> For example, it claims that British users searching for broadcaster Piers Morgan's comments on the Duchess of Sussex following an interview with Oprah Winfrey were more likely to see articles about Morgan produced by smaller, regional outlets.
A quick test does bear out this claim[1], I see no Daily Mail articles with that search even though they are indexed[2]. However DuckDuckGo has similar results[3], so...
A much more likely explanation is that 1) The Daily Mail is just a shitty "newspaper" hardly even worthy of the title and not generally considered to produce high-quality content, and/or 2) that the other articles were much more widely shared, linked, etc. and much of society at large ignored the nonsense from The Daily Mail.
There's a reason The Daily Mail is generally not accepted as a reliable source on Wikipedia.
Aside: I am flabbergasted that Piers Morgan managed to survive this long at all, considering he's been one of the most disliked people on TV for a long time (and for good reason IMO).
I could absolutely believe that there is a "quality" ranking that pushes Daily Mail stories down because the domain contains such poor quality content, or that the pages are loaded down with so much crap that people hit 'back' almost immediately after clicking on one of their links.
That said, and as much as it pains me to side with the Daily Mail on anything, I think there's an interesting argument to be made here that Google's "quality" ratings are entirely opaque and the public should be given better access to them.
Here’s a Google AMP page of a Daily Mail page that crashes on every page load for me on my iPhone’s default Safari browser. They probably need to hire a front-end developer or web performance specialist to diagnose it.
Slow or failing page loads negatively affect search rankings on all search engines & 80% of users abandon your site if it takes more than 10 seconds to load.
This became my most upvoted comment of all time (+22) so it must’ve gotten a lot of attention and is probably worth me following up on. The Google AMP link above now loads impressively fast in under 1.5 seconds in the same iPhone Safari browser. If you click-through the AMP link to get to the Daily Mail’s full version of the page, that loads in 9-10 seconds on the first view and about 6 seconds on subsequent (cached) views.
Nobody is entitled to a particular place in ranking and making this maximally transparent would almost certainly result in people gaming them more effectively decreasing the quality of search results for all users.
Furthermore what are you supposed to do with this data? If you ultimately find that one site is given one score and another is given another and you disagree with this are you going to demand that google show other people the sites you prefer in a higher rank? Nonsense.
No matter how they rank showing their hands would almost certainly be harmful to google because it would allow political groups of any stripe to put pressure on them to "fix" their results on any number of dimensions. Google would in short be crazy to give this to you and you aren't entitled to it.
"Nobody is entitled to a particular place in ranking and making this maximally transparent would almost certainly results in people gaming them more effectively decreasing the quality of search results for all users."
According to this logic, if results were listed alphabetically (i.e., based on a truly objective criteria), we would see folks naming everything beginning with "0" or "A".
The above statement seems to ignore the history of search engine paid placement (people are certainly entitled, so long as they pay) which has evolved into "Ads by Google" appearing above search results. Further, the statement admits gaming occurs ["gaming them more effectively"] regardless of Google secret "solutions".
Listing search results by subjective criteria while portarying this as some sort of pseudo-objective "search" is not helpful. The "web search engine" has become a front for an online ad services business. The public is absolutely entitled to an index of the public information web, not controlled by a private company selling ad services. One day, we may get it.
> According to this logic, if results were listed alphabetically (i.e., based on a truly objective criteria), we would see folks naming everything beginning with "0" or "A".
This is seen in practice. The yellow pages were?(are?) alphabetical, which is why you see so many business that start with the letter A.
The Yellow Pages still exist IRL. There was an interesting book I read some years back about the history of the phone book and it included some history behind the yellow pages.^1
The YP allowed an advertiser to pay for a larger type font, or a quarter/half/full page ad, in addition to the free listing. It is also divided into subject catgories.
What has been lost with Google's web search is the concept of the accessible free listing. It is only accesible under Google's secret rules. The ability to finger through the pages to get to, say, the last entry beginning with "Z" is not possible with Google search. Google will hide the bottom of the list and only display the first several pages. This creates pressure to buy ads or SEO services (game the search) in order to "appear at the top", which is "the only way to be found". Absurd. Google will not even return more than 400 results anymore.
While the phenomenon of naming things to begin with "A" may be seen in pratice outside of the web, this has not rendered the system of alphabetical listing obsolete.^2 Not even close. Also, there are likely other factors influencing the decision to name things beginning with letters like "A". As many computer nerds know, not all letters are equally common in the English language. Anyone who has looked at large zone files knows that domain names tend to begin with "A", but such choice of name is not done to game alphabetical ordering.
1. About 11 years ago I read a book by Ammon Shea called The Phone Book. It had some discussion of the history of the Yellow Pages.
2. Last year, Judith Flanders published a book on the history of alphabetical order.
It's not obvious to me what the bounds of "all websites" are.
The list of all phone numbers is obviously enumerable. There's a registry and a flat list of phone numbers. But, resource constraints aside, is it possible to enumerate all websites? I suppose you could theoretically enumerate every domain name, but that isn't necessarily the same thing.
> The public is absolutely entitled to an index of the public information web, not controlled by a private company selling ad services. One day, we may get it.
You aren't entitled to one paid for by google but I don't think there is any reason you can't fund the PBS of search engines. There in fact save lack of interest or motivation why you couldn't start working on it tomorrow and lobby for government support.
> I think there's an interesting argument to be made here that Google's "quality" ratings are entirely opaque and the public should be given better access to them.
It's a tricky problem, in principle I agree with you, but on the other hand more transparency also means more information for people who are gaming the system.
And there are many MANY people who (try to) game Google. Never underestimate the amount of ridiculous effort some people will go to to make a buck. Arguably Google's largest value is that it's actually reasonably good in preventing this.
The main reason I gave up Google as default search engine is that results were not good and I couldn't find material.
Duckduckgo provides generally better results and has some very cool gadgets (like stack overflow answer expansion).
Google is winning on businesses' opening hours and safe search on images is not as safe as Google, which is the single caveat I need to remember about before looking for something.
Why should the public be given access to that information? Google should be under no obligation to provide any of that unless we "nationalize" the idea of search engines and declare them a human right. Until then, it's a voluntary service to be consumed.
Governments would be absolutely salivating at the prospect of such simple censorship if they owned the search engines. And be under no illusion that all without exception would abuse that power in some way or another.
All limited-liability companies are government-supported entities and it's perfectly fair to impose corresponding social responsibilities on them. In this case Google is in a monopoly position which means they have a stronger responsibility to not only be fair but be seen to be fair.
Of course google isn't under such a legal obligation. But then they should be explicit: "We are ranking results on our own quality metric which we won't disclose, you'll just have to like them", and let the market react. This position can then be taught in schools to kids, and used whenever google search results are being evaluated by the public. Right now google brands its search results as being driven by the public.
It's like when people say google (or fb, etc) has no [first amendment] obligation to allow freedom of speech. Fine, but then don't constantly describe yourself of defenders of free speech, say from the outset you will police speech as you see fit, drop the pretense that your policing is somehow objective, and let the market digest that.
> Right now google brands its search results as being driven by the public.
Where does it do that? Google search results being an opaque algorithm is not a big secret, given how Google clearly refuses to talk about details every time this comes up.
The problem with that is if people know the exact formula for quality, sites can work to game it. Basically, once the formula for quality is known, it no longer is a formula for quality.
But the point isn't 3rd part assessments, the issue is that people want transparency of the algorithms; i.e. the intellectual property is exactly what people want to see.
Unless you think it's even in the realm of possibility to have a human being do the assessment, at the end of the day it's still going to be an algorithm that can be gamed.
If you ever want to play censorship scavenger hunt, try to get Google to link to breitbart.com without including the word breitbart. You can search article titles word for word in quotes and the names of the authors but google will not return a single breitbart.com link.
I know I’m a sample size of one, but I just searched for the string (without any quotes) ‘biden doj to investigate mpls police joshua caplan’ on Google, the story on breitbart.com was the 2nd result, the first result was the same article on ‘newsbreak.com’
That is an interesting observation. I can confirm I get those results too. Perhaps they are relaxing their algorithms now that elections are over. I originally tried this month (or maybe a few) ago and was unable to get any link to breitbart.com even if I googled entire paragraphs.
Some sources aren't merely low quality they are poison. A website on fragrances isn't liable to show you which sort of toxin would make your corpse smell most sweet after you have choked on your own death.
An ethical take would be trying not to spread poison is the right thing to do. Inaction in the face of evil isn't neutral its evil.
I'd rather decide for myself what is "evil" and "poison" rather than have that decision made for me by a search engine who's only job is to return the information I'm asking for. I could want this "evil" information for any number of non-evil reasons, it is not their nor anyone else's job to make that decision on behalf of the user.
I think I will be better off if social media and search engines don't help people poison their minds. That is to say its possible that your desire to be informed and my desire for you not to find what you are looking for might be opposed.
If you think that you are missing out on legitimate information pick a different search engine or make one.
There are lots of oppressive things we can do to help people not "poison their minds". Strictly controlling the information your citizens interact with, as is done in places like China, shows what an implementation of this may look like.
It's also roundly criticized as repressive, anti-freedom, and ripe for almost unlimited abuse by every first world nation.
You're right, but the question is, how absolutist should we be on that principle? The results of free sharing of "information" can be seen in measles outbreaks, for example.
Even if you had freedom from legal coercion it doesn't imply a platform ought to use that freedom to help poisonous crap spread. Lets give an obvious example there was a lady spreading nonsense about how you could cure your autistic kid by giving them bleach anally. She is encouraging dumb people to torture their vulnerable mentally challenged children.
Whether the government ought to let her spread her malicious lies is an entirely different question from whether for example amazon ought to carry her book or google ought to index her site. If your absolutist free speech position doesn't allow you to admit to the idea of the government censoring her I understand. However if you think that amazon and google ought to be morally obligated to help her spread her poison I don't understand your position at all.
A rational person can tell the difference between a grey area obvious nonsense and pretending that there aren't plenty of trivially definable black and white situations in which not carrying poison makes the world a better place is complete nonsense as is the idea that ANY editorial discretion magically leads to 1984. Life is literally the finding a balance point and I think we can reasonably discover a point of homeostasis between free heroin on every corner and constantly strip searching everyone for drugs.
If you don't think so you haven't considered the problem very deeply.
I thought we were speaking mostly about governments in this discussion, but quite frankly, the amount of power that Google and Facebook combined have over the average internet user's information intake puts them in a similar place. I believe the "moral obligation" is to act like the common carriers they play at being when it's expedient to do so, keep their hands off, and allow the government apparatus equipped to handle incitement to violence to do its job.
The problem at the end of the day is that we're not talking about extreme, contrived examples like the one just mentioned. We're talking about ideological things that rational people can disagree about in good faith, and there is no downside for tech companies to boost their preferred ideologies/candidates/etc and suppress their non-preferred ones.
That is a huge problem with, just like the governments, unlimited abuse potential... except it's more insidious. Government suppression of speech comes at the point of a gun, tech suppression of speech happens passively, in that you won't know it's happening unless you know to look for it, or its application is exceedingly blunt.
It's handwaved because many people find the list of boosting and suppressing targets acceptable.
Where do you derive the moral obligation for facebook or google have to act as neutral carriers of information? I'll do one. A restaurant has an established duty of care to maintain a minimum standard of cleanliness so as to provide sustenance and not illness. This duty is established in law and custom, maintained by inspection and certification. It's a duty whose exact performance and rules has changed over time but which goes back in custom over thousands of years.
This duty rendered real and specific by law and inspection is based on the most basic of rights the right to retain your life and health. It is trivially to suppose that someone ought to respect your desire to remain alive by not doing their job so poorly that filling your stomach once leads to you filling a hole in the ground.
Tech companies which so far as I can see have no duty of neutrality beyond what is required to keep our business are in fact very very circumspect about blocking things. Facebook happily left the groups up that I and others reported in the days leading up to the Jan 6 insurrection where they were planning to overthrow our government and it wasn't that long ago that reddit decided to remove communities like jailbait and subreddits in which the people who used to use lynching as social gatherings would have been quite comfortable.
When people talk about the problem with insidious blocking by tech companies I suspect the person is either an idealist or one of the deplorables. I'll do you the credit of assuming your in the former basket because so far as I'm aware the only people at present negatively effected by google and facebook are all in the latter basket.
>Where do you derive the moral obligation for facebook or google have to act as neutral carriers of information?
It's interesting that you mention restaurants. Restaurants have standards that go beyond the casual cook in a home kitchen because the restaurant, owing to its scale, can multiply the effect of a problem with food safety and injure/kill very many people very easily.
To briefly answer your question: Big scale means errors are magnified means different rules apply.
Facebook by itself is the single largest website in the world outside of China. I find it outrageous to suggest that a company in that position (Google too) should get to just do whatever they please regarding the information input of a massive chunk of the global population.
Pretending that power doesn't exist does not nullify its effects or its abuse potential.
>because so far as I'm aware the only people at present negatively effected by google and facebook are all in the latter basket.
Your unwarranted personal attack aside, this is precisely what I meant about those handwaving the establishment of an abusable power structure simply because they're generally okay with the decisions that structure is making.
What about when you're not so okay with those decisions anymore? You mentioned the Capitol insurrection, I assume then, that you think Facebook should clamp down on such groups? Their answer to you is the same as their answer to me: "Our back yard, our rules."
I think we can do better than that. And to preempt the inevitable argument that the first amendment allows them to operate free of oversight in this way.. that's true. It would be a lot easier to tie their freedom from liability for the libelous, terroristic, etc. content their users post to some additional duties, transparency, and so forth.
> and much of society at large ignored the nonsense from The Daily Mail.
Isn't it one of the most sold newspapers in the UK? I like how elitist folks are. In Romania everyone I know would also go "no one buys Libertatea" (one of our trashy newspapers) but it is the most sold newspaper in Romania.
High brow people badly underestimate how much influence these tabloids have. There's a reason their readers made folks like Kim Kardashian a billionaire.
Also newspapers stirring things does sometimes muck up politics. Like in the 30s the Mail used to support Hitler and Mussolini who then went on to cause some bother.
Sure, but that doesn't mean these particular articles were also widely shared or read.
I think this is confusing the general ("Daily Mail is the most read paper in the UK") with the specific ("this article was shared, linked, and read a lot").
Yes, many media outlets are sensationalist, have a poor record of journalistic integrety, yet their product is consumed by millions of people. That doesn't make them a good source; it makes them a liability.
It is high brow left wing types in particular that delude themselves about the oddness of their own beliefs. The Daily Mail becomes a special object of hate because it is a reminder that they are - at least politically - very strange.
I was about to say, this article makes perfect sense to me. The Daily Mail is one of my last choices of news, and I generally don’t use it as a source at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google’s algos have figured out the same thing many of us have…
tl;dr best quote (imo) "The Mail should be on the citation blacklist. There's no area of news where it is actually reliable. It can be relied on to accurately report celebrity gossip, but in that case the gossip itself is frequently false and the Mail doesn't check it. Their coverage of medical, science and political topics is a byword for deliberate inaccuracy."
> Any somewhat political article is extremely left leaning.
I've seen that same argument before to argue how the Nazis, and modern neo-Nazi groups are supposedly all "left wing", their categorization on Wikipedia as right wing and far right is allegedly only the result of that very same "left leaning" bias you are claiming.
Which, as a German, is just a tad bit weird, because it wasn't Wikipedia that defined these groups as such, those results come out of the political sciences. Nazis being right-wing, and neo-Nazis having moved further into the far-right is a very established fact in Germany.
On one hand he complains Obama's article doesn't mention the Benghazi Attack, when that's actually listed as one of the events during his first term.
On the other hand Trump's article doesn't mention the 2019 attack against the US embassy in Baghdad.
The choice of topics after that doesn't help dispel the notion of the author having a bit of an bias issue himself: Abortion, Jesus (a whole lot of that), global warming and vaccines. It's like a best-of of the deeper ends of American conservative talking points, the only thing missing is 2A and some good old "teach the controversy".
Particularly that Jesus part is very difficult for me to take serious: Recognizing that the biblical Jesus is mostly a myth is not "bias", as much as it might offend some religious sensibilities.
Indeed, wanted to check out a few other articles, sadly the "Random page" link only keeps sending me to the very short, and rather unspectacular, article about "Wushu".
> You're not being genuine if you are trying to argue that the coverage of liberals on Wikipedia is the same as conservatives.
And you are injecting a lot of your very uniquely American biases and perceptions into something where they don't really apply.
Wikipedia has over 140.000 active contributors across over 200 languages.
Your notion that all of them have conspired to suppress American conservatives in favor of "liberals", across dozens of different languages, is frankly quite a bit out there and reminiscent of that whole "cultural Marxism" narrative.
That's not to say that Wikipedia doesn't have its issues, it has them, but jumping from there to something that could very well be described as a conspiracy theory, is reaching a bit far.
> There's a reason why there's a Conservapedia.
There's also a RationalWiki, a PsychonautWiki, a GayPedia, there's a Wookieepedia, there's a Wiki for pretty much everything.
The existence of these is not evidence for a lack of such topics on actual Wikipedia, it's merely evidence of more specialized communities creating their own specialized Wikipedias where they can take things to details and dept that would usually be considered inappropriate for a general encyclopedia.
? Actually I find it ridiculous to suggest there wouldn't be a bias.
Are you suggesting wikipedia editors are typical of the population at large? What are you basing that on?
And if you concede there are demographic differences (eg education level) why do you think those differences would be orthogonal to political bias?
Note I'm not saying that there is a bias, but I would say that's the null hypothesis, and a lot easier to defend than the position that there is no bias.
I didn't say bias is not a thing, bias is very real.
All I'm saying that the collective bias that was stipulated, spanning across tens of thousands of users and dozens of languages, would need to be very organized.
Which has nothing to do with wikipedia editors being typical of the population, but a lot with trying to stereotype wikipedia editors as supposedly all sharing the same political bias.
When in many cases they don't even share the same language, nor the same conceptual framework about political dimensions/currents due to often very big cultural differences.
> That's not to say that Wikipedia doesn't have it's issues, it has them, but jumping from there to something that could very well be described as a conspiracy theory, is reaching a bit much.
You jumped to conspiracy theory. You said all. I did not. The editors simply have a bias that affects how they accept and offer contributions. These biases show especially in politically charged topics and you have to identify and check them, often they are factually wrong or misleading. I did not say all articles have this bias, but it is prevalent and makes Wikipedia unusable for any political research, unless you scrutinize all sources and do additional source finding that Wikipedia omitted on purpose because it didn't align with it's viewpoints.
There are niche wikis, but Conservapedia exists to counter Wikipedia's bias on certain topics. They have a page I linked to which lists a lot of these biases, but it's barely an exhaustive list. You can find instances like these on nearly every political page.
This is not some unfounded conspiracy theory as you suggest, Harvard has done a study on this as well as other institutions.
Larry Sanger hasn't been involved in Wikipedia for almost 20 years. He's just a random person on the internet, one with some feelings of animosity towards Wikipedia to boot – he's hardly neutral.
Wikipedia has its problems, but an article that complains "Oh no, Wikipedia calls Trump a liar!" from someone with a chip on his shoulder about Wikipedia in general is silly.
Their name has "socialist" right in the middle of it. You might argue over definitions of socialism and whether it's left or right. But I don't think you can say "a group that calls itself socialist has at least this one left-leaning trait" isn't a position reasonable people can disagree on.
What I find worse than people going both ways on wether nazis are left or right leaning, is someone in a position of authority like wikipedia saying, one side is objectively right [about a question that isn't even rigorously posed] and will be treated as such.
Oh, I don't think socialism is only in the name of nazis, I think their nationalization of many practices and aspects of culture is key. Do you think "nazis had socialist tendencies" is a position that no reasonable people can take?
I didn't mean to suggest taking the name itself as the only evidence of socialism.
> Do you think "nazis had socialist tendencies" is a position that no reasonable people can take?
Yes, because a socialism that benefits only members of the "Aryan race" while excluding, oppressing and murdering others in the same country is not socialism at all.
That can very well be socialism for a subgroup of your existing population.
I think the divergence in views is in the definition of socialism we have; I see it as an economical doctrine of state centralisation, you probably have other egalitarian ideals attached to it.
Economically, on a scale from free-market to socialism, where do you think nazis rank? I think they were closer to socialism that nowadays mainstream left wing parties
> That can very well be socialism for a subgroup of your existing population.
Using that same line of reasoning one could frame the American slave trade as "socialist" in nature because the slave owners were "socialized" by the exploited slaves.
> Economically, on a scale from free-market to socialism, where do you think nazis rank?
Which is kinda meaningless, if you want to see were Nazis stood on what you gotta look at their actions past abstract economic theories and their own PR, you have to look at the people they oppressed, persecuted, killed and for what reasons they did it.
Or you could also look at what kind of people [0] and ideas [1] in large parts inspired them.
Those weren't socialist/communist ideals out of the East, that inspiration came nearly exclusively from the West, a lot of it from over the pond, straight down to originally coining the term "Untermensch" and the associated race theories [2]
> That can very well be socialism for a subgroup of your existing population.
This is like calling ancient Sparta - where the Spartans lived in an egalitarian structure while simultaneously oppressing their Helot slaves - socialism.
Or for a more a recent example, apartheid South Africa, where whites received a great deal of support via government policy that practically ensured their prosperity. That wasn't socialism, either.
Socialism is not about centralized state control. It's about whether the state plays a strong role in ensuring a standard of living for all it's citizens. In successful examples (like Social Security and Medicare in the US) it has accomplished this while the majority of the economy is not under state control.
That's exactly my point, there is a difference between the ideals of socialism and the economic doctrine which plays out when socialism gets implemented.
In terms of economic policy, all the examples you cited are on the left side or going left in my book. There is definitely nothing capitalistic about state intervention.
It also makes sense historically: it took us a long time to understand that capitalism is the most efficient way to create value and advance technology. Even the communist dictatorship that is China understood that and it's using this to rule the world, while the western world (especially the USA) marched back on their capitalism and hampered their economy with more and more regulations.
I think we still don't have enough capitalism and we need a completely unregulated market and no government at all.
> I think we still don't have enough capitalism and we need a completely unregulated market and no government at all.
Who was arguing the merits of capitalism? Not me.
But true colors shine through. It seems like your actual motivation for arguing that Nazis were socialist was just a device to argue for unfettered capitalism by falsely associating socialism with them. That's a weak rhetorical trick that far right commentators have been using for quite a while now.
I'd say that's a staple of socialism/communism/marxism.
From Mao to Venezuela, the core idea depends upon excluding, oppressing, and murder of others in the same country based on class.
The only thing different about the Nazis is they targeted by race not class, though Communist China is targeting Uighur and other minorities in their country.
> But I don't think you can say "a group that calls itself socialist has at least this one left-leaning trait" isn't a position reasonable people can disagree on.
It is to anybody actually familiar with the history of the NSDAP. The "socialism" in their name was mostly PR, what little socialist currents existed in the early NSDAP, represented by the Strasser brothers, was bloodily purged during the Night of the Long Knives.
It's for that reason the very first victims in the concentration camp Dachau were not just Jews, they where German leftist political opposition Jews: Communists, socialists, antifascists, killed as early as 1933. The very same reason why Nazis considered the communist USSR as their arch-nemesis.
> What I find worse than people going both ways on wether nazis are left or right leaning, is someone in a position of authority like wikipedia saying, one side is objectively right [about a question that isn't even rigorously posed] and will be treated as such.
All this information can be found on Wikipedia, not just there, but also local Wikipedias from the places it actually happened. Like the Fuerth Wikipedia being even more in-depth and detailed [0], which is the city next to Nuremberg, both very relevant places for the early rise of Nazism.
That's why it's really not this "open debate" you make it out to be. The only people who insist on that are usually US Americans, due to the caricature "atheist socialist leftist" boogeyman that's been peddled to them for decades and some Eastern Europeans with post-communism shock, to justify their ideological hard shift to the right into often straight up fascism.
I've read extensively on the subject and I'm aware of the claims of using socialism as PR and I'm aware of the great purge.
At the same time, Hitler viewed Marxism not only as a philosophy close to its own, but also as a rival. I don't think the first victims of Dachau prove anything.
The only data I use to argue nazis were closer to socialism than free market capitalism is that their economy (despite having a semblance of a free economy) revolved around the state: prices, wages were fixed, members of the nazi party were put in control of private companies who disobeyed.
Hitler was definitely to the right of Stalin, but he was left of most modern left wing parties.
I also disagree with you that something is not open to debate, and I think it's worrying to hear people hold this view - especially on something so subjective as political categorisations.
That's a well established fact everywhere. That's what every kid studies in school.
I don't think it's correct.
The main problem is that left wing and right wing are meaningless terms.
Left and right generally apply to the economical sphere which goes from communism (entirely state operated economy) to libertarianism (entirely de-regulated market).
Usually when people talk about left wing vs right wing they attach some authoritarian / anarchic connotations. The politicalcompass.org (which is kind of left leaning) has a nice explanation of this problem.
If I’m searching for coverage of a news story via a search engine, I will always choose any other option than the DM even if its ranking is lower. It is a source of right wing hate, propaganda, racism, and generally all round poor journalism.
and I strongly believe that YOU get to make that decision. I don't believe that google in their monopoly position gets to make that decision on your behalf without clarity into how it's made.
How would that work? Google always decides the order of search results. Are they supposed to show a random result that matches the search terms just to be „fair“?
When monopolies exist. Do we let the government tell them what to do (beyond the laws applicable to all businesses)? Or do we just break them up?
Let's say I accept your claim about Google being a monopoly. Should the government force them to rank sites the way the government wants? Or do we just break up Google?
Having a large share of a market doesn't constitute a monopoly.
> exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action
Google doesn't own exclusive control of the supply of answers to queries about the rest of the web in fact it would almost be silly to even talk about such. Its also not the only game as far as ads
What people are worried in fact is google controls access to a very large share of incoming eyeballs in terms of organic unpaid for results such that ranking you poorly or not at all could harm you despite having no business relationship with google.
This however isn't business because the only customers are searchers and the ads on top of the results.
Whether you appear 3rd or 37th is material to your business but not a matter of google having a monopoly on my eyeballs. The framework which you understand commerce doesn't fit the situation.
If you believe it's worth addressing it will have to be via unique legislation that actually suits.
It's well known that Google uses clicks on search result as a preference signal to modify its ranking. This way, decisions by users turn into decisions by the algorithm.
Like what? I don't see anything that's not covered by other outlets.
I do see stuff like "Can you THINK yourself thin? A hypnotist to the stars says you can - and reveals the five-step technique to try if you want to shed the 'lockdown stone'"[1]
Taken from the front page right now. The article is even worse than the title suggests.
The Daily Mail stalked Ian Hislop for years after this in an effort to find "dirt" on him (never found any), all because Piers made a complete arse of himself :-/
Is that... like... a story though? "Private school you've not heard of in NYC has minor curriculum and staffing dust-up". That should struggle to make any part of the paper in a major city, and if it does, maybe a little column buried in the middle.
The only way that could possibly count as international news, certainly, is if you're looking for examples of some certain phenomenon and failing to come up with any more important or relevant than that.
It is a local story, of no interest, if it doesn't validate your worldview. If it props up your side, and make the other side look dumb, then it is of international importance.
I haven’t been keeping a list, and sometimes it’s not so much a major scoop/exclusive as it is providing details and getting quotes on stories that are missing elsewhere. But it’s a definite trend I’ve noticed over time.
Some examples I can think of
- locating where Ghislaine Maxwell was hiding out
- Anthony Wiener sexting scandal
- Floyd arrest body cam footage
This article chronicles their American operation. They do aggressive tabloid reporting/investigation, which may generate a lot of forgettable celebrity content, but is also brought to bear on politicians, officials, and other ‘important’ news subjects.
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/...
Completely agree. "Prestigious" American newspapers do so much selective coverage it's insane...most people have absolutely no idea the extent of it. It produces the result of censorship without needing to actually censor. Just look at the Hunter Biden laptop story for an example -- initially blacked out and denied by American media, blanket rejection of underlying premise of story & suppression of relevant facts, eventual subtle admission on page 10 that everything was true all along.
The average person on the left will deny and reject this since the communist American owned media only feeds them stuff they want to believe. Truth hurts sometimes.
This doesn't follow, the laptop story's premise doesn't pass the sniff test at all.
A laptop is left with a computer repair salesman for some reason, in Delaware for some reason, and for some reason no contact information is given for the laptop's return, and for some reason the repairman both wanted to and was capable of getting a direct line to Rudy Giuliani who for some reason gave the only copy of the hard drive to the NYT without screening any other news outlets.
The repairman goes on to give contradictory statements repeatedly about the origin of the laptop. The FBI acquires the device for investigation into Russian disinformation campaigns.
“This is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign. The intelligence community has not been involved with Hunter Biden’s laptop. Hunter Biden is a U.S. person, and he would be subject to any investigation regarding fraud, or corruption would be rightfully the jurisdiction of the FBI. So, the FBI has had possession of this, and what I can say without commenting on any investigation that they may have in corruption or fraud — is to say that their investigation does not center around Russian disinformation, and the intelligence community is playing no role with respect to that,” Ratcliffe said. “Adam Schiff saying that this is part of some Russian disinformation campaign and that the IC has assessed that or believes that is simply not true, so I appreciate the opportunity to be able to tell the American people that that is the case."
What does it matter? The information on the laptop is still subject to all the normal procedures of journalism: follow-up, look for corroboration, seek confirmation, ask questions, look for evidence tampering, and so on. Instead, the story was buried and ignored. It boggles my mind that anyone could defend this as proper behaviour by the press.
> The information on the laptop is still subject to all the normal procedures of journalism: follow-up, look for corroboration, seek confirmation, ask questions
And The New York Post did none of this.
There are plenty of other articles written by about it by almost every news outlet[1]; it was never "buried". The difference was they treated the suspicious weird story as exactly that, instead of immediately rushing to conclusions.
Of course there is a real laptop, and the content published from it is probably real too, and the laptop may very well have belonged to Hunter. But we don't have the full context, and the initial reporting was suspicious as hell.
And none of this means the narrative it's used for is real (i.e. the claim that Joe Biden has corrupt connections to Ukraine). We saw this with previously leaked emails of DNC, Weiner, etc. where the intended meaning was twisted to "prove" some grand conspiracy. The emails were real, the conspiracy was bullshit.
That Hunter Biden is a bit of a screw-up is not controversial. That this somehow automatically reflects badly on his father is.
We live in a world of subjective truths. "Hunter Biden laptop is fake" is to the left what "wide spread voter fraud" is to the right. People are too emotionally invested to have adult conversation on these topics.
There is ample evidence of a fair election I have seen zero verification that the laptop belonged to hunter Biden in the first place and a lot of reasons to believe that the story is largely fabricated. Specifically its entirely sure that the laptop exists. It's possible it contains some actual stolen data in the same way that a lot of celebrities nudes are now out there due to a vulnerability in icloud.
Its not clear to ME that the physical device ever belonged to Hunter Biden or that it contains anything like what they claim it contains. The single source of truth is massively tainted because the source is a lying scumbag with zero integrity. If you conclude otherwise I conclude its because its the answer you wish were true.
Zero verification minus the dozens of Hunter Biden dick pics and pics of him around drugs or whatever. Could easily scrape metadata to figure out if it was def his laptop or not. Macs send data to their servers whenever an application is open...and also probably have location data on the specific device ID. Could simply cross reference that with the location of Bidens house. Or even look at the wifi connections....does it have the password saved for Hunter Biden's home wifi? Simple stuff to find some answers but the truth is you want to believe it's a conspiracy theory so you will instead bury your head in the sand and be ignorant of facts.
Also, there's ample evidence of an unfair election as well and zero credible verification of any results.
You are totally missing the forest for the trees. Is there a single piece of information or revelation from the “laptop” that has been disputed, denied, or debunked? No. More importantly, have the mainstream American press managed to get the Bidens to address any of the insinuations stemming from materials? They haven’t even tried: they’ve decided to settle for whatever generic comment the Bidens put out through their press agents.
That doesn't really apply when theres a bunch of dick pics on an ACTUAL COMPUTER EVERYONE REFUSES TO LOOK AT. Jesus just check the saved wifi network passwords....if Hunter Biden's house network is saved on it, safe to say it's his laptop. Instead ppl like you unintelligently refer to it as "unproven nonsense" and bury your head in the sand.
I don't have access to the computer nor the raw data. I was underwhelmed by the original news article and never saw anything that changed my mind thereafter. I'm not refusing too look at a computer nobody has access to.
Maybe they ought to have leaked the raw data for me to look at.
I suggest you read up on the scandal more, you either leave out details willingly or you are severely ignorant of the facts.
When you say "for some reason" you are alluding that there is no answer and you're trying to downplay it, you are lying.
The laptop was turned in by Hunter because it was waterlogged. He signed the form. When he didn't come back in to get it and the owner noticed the illegal things on it, a copy of the hard drive was first given to the FBI, another was later given to Rudy because nothing was done by the FBI.
The emails and photos on the laptop have not been disputed. His business partner has confirmed the emails, and the DKIM of at least one of the emails have been verified.
Ironically, DM did enough journalistic leg work that they managed to get their hands on a copy of Hunter Biden's hard drive and had "forensic expert" examine it. Something the rest of the "reputable" media couldn't do.
> After obtaining a copy of the hard drive, DailyMail.com commissioned top cyber forensics experts Maryman & Associates to analyze its data and determine whether the laptop's contents were real.
Company name is listed. You'd have to go ask the cyber-firm they used, any outlet could verify it and write a story debunking it if they wanted. Something tells me they don't want to because they know it's true.
That an individual stolen email could be released without ever having a laptop belonging to you. If they had jack shit they would have leaked everything.
Look how hard you're trying to ignore and twist facts to mold them to what you want to believe. It's literally astonishing to see.
Look up what cognitive dissonance is. You're experiencing a serious case of this here. I'd urge you to reanalyze how you reach conclusions moving forward, there's probably other areas of your life where you're doing the same thing.
Giuliani is an incredibly unreliable source, a known and prolific liar. Without the ability to interogate the evidence directly anything that comes from him is as reliable as he is.
That is literally how human communications networks work reliability of speaker is a pre filter for analysis of evidence. Do you specifically suggest that Giuliani is a reliable source?
If he's not anything whose exclusive providence is established through him is contaminated. Anything anymore including video is trivial to fake if you have resources and the laptop which whose very existence seems so unlikely turned up with maximal political convenience.
In brief we are supposed to believe Hunter filled a laptop with incriminating evidence, then dropped it off at a trumptards computer repair shop in a state he doesn't live in and forgot about. We are also to believe that he happily gave him the login to unlock the encrypted drive full of potentially election killing data that just happened to come into ghoulianis hands.
It's amazing that you believe this shit without hard evidence.
Projection. This is scary to you because you're not allowed to know it's true. Your President and his son are corrupt.
--- to others in the thread ---
> After obtaining a copy of the hard drive, DailyMail.com commissioned top cyber forensics experts Maryman & Associates to analyze its data and determine whether the laptop's contents were real.
Company name is listed. You'd have to go ask the cyber-firm they used, any outlet could verify it and write a story debunking it if they wanted. Something tells me they don't want to because they know it's true.
He literally presented all facts and hard evidence, but your brain somehow rejected all that, offered no response to anything he presented, and instead came up with this completely unintelligent response.
You should seriously reanalyze how you reach conclusions and look up what cognitive dissonance is.
If I had a mental s/Daily Mail/Reputable Newspaper/g I'd be able to give this article a little more time. The Daily Mail do seems, from my anecdotia, to be gaming the system.
I suspect few would care if Google gave manipulative scientology articles a relatively poor search rank. The Daily Mail is absolutely no where near that bad. But they are certainly close to the definition of dog-whistle manipulation.
Where's the line? This, of course, assumes their poor search rank isn't because Google has detected they're doing something shady, which due to the Daily Mail's history is not unlikely.
There are hundreds (if not thousands) of other signals that the Google search engines considers over and above back-links. This includes which links users click on the results.
Google has been caught doing a lot of seriously anticompetitive things, like colluding with Facebook to establish a duopoly, in exchange for things like scanning WhatsApp chat backups uploaded to Google Drive. Or adding an artificial 2 second wait to non-AMP ads.
It wouldn't surprise me if this claim is true: here's to the discovery process to figure it out.
I believe you're referring to the lawsuit from last year filed by the Texas attorney general. It's a complaint where nothing has been proved in relation to the scanning of WhatsApp backups.
Unless there's something new on this case that I haven't seen?
I know nothing about the case, but surely "nothing has been proved" just means there hasn't been an outcome yet? Attorney generals tend not to file cases unless they believe something to be true, at the very least on the balance of probabilities.
This is not true in Texas and other red states. The Attorney General of Texas files political cases that have no basis in law or fact. He filed the election lawsuit which was soundly rejected by SCOTUS, for instance.
I've perused that filing in the past. Most of the language is about how votes "could" be fraudulent, with little to no actual proof that votes were cast or counted fraudulently.
I do remember it using that "1 in quadrillion" statistic that appeared pretty questionable even on the surface.
> If nothing else, the math and statistics cited should be of interest.
This is true, but only because it is such an amazing example of bad statistics. It asserts that there is a “less than one in a quadrillion statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States”. It bases this on two things.
First is that Trump had an early lead, so it is statistically impossible for Biden to have ended up winning. Obviously, it fails to account for the fact that votes are not randomly distributed and mail in votes heavily favored Biden.
Second, that Biden performed better when compared to Clinton in 2016. Obviously, it fails to account for the fact that people vote differently at different times and for different people. The same differences would be seen comparing Kerry/Obama or Dole/Bush.
Yes, they would spend it even if they were on the right side of the law.
This is an interesting example of a prisoners dilemma. If N companies are competing without lobbying, their lobbying costs are zero.
But if one company 'defects' and start lobbying to tilt the regulatory landscape, then every other company must also start lobbying to prevent it.
The end result is that every company lobbies against each other for no net benefit[1], despite large amounts of money spent on lobbying. Good for lobbyists, bad for the companies.
So a company spending money on lobbying doesn't really tell us anything. They may be a bad actor, a good actor, or anything in between. There are valid reason for every position in the spectrum to spent money on lobbying.
[1]. Obv the real world is far more complex than this. The lobbying may provide industry wide benefits, or may prevent the entry of new competitors, or there may be semi-random fluctuations in the regularly landscape, etc, etc, etc.
I agree that silicon valley companies are anti-competitive, but I think you are dead wrong about lobbying.
Lobbying can be a lot of things, but one of the most common is basically marketing & PR for lawmakers. If you're going to be in the news, you pay some clever marketers to make hyper-focused versions of what happened for every single individual law maker. The company wants their view to be easily understood by the 535 voting humans who are seated in congress right now. It's the second oldest trick in the book (after bribery which also ofc happens to a degree).
Lobbying can also include skullduggery and dirty tricks and also other mundane things, but it is not (and never will be) a clear sign that a company is doing something wrong.
That's from a lawsuit by a notoriously corrupt republican flak. He also filed a massively frivolous election lawsuit and is under indictment for fraud.
I don't think Google search censors anti-Google results. Not only it is likely to backfire but it is also hard work, there are millions of articles about the misdeeds by Google.
For effective censorship, one would need to first determine that the article indeed is anti-Google and then censor it in a way that doesn't damage the results (and ad revenue) too much. Google could probably pull it off but for what? Google hate drives views, and ironically, these are commonly monetized by Google itself.
Anyways, searching "artificial 2 second wait to non-AMP ads" is inconclusive. However, if you quote "non-AMP", you get the expected results. Google seems to have a peculiar way of handling dashes and the "non" in "non-AMP" seems to get lost.
> For effective censorship, one would need to first determine that the article indeed is anti-Google
You might call that "sentiment analysis". Google has published papers on it. They've refined it so much that they even turned it into a well-documented feature of their Natural Language API [0].
> Google could probably pull it off but for what? Google hate drives views, and ironically, these are commonly monetized by Google itself.
If you could assign a monetary value to showing someone an advertisement (or several), would you? Google has.
If you could assign a monetary value to someone's knowledge about government/justice actions against yourself, would you?
If you could categorize sentiment into something that can generate revenue... or perhaps something that could hurt revenue... would you?
There's money in censorship.
> Anyways, searching "artificial 2 second wait to non-AMP ads" is inconclusive
Let me make it much less inconclusive . The two searches [1] [2] both reveal the lawsuit by the Texas AG which has explicit allegations [3].
Are you suggesting that Google would censor Google Search search results relating to Google's censorship of Google Search search results? If so, could you provide a source?
A quick search I imagined doing (I even imagined that I used a VPN) turned up 10,000,000 results, 49 of which were news articles from the last 15 years detailing what, but not how, Google Search search results were censored. When I imagined clicking "Next" to see the rest of these results, I imagined that I was presented with a No CAPTCHA, asking me to identify which colored block of visual noise most closely resembled hell itself.
Edit: Oh, and then I did the search for real, and got 4.95m results of similar composition.
I feel like I am going crazy that this fact is not discussed at all.
I recall google from a decade ago being able to answer all my questions, where as now all I get is mediocre, politically-safe, canned answers with a ridiculous amount of ads.
It is enough to look at recipe websites to see that Daily Mail’s claim is clearly true. Recipe sites providing a user hostile ad-filled experience gain the top place, where as simple recipes without stories and tons of ads are nowhere to be found.
Why would Google do anything else? Website owners are paying Google to be ranked higher by essentially buying ads from Google. The difference between the ppc of a competitor and Google is the price the website owners pay. In return, Google will rank the website higher.
I believe you've got the cause and effect completely backwards. Someone that has a recipe site with no ads and no stories isn't in it for the money. In contrast, recipe sites with a ton of ads solely exist for the ad revenue—the recipes are just there as bait.
The difference is that the ad-laden sites spend 90% of their time getting their rankings up in google, the recipes are usually taken/copied from elsewhere and the big long stories are there to make the site look unique to Google, to fool it into thinking there's legitimate content there.
In the end, of course the person who spends all their time gaming Google is going to rank higher than someone who actually cares about their recipes and spends 90% of their time curating, experimenting, etc.
It's a sad state of affairs, but spammers have ruined Google.
What strikes me the most is that simple queries ("how much sun does [plant] need") only return 5 page keyword soups that barely answer your question. Google works reasonably well for more specific technical questions, but really struggles with the basic ones.
The top promoted answer leads to what looks like a reasonable site.
I think the greatest problem here is individual user bubbles. My take is that this would all go away as a problem if Google did away with behavioural tracking - thus the same query would lead to same answers globally.
The question is, how much would that degrade search quality?
The most obvious is location - 'show me chinese takeaways' is a different query depending on where you are and your past ordering profile. But its a solvable problem
> Google works reasonably well for more specific technical questions, but really struggles with the basic ones.
In the past it did, but when I try to search a line of logging output, or a line from a stack trace, Google decides to omit much of my search terms, and even goes as far as replacing some of my search terms with other terms that do not fit the context of my queries at all.
What plants are you having trouble finding that number for? I just tried corn, strawberries, rhubarb, and beans and got the answer in the first or second link.
I just remembered this because of the latest plant I bought, but I forgot which one it was. It's just an example. I felt similar frustrations with other simple questions, for example related to cooking.
I agree, it seems like results are getting worse, a few years back I could ask a question and get an answer. Now I don't even bother and go straight to sites to search, be it wikipedia/ github/ stackoverflow/ ebay. Googling for it is just a waste of time.
It’s gotten especially bad in the past few years. I had a minor health scare recently and found it incredibly difficult to find relevant search results given hundreds of different queries describing my condition.
The amount of health-related blogspam on Google is criminal, IMO. I've come across dozens of sites soliciting health advice, treatments, and "cures" that were not only not approved by the FDA, but weren't written, approved or edited by medical doctors at all.
There are going to be sick or desperate people who follow that advice, or attempt to use those "cures", and some of them will be harmed because of it.
it is hard to talk about an issue for which no solid data is available. To make a comparison, a decade ago, one would have needed to have started recording searches. Unfortunately, and this is why algorithms can be so insidous, collecting data to prove the decline of google is almost impossible.
So despite being blindingly obvious, it is difficult to make a mature discussion based on 'feelings', vague as they are.
A research that would work would be to show how irrelevant current results are. Certainly, that wouldn't be hard to prove, even without comparing it to external data.
> [DM] alleges Google "punishes" publishers in its rankings if they don't sell enough advertising space in its marketplace
> Google [says] "The Daily Mail's claims are completely inaccurate. The use of our ad tech tools has no bearing on how a publisher's website ranks in Google search."
Not a fan of either party, but I hope we get to find out who's accurate.
If anything google should downgrade the daily mail even more. Not for its content (which i personally dislike, but censorship is a risky business), but rather for its spammy practices and clickbait titles.
Then you might as well include every major media organization there is since they all thrive on sensationalism. Google should not be in the business of deciding what's appropriate for us to see. I didn't vote them in as the arbiter of truth.
Google is not in that business. The Daily Mail does not allege that Google is preventing it from being accessed. Censorship is not part of this conversation.
Google has 70% market share in searches. Any change to downgrade or not show a specific site is in fact censorship when you have a monopoly like that. The outcome is the same. Stop making excuses for these companies because they're going to do this to things you don't want them to at some point.
Who's deciding it's useless? I'm not even sure what you mean by that. You're making it sound like it's showing results that aren't what's be searched for.
If I search for something and it's related to what I'm searching for then it is not useless.
The service they provide is to decide that it's useless on your behalf, to save you wading through useless shit.
If I pay an offshore content farm to do content stuffing, do you want my gibberish in your results?
Then it becomes a question of which algorithm you want. Filtering out daily mail bollocks is the kind of thing that keeps me coming back to google. Am I concerned about the implications? sure; but here and now, it's doing exactly what I want.
No, but by using Google you did decide they were most likely to have a good answer to your query (or that they were most convenient), and if they're not allowed to rank results because of 'fairness' that would kind of break the entire value proposition of a search engine
The only way we win is if they both dump many millions into lawyers handling the case, then both get a ruling that restricts what they're doing. Just like like the Oz / FB / Google issue, I'd love all sides to lose.
Not particularly liking the DM as they have their fair share of shady dealings, but I support anyone going after Google and other big companies abusing their position.
I don’t like Google either, but the mail is an absolutely drain on society, and in my opinion has done much, much worse than Google ever has
Yeah google suppresses competition, and shamelessly sells your data, but they aren’t deliberately and carefully peddling hate and dog-whistle racism. Their business model isn’t literally to corrupt people’s minds, addict them to controversy and clastic words and profit from that. They don’t directly benefit from a less-educated society
Google was around in the 1930s, I find it hard to believe they would have come out in full support of the Nazis
""At this next vital election Britain's survival as a Great Power will depend on the existence of a well-organised Party of the Right, ready to take over responsibility for national affairs with the same directness of purpose and energy of method as Mussolini and Hitler have displayed.... That is why I say Hurrah for the Blackshirts! ... Hundreds of thousands of young British men and women would like to see their own country develop that spirit of patriotic pride and service which has transformed Germany and Italy. They cannot do better than seek out the nearest branch of the Blackshirts and make themselves acquainted with their aims and plans."
1st Lord Rothermere, The Daily Mail (15th January, 1934)
You can find numerous quotes by British and American politicians of the time approving Hitler or Stalin. E.g. Churchill praises Hitler in his 1935 book (after the purge of up to 1000 people in 1934). Roosevelt and his wife's enchantment with Stalin is another example.
yet any attempt to counteract that (natural human) perversion of the platform they provide, and an angry mob forms and yells "censorship" and "anti trust"
What about organizations like CNN, that spend months and sometimes years on conspiracy theories, only to move on to the next one when the previous turns out to be false?
Here's for reference an example:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-a...
It’s been getting harder to find references like these online.
Stories I’ve read about can not be found anymore.
It’s like someone is messing with the search results to only give one political viewpoint.
On the plus side it’s fun learning about what your not supposed to know by seeing the fact checkers disprove a story I hadn’t yet heard about.
So convenient that the refutation ranks higher.
The article you refer to exaggerates its first claim so disingenuously that I won’t bother to read the rest. It claims:
> The New York Times on January 8 published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick's skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died
While the referenced (archived) NYT article says:
> At some point in the chaos [...] he was struck with a fire extinguisher
and
> He returned to his division office and collapsed,
There is no cause of death claimed by the NYT. No “bashing until he died” claimed.
For background, that at least one rioter (Sanford) threw a fire extinguisher and hit three cops in the head (two wearing helmets) is alleged by the FBI based video evidence[1].
They started this rumor, the rumor went around all the television stations on repeat for weeks, and then when it turned out this was based on nothing, that it was some kind of fabrication, the NYT doesn't do a front page retraction with a humble apology for stirring up the country.
Was the NYT article edited after the fact? That happens fairly often. I remember having to calm my gf down after she was so upset by the news that someone had their head bashed in with a fire extinguisher. It was definitely reported, and definitely false.
Here's the quote I see from articles alleging the NY Times reported and spread a false story: "Mr. Sicknick, 42, an officer for the Capitol Police, died on Thursday from brain injuries he sustained after Trump loyalists who overtook the complex struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials."
As best as I can tell the fire extinguisher was a different event in which officers were struck by a thrown extinguisher. Sicknick did suffer brain injuries (a stroke). The medical examiner hasn't attributed fault to possible exposure to bear spray that some protestors might have used, so his stroke is determined to be from natural causes. I think we have to wait for the accused protestor's trials to determine finally whether they assaulted Sicknick.
> Google was around in the 1930s, I find it hard to believe they would have come out in full support of the Nazis
Google supports China though, and that's not too far removed. You know people back then didn't believe that Germans ran camps despite all the evidence. It seems like the same thing is happening now - there is evidence of camps in China, but people happily buy products because it is cheap and companies wipe their faces and continue to do business there.
You know in the 30s IBM has provided the infrastructure to run those camps.
So you are making a bold claim here.
I guess I'm in the minority, but I actually like the Daily Mail. They have stories with videos and photos that I cannot get anywhere else on the Internet.
In my experience, they have better American news than many local America news outlets (much more detail and photos/videos).
While some of their stories are sensational, they also have a lot of great articles with solid journalism.
I like it as well, whenever there's some breaking story of some scandal and I want to see 'pics', DailyMail always seem to have the pics first. Like a kid, I look at the images more than I read the articles.
Ok, I might get roasted for this, but will still take a shot at it.
At what point do we say that Google has a moral responsibility to provide unbiased information? I'm not sure we can.
It is a free market after all, and Google is a private corporation.
Even if the Daily Mail's allegations are true, Google is still doing what is in it's best interest, and not illegal (afaik its not illegal to modify the algorithm of one's core product, happy to be corrected)
yes, I agree.
Whatever we do, we can't eliminate bias.
And, adding to that, as a society can we force a private company to change their algorithm to better suit our taste?
I am not sure we can.
There needs to be a larger debate on this. Maybe the courts are the right place for such a debate.
The courts are specifically not a place for debate. Courts are supposed to interpret the law independent of public opinion. Debates should occur in the legislative branch of government.
I don't think it's reasonable to compel private companies to change their search ranking algorithms because that would violate fundamental free speech principles and there is no objective standard for bias. A better solution would be to impose stricter limits on market share and dominance even on companies that aren't monopolies. That would preserve competition and give consumers real choices on which services to use.
You ask about moral responsibility and then give nothing but legal reasoning. Those are not synonymous. Google acting within the law has nothing to do with whether they are acting morally, only legally.
We can say they don't have a responsibility once we begin holding accountable those who do have a responsibility and yet still use Google to help fulfill that responsibility.
For example, I think we can agree that a teacher should have a moral responsibility to teach students in an unbiased manner. If that is the case and their teaching involves the use of google, then is the teacher not at risk for introducing bias and should be held responsible? Otherwise why even put the standard on the teacher if it can be done away with by outsourcing some of the work?
I understand your point.
But think of it as a random stranger on the street instead of a "teacher".
Just that we all like that stranger's looks. He looks intelligent and well read. Almost like a teacher at a school. Should we trust him to give us unbiased information?
Advertising models will be extinct soon enough. If only the get rich quick assholes moved elsewhere, actual protocol development could do it this decade.
So its the Daily Mail best known in the industry for their ability to rank barely legal pop starlets in revealing outfits
I suspect what happened is the daily mail was considered a low quality news site which the majority of the UK population would agree its a fair assesment.
And Piers Morgan is pretty much one of the most hated hacks in the UK.
This is absolutely disgusting. Google has appointed themselves the unaccountable police of the Internet, secretly blocking websites for unspecified "compliance issues".
> It is highly significant that—after more than three years of stonewalling and refusing to answer any questions or respond to a single demand—CEO Pichai has admitted that the technology firm controlling nearly 90 percent of worldwide search traffic has been suppressing WSWS content all along.
Political censorship is equally harmful whether done by the government or by a megacorp. When the megacorp becomes more powerful than government, it's time to either break them up or make them a public utility.
I'm not up on law. I wonder what actual law they've allegedly broken. Are there any legal precedents implying you have to rank the Daily Mail high in your organic results?
I mean I understand the words "anti-competitive" but not sure how that translated to me needing more Piers Morgan in my search results or how the judge is supposed to even rule on that.
Fair competition, google sells their rankings position of keywords to their clients in form of adsense. It now stands to reason that if Google manipulates the ranking, it's also giving or returning money. Hiding behind " THE ALGORITHM " is a scam that won't last very long.
Though say for argument's sake that Google were to rank results higher for those who spend more on ads but put a disclaimer to say so. What law would that break?
In the US, it would be the Sherman Antitrust Act. Basically, if Google is abusing their market position, they’re breaking the law. Whether they are or not, I can’t say.
If you build your business on clickbait and bullshit "journalism" you can't complain when your main source of traffic decides to squeeze a bit more cash out of your enormous money pit.
Being pro-free-market is against the interests of incumbents, and if in fact an incumbent was pro-free-market regardless then that is laudable. Incumbents are protected by regulations.
There is a lot to dislike about the Daily Mail I'm sure (I don't read it). But you aren't catching them in a moment of hypocrisy here. Everyone hates losing, doesn't mean they are wrong about what the rules of the game should be.
The article says the DM is accusing Google of burying the DM's results in favor of other news outlets'. The dispute is not about Google favoring its own news, as if there were such a thing, over the DM's.
A completely deregulated free-market economy would have no recourse to the courts. Such does not exist. I have no idea regarding the merits of the case but so far we don't know who's to get bitten.
Courts are integral to a free market. Without them all sorts of markets evaporate completely.
More generally, having a market does not mean having a government that supplies no public goods -- that is, having a government, since supplying public goods is all a government does.
The confusion may be a linguistic one -- conflation of the terms "competitive" and "unregulated", and of "a" market with "the" market.
The existence of some free markets does not imply that every market is free. Excepting failed states, nowhere is every market free -- the markets for grenades, ivory, medical licenses, political appointments, assassinations, etc. are all things most of us want either tightly controlled or entirely suppressed.
And even in an extremely competitive market, like the ones for lettuce or generic drugs, there are still important roles for government to play. Of course regulation can be and often is grossly wasteful, even corrupt. But it's also critical to our safety.
Written from the perspective that the most straightforward explanation is true:
Bad analogy. Nobody entered anyone else's business.
The defendant prefers that its users get good quality information, and the plaintiff's reputation for low quality information runs afoul of that practice.
> The defendant prefers that its users get information that a) maximises the defendant's ad revenue and b) advances the defendant's preferred narratives.
I used to be very much of the same opinion. But increasingly I find the Daily Mail to be the only place to turn for a sensible reaction to woke hysteria – like the supposed "rape culture" in schools, and the recent walkouts over the flying of the Union Jack at the Pimlico Academy.
I would have been amazed even 5 years ago too. For example, I listened to Harry and Meaghan's cringeworthy new podcast on Spotify. Afterwards I clicked around the web, trying to find some commentary that would truly sum up my feelings.
Eventually I landed on the Daily Mail's site and what do I see? A headline: "Woke Word-Salad". At that point I had to concede: okay, maybe this is where I belong.
It appears to be an idiom for a party in the wrong (Daily Mail for clickbait article) from being allowed to report that they were wronged (manipulated search results by Google) since the parent poster seemed to suggest that Daily Mail somehow deserved that treatment and two wrongs make a right.
That's a weird idiom, then, considering that Daily Mail is in the UK and Google is in the US. And considering that Daily Mail is not a search engine, so they're not comparable entities to begin with. And that I'm not even sure that Google was in the wrong here in the first place. So I was confused on multiple levels, apparently.
Not quite sure what this has to do with the idiom's inapplicability, unless "country" in it meant "world". But clearly the reason for what you point out is that the English-speaking world is way larger than the UK.
Arguably shouldn't judges follow their judgement on the cases they work on ? Throwing out baseless cases happen every day, a company abusing the system having their ridiculous complaints thrown out would be reasonable.
To me that is the basic reason for having humans in the process.
I think the point was the case should not be thrown out because the judge doesn't like the plaintiff but only if the case is baseless. You can't judge the validity of a case just because preconceived notions about the plaintiff.
Wether a case is deemed baseless is not cold and dry facts, there is a judgement of merit and intention of the filing side.
Also taking into account the surroundings of a case, including who’s involved and their history is not preconception (or then everything becomes preconception).
It’s not the same if you’re a CEO filing a suit against a grandma who shouted insanities at you when you fired their son, and if you’re a worker subject to verbal abuse from your boss.
The only difference is that the Guardian/NYT's lies are accepted enough to be dangerous.
See: russiagate; russian bounties for american soldiers; the lack of representation of blacks and minorities in initial Covid coverage, leading many to assume it did not affect them; etc.
You're going to have to do better than that. Please provide articles from The Guardian that were stating incorrect facts (not reporting allegations or personal opinions) that weren't recanted later when new evidence came to light.
Edit to clarify: you're making a statement, you should be able to provide direct proof.
Most sources claim the Guardian is mostly factually correct:
Yeah... I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole for you. You have to have been paying attention. These things turned out to be false but were continuously reported on at length as if they were true, even though plenty of sound skepticism existed at the time and a basic, continuous, genuine application of journalistic standards would have compelled then to ask, what is this based on? And discovered it was nothing or made-up.
When it comes to your links, consider that media ranking the media is perhaps not the least-biased judgment. Outlets branding themselves as fact-checkers are often particularly egregious. Snopes, for example, can't even dispassionately and accurately rate stories that do not fit a woke worldview.
I once read a NYT "fact check" that was checking a trump quote. One of the quotes was "we've been fighting in the middle east for 17 years." They rated this statement False, flat-out. Why? The correction stated, "We've been fighting in afghanistan for 17 years, but afghanistan is not the middle east. We've been fighting in the middle east for 16 years."
It completely ignored the point of the statement to issue a False rating on a technicality. Any reasonable interpretation would not have done so.
This is an example of the accuracy of modern-day "fact-checking." It's basically made up.
That's not equivalent at all. The dreadlocks story is a legitimately outrageous and racist attack. It's not journalistic ethics to write stories like a robot. The context is important. The NY Times headline includes relevant details to inform the reader. "Kids Cut Another Kid's Hair" just sounds like juvenile hijinks and isn't doing justice to the story.
The Daily Mail will actively gin up uninteresting or patently false stories with the hottest headlines they can possibly get away with. They'll skip coverage of important news if they can find a story about a prominent person misspeaking about something inconsequential. Look at the lawsuit. They were upset that publishing multiple stories a day about Piers Morgan weren't all getting top search ranking. The world doesn't need multiple stories per day about Piers Morgan any more than it needs multiple stories about celebrity bikini bodies like what's on their front page right now. DM is fluff, it's pandering, it has no redeeming value.
> "Kids Cut Another Kid's Hair" just sounds like juvenile hijinks and isn't doing justice to the story.
The alternative take is that story pretty much is just juvenile hijinks, and the NYT is pretty much ginning up a story. A lot of the kids I knew in school were horrible to each other and nobody wrote an article about them.
Most print journalism has gone to the gutter these days, the NYT isn't a respectable institution. There is a bunch of stuff on the internet that is more reliable.
But it is juvenile hijinks, and did turn out to be patently false.
> The NY Times headline includes relevant details to inform the reader.
Lets see which details were no longer relevant once the story turned out to be false, and the Times (to their credit, unlike the Mail) changed the headline to reflect that:
I would not consider anything that is written in the Daily Mail "truth" by any reasonable understanding of the word. They write op-ed pieces at best, and more often than not just make things up or deliberately twist things out of proportion or context.
All online "journalism" which uses advertising as its main source of revenue does exactly this. For example in Australia we have news.com.au who uses the exact same tactics. In fact their headlines and blurbs are even shorter than Daily Mails, forcing you to click to learn what the carefully worded (yet extremely manipulative) headline is talking about. This is not exclusive to Daily Mail.
The Daily Fail is a hate-filled stain on the name of good journalism. It ran the headlline "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" in the 1930s and it hasn't changed much since. It bears no small part in the UK's currently catastrophic situation. I hope Google takes every penny they have.
Their business so thoroughly dependent on SEO it's probably worth their while to sue. Even if they lose, getting Google to loosen up a tiny bit out of caution is worth the price.
> If you build your business on clickbait and bullshit "journalism" you can't complain when your main source of traffic decides to squeeze a bit more cash out of your enormous money pit.
I'm pointing out you're not really adding anything to the discussion. Saying you morally disapprove of the Daily Mail without substantiating it with facts isn't for HN.
The DM regularly loses libel cases for publishing fake smears about various victims. But apparently it considers these losses a cost of doing business.
It has been called out for its racism on numerous occasions.
It's notorious for wildly exaggerated tabloid abuse of legitimate refugees and immigrants.
It called judges who forced proper constitutional proceedings during Brexit "enemies of the people" - sparking a record number of complaints to the Independent Press Standards Organisation.
Its comments section is a cesspit of race hate and petty ignorance.
It literally supported Hitler before war was declared.
There isn't a rational case to be made for not disapproving of it morally.
Unlike the rest, the Mail continues to be owned by the same family.
Interestingly, the writer of the article in The Mirror that supported Hitler was one Lord Harmsworth - great grandfather of the current owner of the Mail.
Harmsworth also used to own the Mirror before it was sold and changed its political orientation.
The nicknames for the Daily Mail are quite illuminating:
The Daily Lie, The Daily Hate-Mail, The Daily Heil
Of course these could all have been generated by the left wing liberal elites who have an issue with straight forward honest reporting. Best you have a bit of a google/search engine of choice to determine which is more likely to be true. You could of course try visiting their website and seeing for yourself.
So, you support doing this to every major media outlet on the planet? Because they operate on sensationalism just like DM. I'm guessing there's particular outlets you don't want this to happen to because you agree with their bs more than opposing outlets.
Your argument can be summed up by just saying you only want information that supports your preconceived notions available. Which, is obviously bad for a variety of reasons....
Bad things happening to bad people is still bad if it’s done unjustifiably so. There’s nothing really about this story that prevents it from happening to a site you like.
To me, this is just a tired hot take. The Daily Mail regularly covers stories that others don’t, and they do so with perspectives and plain speak that others don’t provide. I feel like everyone here attacking the Daily Mail doesn’t actually read them, but are blindly repeating an opinion they’ve been told to hold, because the Daily Mail’s existence is inconvenient for other newspapers and for certain ideologies. It’s tactically easier to attack the source rather than individual pieces of content. We see the same thing with the N.Y. Post.
During these polarized times when censorship is rampant and diverse perspectives are hard to come by, I’m glad to have someone like the Daily Mail around. A recent example of a great article is their story on COVID vaccines potentially affecting menstruation (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-9446907/Some-wome...), which they wrote about before any other major news media. Read for yourself and decide how you feel about the content.
Daily Mail can fuck themselves. They published an article a complaint I filed with the Oklahoma coroners office in 2012 because it was taking 12+ months to get results when my 5yo son died. They also spun it as parents in "outrage" to get clicks and refuse to take the article down even now that there is no way it is producing revenue for them.
It is a personal testament to what most people familiar with the paper know, that it is spiteful pabulum. It is relevant in that if Google ranks search-items according to a criterion of quality, one would expect the Daily Mail to fall lower than other news sites covering the same story. Also, it's more than a little obnoxious to hand-wave an anecdote about personal loss away like this.
If someone told you this story about their dead 5 year old in person, would you be so abrasive?
I suspect if you would, rightly or wrongly, you’d probably be faced with violence
You aren’t being clever by dismissing people’s feelings and stories.
Besides, give it some thought, are you being so rude based on emotions? Would you be replying like this if there weren’t politics involved? If it was some other company the Mail were attacking?
Yes because you don't get to use your personal emotional reasons to decide what I get to see. That's the asshole move, pointing it out is not.
Lay out the facts as to why it's good/bad or don't say anything at all. Some personal story about how it made you feel bad is irrelevant and actually harmful to making an informed decision. Toddlers use emotional reasoning, be an adult.
listen, I agree with you on a certain level. I hate news reports and docs where they try to jerk my emotions with sad music and sob stories
but this is not that. this is a presumably real person telling a story that’s very sensitive to them. they’re not trying to trick you, or manipulate you. they’re just giving an example of how they were treated by the daily mail
you’re acting like a petulant autistic child
everyone - including you - uses emotional reasoning. you will learn this at some point. even if you don’t want people to be emotional, they are. the human world is emotional, and trying to navigate it while being a dick to anyone who shows emotions will serve you extremely poorly
finally your rude tone betrays your hypocrisy. you’re emotionally involved in this, and you’re not acting rationally because of it
According to who? I don't want my search results based on what you or anyone else thinks. I think CNN is horrible journalism, propaganda, they've been caught lying consistently, and their headlines are full of sensationalist bullshit but I can guarantee you Google won't touch their search results.
I'll make my own decision on whether it's bad. I do not want it filtered out before I even get to make that decision.
This desire to stop people from seeing stuff you dislike is really weird and reeks of authoritarianism. The option for you is to not click on anything from DM. Except you then go on and force your beliefs on everyone else by making it so they don't get the option to choose and that just means you want to control what they think and believe. I find that attitude abhorrent. The irony is that people doing these are supposedly so anti right wing and yet they do exactly what the Republicans were doing with censorship in the 90s.
It is my opinion that the Daily Mail is a work of fiction loosely inspired by the real world, but ultimately as disconnected from reality as Stross’s Laundry Files series.
I have no idea if their claims against Google have any merit.
Nevertheless, I want a society with rules that will protect even the worst amongst us from misbehaviour by others: pre-judging based on reputation alone leads to in-groups with power, power corrupts and attracts the corrupt, and it would all end badly.
This is the Pavlovian-style trained response every time the popular tabloid, the Daily Mail is mentioned here. It's what it is. Get over it. Of course it's pleasant to feel a cut above the six million who buy the print copy and the thirty million plus who read it online but please bear in mind it's not aimed at your level of readership. Good however that you manage to scan it most days so that you can be assured it's a work of fiction. Personally I'd give it a miss and keep to the more subtle works of fiction in the upmarket section of the press.
The reading level is no problem. My concern isn’t the press ELI5-ing 3D printers as being “like Star Trek style replicators”. Make everything as easy to read and understand as possible!
My first concern is when things are invented whole-cloth, or misrepresented badly enough they might as well be, and when corrections are either not forthcoming or only happen after legal action: https://listverse.com/2015/06/23/10-egregiously-false-storie...
My second concern is when the publication contradicts itself, which DM is famous for with regard to what causes and cures cancer: https://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/
> Personally I'd give it a miss and keep to the more subtle works of fiction in the upmarket section of the press.
Thinking of Trek-tech and upmarket publications, I have had a similar attitude towards New Scientist ever since the EM drive was on the front cover.
This problem isn’t just a Daily Mail problem, but the story this thread is attached to is about the DM, so they’re the ones I’m focusing my criticism on.
Also the Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project -- "A blog following the Daily Mail’s ongoing mission to divide all the inanimate objects in the world into those that cause or cure cancer."
That list is more than a little misleading; it's outright lying in some cases:
The list says that DM said being left-handed causes cancer. The link to the DM article is simply reporting the peer-reviewed and published medical research that found a higher risk of breast cancer in a study of 12000 women.
Honestly, that list is more fake-news than "the russians did it!"
It's a list poking fun at their repeated reporting of things related to cancer - you don't have to take "causes" literally. It's very tongue in the cheek.
Also, as mentioned on top: "However, it is worth noting that some of the entries are backed up by scientific fact. It’s just a shame that the vast majority are fear-stoking exaggerations and lies."
So when I search for code issues or bugs I get the preferred ideology on fixes? That’s good to know I guess my code has been Google ideologic for years.
The conflict of interest between Google's Search and Advertisement divisions is too problematic and these divisions need to be split into separate companies.
Ad ranking and search ranking are surprisingly similar problems: show what the user is likely to click. Main difference is what dataset you draw from. So you'd likely find that there is quite a lot of overlap between their search and ad divisions and little would change by splitting out the non search ads from the search ads.
They may be similar from a technical standpoint, but as a user I think the two (ad and search) are quite different and I have almost diametrically opposed feelings about them.
Stop using Google, it's a bad company with bad practices and it's search engine is becoming increasingly worse at providing good results. There are other options that are just as good now.
Our worthless government needs to do their job and break them up.
'The Daily Mail' has a case. Go and visit their site right now [1] and tell me where the inflammatory or irresponsible headline is.
Now try 'The Daily Beast' [2], it's I think a little bit worse, and you have this flame-nugget: "White Violence Links Black Lives From Emmett Till to Floyd" which is an interesting thesis, but kind of racist.
The DM really isn't that bad, and much like the issue of 'Fidel Castro' it's a litmus test to see if people are emotionally clouded ideologues or not.
the daily mail website is literally unusable on mobile. other sites are bad, but I’ve not seen a single other one where you literally can’t scroll down the page
that I would pick on this one doesn’t highlight the bias in the system, it highlights that the article I’m commenting on is about the daily mail
The issue has nothing to do with technology, it has to do with 'quality' information ranking and Google's supposed bias with regards to who they deem 'credible' and not.
Breitbart is a much more aggressive tabloid, and individuals within Google wanted to ban it outright, arguably because of their 'poor quality' but mostly because their political bias.
My point is that if there is a 'right wing tabloid with questionable legitimacy' that might make people uncomfortable, it's Breitbart. Not The DM.
People are lamenting the DM here because they use 'click bait' headlines and 'misrepresent' information, people are using shamefully hyperbolic language on this thread.
But in reality The DM is just a regular tabloid, and it's not that bad - technical quality issues notwithstanding.
A quick test does bear out this claim[1], I see no Daily Mail articles with that search even though they are indexed[2]. However DuckDuckGo has similar results[3], so...
A much more likely explanation is that 1) The Daily Mail is just a shitty "newspaper" hardly even worthy of the title and not generally considered to produce high-quality content, and/or 2) that the other articles were much more widely shared, linked, etc. and much of society at large ignored the nonsense from The Daily Mail.
There's a reason The Daily Mail is generally not accepted as a reliable source on Wikipedia.
Aside: I am flabbergasted that Piers Morgan managed to survive this long at all, considering he's been one of the most disliked people on TV for a long time (and for good reason IMO).
[1]: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Piers+Morgan+Duchess+of+Su...
[2]: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Piers+Morgan+Duchess+of+Su...
[3]: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Piers+Morgan+Duchess+of+Sus...