those steps in
the directions?

------
alva
dupe :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12805481](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12805481)

------
elcapitan
How will google respond, send Angela Merkel a link to the Wikipedia page about
machine learning, saying "here's our algorithm"?

~~~
zzzcpan
Google is not supposed to respond. The demand is addressed towards the public,
not Google. It's kind of a form of pressure, they are showing they are ready
to escalate and are hoping later on Google would be more willing to cooperate
with the government and so on.

------
EJTH
> Merkel and the EU army of lawyers actually pulls this off

> Google and everybody else release algorithms

> SEO "experts" and other blackhats now have the holy grail to good ranking,
> defeating the purpose of said algorithm

In reality, I am not really so sure that Angela Merkel in particular would
like Google to expose how they attempt to distort reality, history or
politics...

~~~
zzzcpan
She should have demanded measures against "terrorism" and "pedophiles", like
other governments. People seem to be ok with censorship presented this way.

------
zzzcpan
So, politicians have trouble influencing people through social media, search
engines and decided to openly demand influence there. It's good, it means they
were not able to persuade them privately.

------
andrewclunn
Government surveillance programs are destroying privacy. Get your own house in
order first before we'll trust you to regulate the internet.

~~~
FrancoDiaz
Yeah, it's always the public at large, or companies that need to be
"transparent", but when it comes to the government it's "do as I say, not as I
do".

------
DominikR
Angela Merkel is right for once here, these companies can and do influence
public perception and even elections.

This is seen in the current US election where all except for Facebook quite
overtly try to suppress the conservative viewpoint.

But my big issue with what she is stating (aside from the refugee invite to
the EU) is that she wants governments to control what kind of message is put
out.

With private control and ownership we still have at least some media that
presents an alternative viewpoint to the current left leaning mainstream. (I'm
talking about big corporations)

With government control it could easily be 100% percent biased in one
direction. It's bad enough already but this would be even worse.

------
kuschku
The big question is this:

People end up more and more segmented into their filter bubbles. This has led
to extreme behaviour during the US elections already.

We really really don’t want to repeat that horrible situation with the federal
election in Germany 2017. The question is how we can prevent that.

    
    
        ________________________
    

My personal suggestion would be to require Google to only use non-personalized
ranking for all news and political articles, and to require Facebook to add
fact-checking previews to every single article posted discussing a topic on
which a fact-check exists.

So that if someone posts a Trump tweet on Facebook, in the preview it’d also
display a short fact-check from both sides of the political spectrum, and any
longer article would also always be presented together with an opposite point
of view.

The traditional media have been required to present multiple points of view on
topics, and to fact-check political statements for ages, such a solution might
be useful for the modern media, too.

    
    
        ________________________
    

But to go back to the start: If there’s one thing we don’t want to repeat,
it’s Trump, or the AfD, or any other populists propelled to power through
misinformation and propaganda.

~~~
sidlls
Perhaps unintentional, but your examples are extremely biased.

More than one politician has distorted reality and played fast and loose (to
be charitable) with facts.

Moreover, who checks the fact checkers? Politifact and other sites aren't
unbiased themselves, after all, and we certainly have seen that the news media
in America are easily manipulated (c.f. the tons of free media Trump gets and
the collusion explicit in email dumps from the DNC hack).

We don't have high quality, (mostly) neutral fact checkers in this country.
That's a big contributing factor to the state of our current election, where
the highest office is contested by a bigoted, stupid clown and a corrupt,
deceitful and likely criminal woman, both of whom are likely to engage in
terrible and aggressive foreign wars, while just about anything down-ticket of
these two is ignored unless it intersects with the Presidential race or
involves some completely irrelevant and salacious sex scandal.

~~~
hackuser
> We don't have high quality, (mostly) neutral fact checkers in this country.

I disagree. The leading news sources, including the NY Times, Washington Post,
and others, do a very good job. In case you think the Times is biased,
remember that they broke the Clinton email server story.

~~~
sidlls
One data point isn't sufficient to make your case, in my view. And the bias
isn't on a Dem vs. Rep axis but rather on an axis of class, especially as
regards access to socially, politically and financially well connected Elites.

~~~
hackuser
Do you have some data?

