
White House is considering antitrust investigation into 'online platform bias' - mudil
https://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-executive-order-investigate-google-facebook-antitrust-2018-9
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kstenerud
Regardless of the official reasoning behind it, this kind of legislation is
essential to the continued functioning of our democracies.

Every company has a culture, and that culture by definition has biases, and
can't help but leak those biases in everything they do and produce. When a
company controls what people see (and search results are a form of control),
they affect perception, which in turn affects judgment.

We saw firsthand the insidiousness of this when a bunch of googlers succumbed
to savior syndrome, discussing their desire to use the powers of the company
to counter "badness" and foster "goodness". Regardless of your own personal
views on the political issues discussed, they can very easily end up biased
against your personal views, marking yours as "bad" against their "good",
while hiding behind a (self-believed) objectivity. Even when they are 100%
morally/ethically correct, the very act of unconsciously biasing the majority
of people undermines democracy.

Diversity of thought is WHY democracy works. The less diverse peoples' sources
of information are, the less accurate they become as collective judges of a
republic. We've been seeing a trend towards homogeneous thought with the
advent of mass-media, but with those you could at least choose which poison to
drink. With invisible biases in search, you completely lose sight of
alternative viewpoints because they are suppressed at the source. A monopoly
(or oligopoly) here would be disastrous. These really are the final days where
we decide who will be the architects of our minds.

~~~
haloux
I feel like I’ve been warned about this point in time since I was in school:

“This is where relativist, postmodernism leads.”

