Google, Facebook, Twitter, Patreon and others were able to grow to the size they did based on Safe Harbor provisions that exempted them from libel laws under the premise that they were neutral platforms that allowed anybody to post content etc.. Newspapers and television stations are held liable for their content. Once they started to editorialize by banning things under subjective pretexts such as "hate speech" they started to violate that. It is also well known that there is political bias among these companies. This is one of many strategies that can be used. But, more importantly, there is concern from the left as well about these platforms and have been calls from that side as well to regulate them. They would have been much better served to have stayed neutral, but they've made their beds....
This is a weird argument to have. It raises many questions. Like, it's one thing to suggest maybe libel laws should apply to big tech companies. But do we really want to force them to be "politically neutral?" Such a thing literally does not exist, for one thing; but who gets to define it? For example, can the president order that a given news source appear higher in the rankings? Who decides what deserves to be ranked higher?
Further, what happens if Google were to prove that it's search algorithm were completely politically neutral (which is obviously non-sense because that statement doesn't mean anything.) What do we do then?
Should we also look at New York Times? What if they are posting too many liberal viewpoints?
Why would we look at the NY Times? They don't have a monopoly on national news. They have a small minority position overall and always have.
Google effectively has three monopolies (or near monopolies): search, YouTube, Android.
I include YouTube because in their user-video / amateur-video space they have an overwhelming position, there's nothing even remotely close (Facebook is still a poor competitor, and will probably never capture the higher quality amateur content).
Now we're talking about an entirely different problem altogether. If you want that problem fixed, we need better legislation for tech companies, not worse. Adding more regulatory hurdles and legal obligations will just get you even stronger incumbents.
> But do we really want to force them to be "politically neutral?" Such a thing literally does not exist, for one thing; but who gets to define it?
Just a naive idea but personally, I'd say a platform is politically neutral if it takes no action to prioritise or remove content unless required by law. This puts what should and shouldn't be on the platform in the hands of lawmakers, who, theoretically at least, represent the will of the people.
However that's bad for business so I'm under no illusions it'll ever become reality.
Let's say a far right conspiracy blog is posting a conspiracy about a school shooting before any information is really available. Suddenly, it's on top of Google and being surfaced prominently on Facebook.
People don't like this because these neutral companies are now promoting fake, definitely potentially harmful stories.
But if you penalize them for this, from one viewpoint, you are suppressing political opinion.
That's with a conspiracy; but if you drag the slider backwards, you find that there's no actual tipping point where it's clear action should be taken. Further, what if the far right has more conspiracy theorist than the far left? It would be partisan to not run fake news!
Going more subtle, bias in algorithms is a thing. Like PageRank is based on the number of high quality links to your page, right? What happens when rightwing views are underrepresented because their network of links is naturally considered less high quality due to being less linked around the web?
And if you think people would never make arguments like this, try to remember how often people fight over the correlation of politics and population density. It's why the United States has a Senate and a House.
Google doesn't produce news, though. It aggregates it based on user preferences and history. Complaining that the aggregate of news doesn't cast you in a good light is more of a reflection of who you are than what the aggregator is, as a public figure.
So what? If you don't like how the algorithm sorts search results then use one of the many competitors. If you think the competition is inferior then you're by definition saying that the google algorithm is preferable to the competition despite whatever political bias you see in the results.
It's good to call for transparency. Google has an effective monopoly on search so it's not just about me as an individual switching to ddg or something. Google can make and break media properties based on what are currently hidden and seemingly editorialized levers.
I'm not a fan of regulation but as a consumer I'm absolutely within my rights to ask Google tough questions.
What does it mean to have a monopoly on a product that costs nothing? Saying google has a monopoly on search is akin to saying that Tolkien has a monopoly on high fantasy novels; just because it's the most popular on the market doesn't mean its your only option, and the same is true of search engines.
> Google, Facebook, Twitter, Patreon and others were able to grow to the size they did based on Safe Harbor provisions that exempted them from libel laws under the premise that they were neutral platforms that allowed anybody to post content etc
Google, in particular, did not, because web crawler results are not user-submitted content and thus are not within the scope of the CDA safe harbor.
They are, instead protected from libel a way that is open to, and frequently used by, newspapers: they mostly (i.e., in the form of search results) report what amounts to “X person said Y”, which is (to the extent it is true, whether or not Y is true) absolutely protected from libel in the US. And that would be true even if they preferentially promoted (or even exclusively carried) content favorable to (or, alternatively, disfavorable to) one viewpoint.
It's also possible that they consciously decided to stop being neutral (e.g. Zuckerberg's statement in Congress about being like a publisher) which would ultimately lead to regulation and thus reduce competition against them and "outsource" all the drama against them over to Congress.
I don't remember the details but I remember some people were surprised by some of Zuckerberg's comments and thought it could open them up to regulation. Maybe it wasn't the comment about publishing.
No platform should be liable for content users post. Only if it is employees of the company doing the posting on company time should the company be held liable.
That is only true if you stay completely neutral according to those provisions. But when you curate/moderate content you are editorializing things and it becomes murky. Overall I agree with the original spirit of Safe Harbor. IE: the platforms should not be liable, but they also need to stay neutral, which means that they do not ban, demonetize, down rank anybody based on subjective moral grounds, but instead only do so if federal laws etc. have been broken that force them to.
I wasn't making a statement on current law. I said "should". As in, I don't think there should be any law pushing liability onto the service providers, regardless of neutrality.
I might agree with you if news outlets and others were held to the same standard. That said it would be be interesting to know how that changed the landscape. Right now you have the powerful choosing the narrative and the little guy being crushed with the current system. All of that being said, libel and slander offer protections against unfounded smear campaigns against individuals and adds accountability which should be there for everyone. There is not one size fits all to fix things, but the current system is majorly broken and the "don't be evil" company has become the monster they claimed to not be.
Google in particular is vulnerable because of their monopoly-level status on search traffic and search revenue.
Facebook less so, and Twitter even less so. Access to information is vital, access to your cousin's birthday photos and the blatherings of idiots who like to shout out into the ether probably less vital.
Are Google results actually worse for "conservatism"? Like if you go on Bing, Baidu, or DuckDuckGo, you're going to get better results? I'm really dubious about that.
Not only that, but the tech companies are starting to take an active role in politics [1]. The amount of power these companies wield should make everyone nervous - there is a comment on this article that "without checks and balances and the protection of the Constitution [the US] would be living under authoritarian dictatorship right now". On reflection, nobody should believe that the US is subject to sudden change but tech companies are somehow immune.
Imagine if the Google shareholders decided that someone like Trump would make a good Google CEO; paralleling the US move from Obama to Trump in one election cycle. It would be very worrying.
Removing Section 230 immunity should be one of the country's legislative priorities. It's incredible that we've literally given a whole industry a blank check to do what they want and be completely exempt from responsibility for the damage they cause. Without Section 230, companies would be subject to the standard definitions of intent in the law, as to whether their actions were purposely, knowingly, recklessly, etc. harmful. Tech companies have opted not to handle their platforms responsibly because it's more profitable not to.
Section 230 is how a company can make billions selling ads for malicious sites, and not be held liable for it because they didn't technically write the malicious ads themselves. Not only would moderating the content of the ads these companies sell cost them money, but refusing to sell malicious ads would cut off profit options for them.
If Section 230 was removed, they'd have to actually take care of the business they engaged in, as they'd be responsible for promoting and participating in illegal activity.
Wow that's incredible short-sided. Section 230 enabled the internet to grow and flourish with moderate freedom (the DMCA etc still exist). Removing it would heavily benefit large companies who can afford expensive monitoring and filtering software, while hurting small companies without enormous legal departments.
On the contrary, Section 230 was a short-sighted action to allow unchecked behavior in an attempt to get that rapid growth, without solid, reliable protections behind that growth. And while rapid growth can be good, we have to come back and put proper regulations in place to keep things from crashing to a screeching halt. The stock market's a great example: You can strip out protections, and yeah, growth will skyrocket, but when you realize what that house of cards is built on, it crashes down and makes everyone bankrupt.
And the suggestion that regulation hurts small companies and helps big ones is a myth generally perpetrated by those large companies. "Don't regulate us, it'll hurt the little guys" is an amazingly frequent scream of big monopolies trying to protect their business models.
Content moderation actually doesn't scale well at all, because nobody's really gotten automated content moderation right. Small companies have little to no problem moderating their comments sections or business relationships, but large tech companies actually can't do this without cutting deeply into their profit margins.
Yes, they'll use "expensive monitoring and filtering software", but those systems tend to suck, which is why so much malware and bad content comes through Google Ads and the Play Store and why Facebook's platform has been gamed in countless ways by bad actors. Automated systems present massively additional liability compared to human employees, and removing that immunity would ensure large companies couldn't just hand off moderation to an algorithm.
It is worth noting that often conservative and liberal Americans believe they have a point of disagreement as to whether regulations on corporations are a good or bad thing, in general. But really they do not disagree on this point. Only the minor details of what those regulations should be exactly.
I don't agree with this statement. Yes, both conservatives and liberals believe there is an amount of regulation that is acceptable. Conservatives typically aren't anarchists. Liberals typically aren't full-socialists.
The disagreement is the amount of regulation, and where to draw the line.
Though this is the idealized version of reality. In actuality, there are of course a host of political reasons conservatives may want more regulation in some places, and vice versa.
The current bipartisan issue is that the line is invisible and therefore impossible to regulate. Of course, Google has a trade secrets case for the line being invisible.
The government makes Coke list the ingredients and nutrition facts, but doesn't make them reveal the secret formula. Maybe there's a similar way to regulate Search?
Why regulate search at all?
A soon as you think Google is not giving you good search results you can hop on over to Bing or a host of other options. The free market works very well here. As opposed to the issue of net neutrality, where very many Americans have no ISP they can switch to if they are not happy with the throttling their ISP is doing. Said throttling could also be used to silence or slow conservative news and ideas.
Yes anybody who doesn't like what they see on Google can go search somewhere else. But that won't stop the other 80% of us from continuing to search on Google and seeing "biased" results, which is what is motivating some political/ideological calls for regulation.
Because the greater interests of Google's voting shareholders are not necessarily aligned with the interests of America's voting electorate. Which is really where any regulation of any company comes from, not an untypical case, the government is just late to the party.
Since my other comment was downvoted, here is another example - today conservative panelists on Fox News were calling for video games, and smart phones, to be regulated/banned to prevent gun violence.
I really don't see any kind of innate difference in the amount of regulation actually preferred by either half of america. If someone who downvoted the other comment would like to offer a thoughtful rebuttal or data to support their view I would be happy to consider it.
>The disagreement is the amount of regulation, and where to draw the line.
It is not clear to me that there is any disagreement on the amount. I know that the conservative claim is that they want less regulation but how do you measure that?
There are a host of things conservative policitians seek to regulate that liberal ones tend not to. There are even huge socialist programs that conservative politicians support more than liberal ones (like the military)
I appreciate the relevance and importance of posting this to HN, but I also think there’s not much anyone can add to the innate absurdity of the idea and the president’s claims. Additionally, aren’t searches already somewhat regulated e.g. DMCA takedown notices?
The claims are justification for the regulations they want to push through. Some countries have laws about what search results can and can't be returned. It's quite doable, and if you don't want it to happen, you probably shouldn't get complacent. Go talk to your representatives and consider getting active in an election campaign.
I think the more generic questions is how are we going to assess that an algorithm is fair or not.
Since we are going to have our lives more and more influenced by the results of algorithms, should we regulate them or not ? If yes, how ? How do you appeal to a decision made by a machine ?
I don't think there is any easy answer to these questions.
Maybe you want to be able to appeal to a machine made decision and that it should be reviewed by a human at some point ? But maybe not, at some point, changing your name is probably easier.
"The internet is a reflection of our society and that mirror is going to be reflecting what we see. If we do not like what we see in that mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society." ―Vint Cerf
Conversely, if you're unsatisfied with yourself, making your mirror distort your reflection will only make things worse.
I reserve a special level of contempt for people who think they can "fix" society by using force or authority to control how other people think, speak, and feel.
A distorting mirror is not what Vint is suggesting, the problem is not the mirror it's the subject, fix the subject is what I take out of that quote. Violence or force is not the only answer to fix society I have seen the light of knowledge work miracles on certain societal problems.
Vint isn't suggesting that we do that, but a lot of other people are. Nothing good can come of it; the article is part of the backlash against this impulse. (And that should be disconcerting: backlashes have a way of being worse than whatever it is they're fighting.)
That was the relatively decentralized and competitive pre-social media internet.
The problem now is that google and facebook have such a dominant position that larry page and zuckerburg can decide what to show us and what not to show us. They essentially hold the mirror and they decide what we get to see.
Vint Cerf's internet is the one I grew up with and the one I believe in. With the rise of social media and monopolistic tech companies, the relatively uncensored decentralized internet has turned into a dystopian curated and centralized one.
The internet is a reflection of the most extreme (and thus crazy) parts of our society. It’s basically what you’d get in a democracy if you could just vote over and over again. Nutcases with too much time on their hands would spend all day voting, because they’re true believers or just for the lulz. Ordinary people might vote a few times, but they have other stuff to do. When they realize they have no real power against the nutcases, they might just give up.
Now replace “voting” with “posting” and you’re pretty close to how modern social media works.
I think this is where Google (search) and Facebook ( social media ) are different. Google was based on the strength of an algorithm that filters out less relevant content. Providing/promoting relevant content is one thing society can do to separate the crazy.
The internet exists, is way to big to manually curate, and google is just providing a window into it with algorithmic searches.
There is always talk about how google promotes this or that by having this search return X and how they should adjust it. They always "adjust the algorithm" or ban sites from their search results entirely.
Google's search is better (I've tired and use others..) and thus it wields enormous power. This puts them at odds with governments that always want to control information. I'm sure if they could the whitehouse could make its own "search engine" but people wouldn't trust it.
edit: removed my "good luck with that". The US currently has a poor track record of controlling large corporations because of lobbies etc.
The US government is able to enforce sanctions on other governments, crushing their economies and major businesses. It's able to acquire private property and businesses through eminent domain. "Good luck with that" is a bit shortsighted. The tools exist for the US to exert these forces, and they have been used successfully.
The US tends to treat its own companies with kid gloves and tends not to put the hammer down on billion dollar companies with their all important lobbyists.
> The internet exists, is way to big to manually curate, and google is just providing a window into it with algorithmic searches.
You're assuming that because they can't do it, they won't.
You forget that these people are making the laws. They can just vote a law that "the internet must be curated, and uphold standards X and Y".
Then they simply force providers to block anything that isn't perfectly curated at the simple request to a court.
Done/done.
So they can simply force others to do it. They can simply force self-censorship (see GPDR, and why that law is such a horrible thing). Congress can't check food for safety, so they make others do it (e.g. the FDA doesn't check food safety (except where it has already gone wrong), it forces vendors to check it, then does a basic sanity check on the report of said check, same is true in Europe, except for the name of the organization).
"adjusting the algorithm" is something they do all the time. Then the algorithm is to blame or credit for search rank, they're not choosing winners and losers.
What would be the point of adjusting the algorithm other than picking which results should be surfaced? That's what the algorithm does, that's its whole raison d'être. And in addition to the algorithm, Google has a substantial block list which is different for different regions.
The solution is to mandate that Google publicly disclose their algorithms and the various weightings they apply to incentivize behavior and how much of an impact they have. Then everyone can see whether or not their behavior constitutes unfair bias, can test for themselves what's going on.
Google does not need or deserve the ability to keep the way all human knowledge is accessed and found today a trade secret.
Additional notes on this to address the obvious criticisms:
- Google would still have the benefit of it's actual data/crawled content that presumably would not be disclosed and constitutes a significant portion of their business advantages.
- It's unlikely competing search engines would somehow leapfrog Google's technology by having access to their search ranking algorithms. At best copying Google would make them "as good as Google", but you need to be "better than" to get people to switch or offer features and benefits they don't.
- Even if all of Google's data and algorithms were cloned by competitors, everyone would still by and large use Google because Google is the default on almost every platform and browser, and Google has a significant lock-in effect over their platforms.
Which is to say, requiring one of the world's most powerful monopolies to disclose the algorithms by which knowledge is found would have minimal to non-existent impact on their business but have significant benefit to society.
I think that would suggest that Google's protection against content farms and bad SEO is way more simplistic than it probably is. Sure, like security in the open source world, transparency would make it possible for bad actors to find flaws in their code, but it would similarly allow others to find and disclose to Google those flaws and offer suggestions on how to fix them.
Trump is basing this off an article[1] that categorizes the best news outlets in America and abroad (New York Times, the New Yorker, Bloomberg, LA Times, NPR, the BBC, CNN) as being on the far left[2]. (There's also a few strange inclusions like ESPN. I was unaware that ESPN was part of the liberal media conspiracy).
If your premise is that Breitbart and the New York Times have equal "quality" as news reporting organizations, and are equally partisan, and the only thing separating them is their political bent, then yes, it looks like Google is stacking the deck in favor of news organizations that you've categorized as leftist.
In reality, what's happening is that Google's algorithm favors trustworthy news sources over untrustworthy ones, and the right has branded "factual news we don't like" as partisan.
Or it's extremely basic text matching and "African American Inventors" more closely matches "American Inventors" (as it is an exact substring match) than web pages about "Inventors from the United States", which is probably a more common phrasing (see: https://www.google.com/search?q=Inventors+from+the+United+St...)
One of the biggest problems with Google as I see it, and facebook for that matter, is for the end user there isn't much of a way to introspect _why_ a search result comes from a particular query. In this case, you used that lack of information to confirm your own assumptions and bias.
How many photos of white inventors have the word "white" near them, though? Image search isn't exactly parsing biographies. So it gets largely lost in noise compared to "inventor".
It's pretty common for certain words in certain image searches to be useless, and that's including a lot of very boring searches nobody has ever thought of.
It's pretty easily explained by the fact that people really only use the term "white inventors" when talking about black inventors (honestly "white inventors" would probably have racist connotations in most other contexts).
Any search algorithm will introduce some kind of bias. People will notice this bias and assume a conspiracy because humans like to read purpose and intent into everything. If all the results were white males, people would be accusing Google of sexism and racism. If the results skewed toward Asians people would think Google was in league with the Chinese government or something.
This is one of the social dangers of allowing algorithms to make important decisions in society. We might not even be aware of what biases we're introducing. They can be very non-obvious, especially if the algorithm is complex or the data set is large.
Edit: here's another possible explanation: perhaps due to efforts to popularize African American contributions to American history there are more web pages (in a pure numeric sense) about African American inventors, scientists, etc. on the web. This could affect the way Google weights search results.
> This is actually one of the dangers of AI: it might introduce all kinds of weird biases that we're not even aware of until the effect has already been felt.
This isn't a danger of AI in the future, it's a danger of google's algorithms in the present. Most users (myself included) have come to treat Google results as some oracle of truth, so the bias introduced by Google's existing search algorithms can have tremendous impact. Most of the time it will go unnoticed, and it doesn't require any intentional manipulation. What people know, and how they act based on what they know, is being heavily influenced already by google's algorithms.
In a sense, it doesn't matter whether the curious "american inventors" search results set comes out of political bias or technical inadequacy: from the perspective of many people, Google's editorial choices in certain areas have forfeited the benefit of the doubt in others.
This situation is a good example of why it's important to pay attention to maintaining the appearance of impartiality as well as actually being impartial.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google. Nothing related to search.)
Literally the first result in that search is a far-right, white nationalist blogger alleging Google is manipulating results for that search.
This would seem to both belie the claim that it is manipulating the results -- by virtue of the fact that wouldn't the first thing they manipulate away be this very criticism -- and seriously taint the chain of events that led you to claim that they are.
There is a sub category called "African American inventors". Since the sub category also match the search terms, it is possible that for some reason they are displayed in priority.
edit : the post of econ4all about "us+inventor" tend to confirm that it is an issue with "american" being part of "african american"
Also there's the fact that lists of famous African Americans are probably more common than general lists of famous Americans (and many will appear on both lists). The bias here seems pretty obviously to align with a general bias to what people put on the Internet. The funny thing about the position they are in is that there is no way to make everyone happy seeing as there doesn't seem an objective way to judge bias so it's inherently subjective.
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 the monopoly)
They (FAANG) have moved from "interesting startups" to "essential utility". The thing about essential utilities is they are always regulated.
The question is not should Google be regulated (as a new form of utility) but who should regulate it, and under what terms of reference.
An American regulator? European? Chinese ? A new form of UN based regulator for new forms of multi national company? Should it be laissez faire? What views on privacy should the regulator have - is it a price based privacy or an inalienable right?
The very fact that so many people happily use DuckDuckGo instead of Google is proof enough that Google isn't an essential utility. The same story is true for all the rest: I'm sure you know people who have left Facebook completely behind without any ill effects--in fact, everyone I know who has left FB has heartily recommended it to anyone who will listen. No stretch of the imagination is going to put these websites on the same footing as gas, water, and electric.
plenty of people have septic tanks and even generate their own electricity - but that does not mean the 98% of users do not see the sewer company as essential.
What google does is privatise a public good (our markup and usage of internet) - that seems a strong case for regulation irrespective of the very small amount of competition
It is also worth remembering that gas and electric companies also were seen as "not essential" for a long time, as many people managed the old way - there just came a tipping point where the value and convenience (and economic / social benefits) were so great the old ways died out and suddenly a significant proportion of society was dependent. Humans have lived without electrical supplies for many years just as we managed without search engines - but at some point it was "better" for everyone to have electricity, and so everyone got it and we don't want to go back.
US military doctrine of "shock and awe" talks about "bombing people back to the stone age" by destroying electricity and water supplies- when really they mean bombing people back to the early victorian era. But from the vantage point of a man sitting on the loo using a electrically powered internet device, 1840s and the neolithic don't seem very far apart.
I have no doubt in my mind, if the United States was a country without checks and balances and the protection of the Constitution, we would be living under authoritarian dictatorship right now. The quickness by the administration to attack media, promote propaganda, and now censorship is frightening.
Sure, but to be fair, if we didn't have good checks and balances, things would have been bad a very long time ago. This isn't the first time checks and balances can/will help us avoid bad policy, and it won't be the last.
While I am not sure how plausible it is that US gets there, it certainly feels like some sort of authoritarian dictatorship is still possible. Democracy is only as good as our institutions, and a lot of institutions seem to be struggling.
Checks and balances require the separate branches to be willing to apply them. With the apparent lack of any meaningful oversight by the legislature, it does not seem like the checks and balances are working very effectively.
I suppose that's a strong reason why many (including myself) prefer divided governments, so that adversaries can keep each other from going too far.
I don't remember where I read it, but something like this rings true: the founders anticipated authoritarians seeking power, but they did not anticipate legislators allowing it.
Edit: I don't mean to say that Trump becoming a dictator in the US is possible; I think that's extremely unlikely. I simply mean that there is a weakness in the US political system when government is controlled entirely by one party, and that this weakness could possibly be exploited some day.
While this particular instance is dumb, there's definitely conversations in politics that need to happen about algorithmic biases. If this kicks things off, I'm fine with that.
Trump doesn't address other search engines though, which (hilariously) helps Google more than the threat of looming regulations hurts them. Getting attacked by Trump is a badge of honor at this point. Just about any liberal or conservative with a brain will realize only regulating Google's results is a very bad move when there is Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other search engines.
The frightening thing is that this would-be-king still has support from 40% of the populace. We're stuck with them and they are the greatest threat to the principles of American freedom. This country can't work with so many people happily supporting demagogues who pander to their pet issues and ignoring the damage they cause.
> The quickness by the administration to attack media, promote propaganda, and now censorship is frightening.
How exactly is trump promoting censorship here? Isn't he doing the exact opposite? Isn't he promoting free speech?
And frankly, I think it's great that the media and the president have an adversarial relationship. The president should attack the media ( free speech ) and the media should attack the president ( free press ). Why would you want the president and the media having a cozy relationship?
I can't think of a greater symbol of democracy and free speech than the president and the media keeping each other in check.
The media and president should be adversaries, not friends. I'd rather the media tell us everything the president is doing wrong and shining the spotlight on him and vice versa. And this isn't just about republicans. I wish the media would be more adversarial with the democrats as well. With all politicians. It's a great way to keep politicians honest.
Censorship isn't the best word for this, but he's certainly not promoting free speech here. Promoting free speech would mean acknowledging that Google can do whatever it wants, and say whatever it wants to say via its search results, whether the government likes the results or not.
Regarding the media, there's nothing wrong with the president and the media having an adversarial relationship and in fact I think that's the norm. But I wouldn't describe a president attacking the media as promoting free speech.
> Promoting free speech would mean acknowledging that Google can do whatever it wants, and say whatever it wants to say via its search results, whether the government likes the results or not.
What if Google holds a monopolistic position in the search market, and its actions are detrimental to its users? What if what the government is doing is enforcing anti-trust rules?
Whether Google is a monopoly in search or not is a determination the anti-trust division of the justice department would have to make, which I don't believe is what the current administration is actually suggesting they are going to pursue since they are generally pretty unorganized and that sounds like a lot of work.
Anyway even if that were found to be the case (and arguably there's a good case) I don't know if the likely remedy would be to allow the government to control search results.
If the government wants to meddle with search results the better approach might be from the FCC which could claim Google needs to operate under some kind of common carrier status I guess.
> "How exactly is trump promoting censorship here? Isn't he doing the exact opposite? Isn't he promoting free speech?"
We are talking about a president who routinely threatens punitive government actions against detractors. There exists a line between criticizing bad journalism, and using executive powers to threaten critics. The later is what dictators do.
In the case of Google, they maintain their search algorithm is not politically biased. Unless we have substantive evidence proving otherwise I see no reason not to believe them.
It seems what Trump is suggesting here, is a government regime controlling what search results we see... That is a very scary prospect, right now.
I have a brother working as a journalist, who toils away fact checking, all day long. I can assure you he and his colleagues do way more due-diligence, fact-checking, and gathering of supporting evidence, than the Office of the Press Secretary could even try to pretend to.
It's so easy to get up in a press-conference say something patently false, when you don't allow any dissent.
If you don't like criticism it's "Fake News".
If you can't see what Trump is doing when he calls the media "Anti-American", you have the wool over your eyes. It's dictator 101.
It is frankly terrifying to me that so many voices in this thread are defending this blatantly unconstitutional and thoroughly authoritarian idea. If this ridiculous proposition is not beyond the pale, perhaps nothing is--a chilling thought, imo.
Remember when the Republicans were the ones complaining that net neutrality was a backdoor route by Democrats to impose political content regulation on internet channels?
Now, they just head straight for the front door themselves: “we don't like (what we perceive as) the political viewpoint on Google results, so we’re considering regulating it so that they have to say what we’d prefer”.
Short of the kind of coordinated activity with a campaign that would be an illegal contribution (which Trump should know plenty about, since he's been directly implicated in it with regard to AMI and the payoff to cover up his affair with Karen McDougal), even if Google's presentation was deliberately, partisanly, politically biased, that would be core free speech/press protected by he first Amendment.
It's well past the point where journalists should, with most Trump tweet articles, note the correspondence between "whatever fox and friends said today" and "whatever he just tweeted".
Trump’s rhetoric around media is terrifying. The outlets best known for thorough research and journalistic integrity he calls “fake news.” Meanwhile he promotes outlets like Breitbart and Info Wars, which are essentially state media, with zero journalistic integrity.
These are the actions we’re used to seeing from oppressive dictatorships, but seeing them from the President of the United States is nuts.
If you search for “Hitler” you find mostly negative articles even though there are some “news” sites affiliated with “very fine people” who write positive stories.
The vast majority of major accredited news media is negative towards Trump, ergo searches mostly reflect that. Shocking revelation.
Before he was president or even running for office he'd call into a fox news show and say something stupid and other news outlets would pick it up and I remember being annoyed and thinking "why is this news?!" now he's president and everything he says is news and it hurts my soul.
Anyway we live in a free country and the government can't dictate what kind of news a search engine should surface.
It's ironic though that newspapers are actually entertaining this nonsense and not outright debunking the notion and highlighting how dangerous it is.
We live in such a country now but that could change at any time. If the government starts dictating search results then we will not be a free country. Unfortunately causality doesn't go the other way.
As a republic, governed by the US Constitution, the 1st Amendment is clearly written to prevent such stupidity. I can't believe this is even being entertained on HN.
The first amendment is just a piece of paper unless someone enforces it. When the head of the executive branch of government starts talking openly about violating it, it's (past) time to take the threat seriously.
The constitutions of the USSR and Nazi Germany had similar provisions. The constitution of China still does. These things aren’t magic, and authoritarians find ways around them.
When a company has a near-monopoly market position and is using it to harm the public and restrain trade, the government absolutely can dictate a number of things to a business, according to antitrust law.
Yes, by failing to act against the block of monopolies that entirely control social media, search, etc.
So long as the government fails to act, they're supporting the monopolies in question. So long as those monopolies exist, what they're doing is called censorship. As monopolies they have the direct sanction of the state.
Why single out google only? Isn't it an industry wide issue rather than a company one?
This is going to be interesting because recent moves by social media and tech companies have shifted them from a distribution platform to publisher which opens up an incredible amount of liability issues.
As much as I dislike Trump, I think recent moves by the tech industry were awful misteps. The extremes they went to and the obvious stifling of right wing voices really hurt their reputation and now opens them up for heavy regulation.
I use to feel that social media and tech were biased but fair or tried very hard to be fair. Now it's hard to trust anything ( posts, tweets, search results ) because these platforms have no fairness in them.
Normally, competition would be a deterrent against unfairness, but the days of excite, yahoo, askjeeves, altavista, etc competing with google are over. What else is left but regulation?
Gave this search a try - "Donald Trump" - to see how bad it really is (I rarely specifically google anything about Trump).
Breitbart is a traffic juggernaut in the US, and Google has Aljazeera ranking on the second page along with dailymail.co.uk. No Breitbart anywhere to be found on the first 15 pages. All the far left results are there of course.
IMDB is on page four. Haaretz on page five. France24 is on page five. TMZ, People.com, PageSix, UrbanDictionary, PopSugar are all there....
Along with this glorious headline on page six of results: "What If Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since 1987? - NYMag"
There's very obvious bias across the board. Every platform is simultaneously conspiring (ie working together) to throw far right voices off their sites while leaving their counterpoints on the far left entirely alone (even when those people blatantly violate the platform terms of service). Just another good reason to begin very aggressively regulating the monopolists.
So long as they possess monopolies, they are in fact committing censorship. And when they all act as a group politically to censor, even more so. It's time for the government to act.
1) How many popular sites point back at Breitbart? At least initially, Google's search algorithm appeared to be based on the number of such backlinks. I imagine it still does to a certain extent. I doubt very much that the net traffic to a given site plays an important role in Google's search algorithm.
2) Have you tried to do the same search with other search engines?
I'm hyper socially liberal and when it comes to economics I very broadly support free market policies.
If all of the major platforms - monopolies - for social media and general media reach are aggressively conspiring to limit speech based on politics, what you have is not anything resembling freedom. You have censorship in fact.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Google search = near universal platform control by one political ideology (which they've all admitted to over the years), which is now very openly censoring the right wing of politics. The coordinated censorship isn't subtle, they're almost flaunting it at this point.
It's an extremely dangerous concentration of power into one politically aligned monopoly set of corporations. We're seeing the results of that now, as the desire to directly control and influence politics kicks into gear.
If a platform has a very large monopoly position, then they should be legally forced open as a direct pass-through consequence of the first amendment. They should be required to allow all speech (that doesn't involve threats of violence, which isn't speech), or give up their monopoly position.
Where is the non-anecdotal proof? Do you have any substantiated accounts from whistle-blowers? leaked documents?
Just because you did a google search, and a lot of anti-Trump stuff came up isn't proof of anything, other than proof that Trump has a lot of negative news surrounding him, and has for quite some time.
There's no censorship on Trump, he just has a very bad reputation and PR, there's no conspiracy, if you are not convinced, just take a look at his Twitter account and you will understand why almost all the coverage is negative. And Breibart is a very niche far-right newspaper at best.
