
Trump Accuses Google of Burying Conservative News in Search Results - couchand
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/business/media/trump-google.html
======
Dwolb
Yikes this is a complex topic.

There’s a couple of things at play:

Google does control (unbiased or biased) a significant portion of what
internet users see

This control has the potential to sway public opinion, direct discourse, and
economically make or break businesses (even those that extend beyond media)

Personally I believe gigantic internet companies like Google require more
regulation because they can’t be trusted to act responsibly indefinitely.

However I do not believe the current administration has shown thoughtfulness
and care for the republic in a way that I would trust them to enact this
regulation.

~~~
jocs_
Google has created ridiculous conditions where there is a massive arms race to
be on that first result page on any give subject.

The truth is Google results should not exist for anything and everthing.
Especially ambiguous subjects. Who does anyone think wins these arms races
that are being set up?

It is as retarded as having the supreme court pumping out decisions in real
time. Why does that not happen? The tech exists. The bench can sit on twitter
and keep pumping out their mid process thoughts on anything and everything.
Imagine if they did that trying to constantly optimize for more like and
follower counts rather than optimizing for outcomes that serve justice.

The current architecture to address ambiguity is pure shit. Where people need
to be pushed into slow deliberate thinking or where they need to be signaled
they have a second graders understanding on a subject, Google is playing a
huge role in signalling the opposite.

It's doing a whole lot of unintended evil by setting up these arms races
around ambiguous issues.

~~~
lotu
Are you literally suggesting that for some of the most important queries that
people make Google should just return no results because it is too hard to
decide who is on top?

~~~
fivefive55
I think he was. Honestly the comment doesn't make much sense when you think
about it for a second. He seems to think having ready access to information
you want to find is a bad thing.

~~~
Fjolsvith
This sounds like something the Chinese government would espouse.

------
lovehashbrowns
Isn't this the same administration/party that is desperate to get rid of Net
Neutrality so that the government isn't meddling in private business? But then
there's this:

> “This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!”

Wonder what makes Google different/worse from an ISP.

------
yostrovs
Try searching for "American inventors" or "American scientists" on Google and
tell me if you notice anything odd.

~~~
yongjik
It has a plausible explanation. People searching for Oppenheimer or Gell-Mann
don't type "American scientists", they just type "Oppenheimer" and "Gell-
Mann". And a website talking about Oppenheimer doesn't spend much time about
his being American---after all, that might be the least interesting fact about
Oppenheimer's life.

OTOH, I'll bet there are websites that talk about, say, "George Washington
Carver, an _American scientist_ you have never heard about."

That said, the quality of curation seems rather poor.

~~~
mc32
If you go to google.de or google.jp you get a diff selection to the same query
“anerican scientists” (in local language).

------
i_am_nomad
Surely there’s a way to study this and generate some meaningful statistics on
whether Google (and others) actually bury conservative stories. Or maybe it’s
already been studied, and either supported or rebutted.

~~~
dagenix
First you have to figure out what a "consevative story" is. Then, you need to
figure out why a search for "Trump News" shouldn't bury partisan hackery on
both the left and the right. "News" used to / ought to mean something about a
presentation of facts, not some particular party's preference for what it
would like the facts to be.

~~~
traviscj
I guess the world used to have less facts, and now they have to choose which
ones to publish?

Jk. Money talks, and outrage sells better than dry facts.

------
vitro
Not me, not me, always them.

------
tj-teej
Why isn't the problem that Google has a monopoly on search?

IF (a big IF) Google was actually biased, you could go to their competitor.
But if there's no other real competitor then IMO the solution isn't to
regulate Google, but to fix root cause problems which led to there only being
one company controlling all search (AKA breaking up monopolies)

~~~
lovehashbrowns
Why is something like Bing not a real competitor?

------
factsaresacred
Whether or not Google are doing this, keep in mind:

\- Facebook's short-lived 'trending News' came under fire after employees
admitted to routinely suppressing conservative news stories.

\- Every newspaper endorsed Trump's opponent so any news source is potentially
anti-Trump. Some, like CNN, aren't even trying to be objective (every article
reads like an editorial with a little too much snark), while others like the
NYT released a post-election letter that just fell short of admitting their
bias ("we believe we reported on both candidates fairly").

\- Twitter was found to hide many Republican politicians from autosearch
results.

None of this makes Trump's accusation true, but it highlights that there is a
precedent.

------
dagenix
What's the proof?

> Mr. Trump’s criticism appeared to be inspired by a segment last night from
> Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs. During the program, Mr. Dobbs
> highlighted an article by a conservative website, PJ Media, that said that
> it had conducted an unscientific study in which 96 percent of Google search
> results for the word “Trump” were articles from “left-leaning sites.”

Oh boy: an "unscientific study", whatever that is.

~~~
nkozyra
> Oh boy: an "unscientific study", whatever that is.

Otherwise known as an "anecdote."

~~~
Gys
Trump loves anecdotes. Probably a lot of people prefer anecdotes to anything
scientific :-(

------
moonka
Maybe we should bring back the FCC fairness doctrine.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine)

~~~
michaelmrose
Maybe you should start your own search engine. The fairness doctrine makes no
coherent sense in context.

How many sides are there in every multidimensional issue. Who decides which
sides should be represented and how? Do we force every piece of content in the
universe to have an unmoderated comments section filled with racist invectives
and conspiracy theories? How "fair" will it be when nobody reads it.

Implementation aside the internet is already as fair as can be expected. It
has never been cheaper to set up a site and have your voice heard. This of
course merely guarantees that you can be heard not that you will have an
audience.

Edit: US inventors never did show such results you are mistaken or misleading

------
nitwit005
My grandmother is currently watching MSNBC, which is constant Trump bashing,
and she quite enjoys it. The New York Times most read almost always includes
negative stories about Trump.

I suspect the "problem" is just that people enjoy reading these negative
articles. Google is trying to point people to what they're likely to click on.

------
legitster
The tweets in question:

> Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of
> Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so
> that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent.
> Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of....

>....results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very
dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding
information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot
see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!

------
dddw
I wish they actually did... can't open the newspaper anyday now without this
twerp popping up all the time.

------
thomk
I wonder if he saw this article?

[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/17/trump-
idiot-...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/17/trump-idiot-google-
images-search)

Also, you should try it. Its remarkable really, search for idiot in google
images.

------
mullingitover
So what.

Google should be able to blacklist every conservative (or liberal) site if
they feel like it. They're a private business, and we have a Constitution that
prohibits would-be tyrants from interfering with free speech. Trump should be
run out of town on a rail for even hinting that he'd like to undermine freedom
of speech.

~~~
reversecs
It's complex because if a single corporation has a monopoly on all the news, a
single company can filter all speech. There are alternatives currently but it
doesn't make it less of a monopoly.

~~~
mullingitover
This is really simple, however: Google does not have a monopoly on news.

~~~
reversecs
Maybe not about news, but what about content provided at search, and videos.
Youtube and google search. Everything else is dwarfed by Google in that sense.

~~~
mullingitover
It still boils down to a first amendment issue: can the government tell Google
what it can and can't say? If Google is using its market position illegally,
that's one thing, but there's no such thing as an illegal use of its free
speech rights (except as legally prohibited, e.g. libel). Google could keep a
'We think Trump is a traitor' banner on every single one of their pages and be
within their rights under the Constitution.

------
dx87
Whether or not the bias is intentional, this reminds me of the fairly recent
accusations that claimed twitter was deliberatley preventing republican
congressman from showing up on the front page. They said it wasn't deliberate,
it was all done by an algorithm...that just happened to be written in a way
that only flagged members of one political party.

Looking at the bigger picture, this may be a case of big tech companies not
caring about political diversity while hiring, creating a cultural bias in
their products. Just like the Usenix talk by the Harvard professor citing a
study that facial recognition developed by a Japanese company had trouble
recognizing non-asian faces, if a company's culture is mostly homogenous and
leans heavily toward one end of the political spectrum, the developers could
be adding an unconcsious bias to their algorithms that ranks people and
websites at the other end of the political spectrum as untrustworthy or
malicious. Normally political bias doesn't matter when it comes to products, a
chair functions the same whether a liberal or conservative made it, but when
the product is a list of relevant and trustworthy sites in response to a
query, political bias can be very evident in the product.

An example I've seen of the news bias was shortly after Trump was elected,
their was a covert raid on an Al Qaeda compound in Yemen. On CNN, the headline
was something like "Trump authorizes covert raid that results in multiple Navy
SEAL casualties." The Fox headline was something like "Trump authorizes covert
raid of Al Qaeda stronghold that results in trove of intelligence data". Both
are true, but the focus and tone of the articles was wildly different. If
Google's algorithm results in only sites with a negative bias against Trump
being pushed to the top of search results, I don't see why it shouldn't be
investigated for the same reason that pro-Trump Russian influence is being
investigated on social media sites. I think everyone can agree that covert
meddling in politics, whether intentional or not, is a threat to democracy and
fair elections.

[https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentat...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentation/mickens)

------
funwie
Which data is this accusation based on?

I see google as a mirror that reflects what the world says about you. Of
course, they moderate results but I don’t think that they do it to such an
extend that only negative results will show for a person seen as positive in
the world.

Trump is denying his reflection in the mirror (Google search). He doesn’t want
to accept that Google’s result is how the world sees him now.

Google does not write the negative content

------
wilsonnb3
"Old man shouts at cloud"

This has been a conservative talking point for a while. I'm surprised it's
taken him this long to publicly complain about it.

~~~
itbeho
Seems like conservative news sites that are claiming this ought to be able to
use Google’s own analytic tools to highlight any trends against them.

------
ebikelaw
Google should go all-in and just run factual blurbs about Trump's various
crimes on the Chrome new tab page. I don't know why anybody puts up with the
abuse from this guy.

------
repolfx
There's a dupe that got flagged here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858874](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858874)

Perhaps this story will also get flagged - it seems there's a lot of people
who don't like discussion of political bias in Silicon Valley companies on HN.

It's pretty easy to see why Trump thinks this. Just go to Google News and
search Trump, then look at which news sources are selected. Or just look at
this helpful pie chart:

[https://static.pjmedia.com/trending/user-
content/51/files/20...](https://static.pjmedia.com/trending/user-
content/51/files/2018/08/chart-4.png)

The way News selects and ranks sources is even more opaque than web search.
Web search at least has some papers describing how it works, but News searches
only over a subset of the web selected by humans.

What policies do they use to decide what gets to be included?

[https://support.google.com/news/publisher-
center/answer/6204...](https://support.google.com/news/publisher-
center/answer/6204050?hl=en-GB&ref_topic=9010378&authuser=0)

They state:

 _We do not allow content that sends messages intended to harass, bully, or
physically or sexually threaten others._

 _We do not allow sites or accounts that engage in coordinated activity to
mislead users_

 _We do not allow content that promotes violence or harassment against an
individual or group based on ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age,
veteran status, sexual orientation or gender identity._

Well, that's going to be a problem for Google because by now everyone got the
memo that the student generation that Google has been hiring extensively from
for years now is willing to define almost any kind of viewpoint that isn't
extremely liberal as "harassment" or "hate". Including fairly anodyne policies
Trump has, like there being limits on immigration.

How will Google credibly argue they aren't biased when their inclusion policy
for Google News reads like a list of guidelines to a university safe space?

~~~
pacerwpg
CNBC, Politico and the Atlantic being flagged as liberal is evidence of the
bias in the study.

~~~
danjoc
According to The Atlantic, The Atlantic endorsed Clinton. Only the third
candidate they've endorsed since 1860.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-
cas...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-case-for-
hillary-clinton-and-against-donald-trump/501161/)

Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, Hillary Clinton.

