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I wanted to comment on the posts in the Jusse Smollitt thread but I think this deserves it's own thread. Tucker Carlson is doing a Tech Tyranny series and it's worth discussing. It's really SCARY what these companies are doing and how much influence they wield.
They talked about how the results of searches far and away favor liberal sites. They talked about how Google had get out the vote sites that were directed at Latinos to influence the election their way. If you want to some of it, you can Google Tucker Carlson tech tyranny and watch some of the segments.
'They' must be right -- right.
You don't see any bias on Tucker Carlson ......lolol.
The irony -- quoting Tucker Carlson about being biased -- lololol.
We can't make this stuff up anymore because it isn't funny because it is our freak'n real life.
Having used search since LONG before google as even an idea (webcrawler by aol, alta vista, excite, etc) I can assure the consuming public that Google uses actual math to figure out what is returned and what isn't.
Watch what happens next. That Actor with TC initials will start a boycott....and absolutely nothing will happen....because, the number of people clueless enough to think Google "favors" anything other than common "Western Values" is close to zero.
Of course, if one DOES NOT favor western values, then the results would seem to be off.
Not strictly true.
Web search results are algorithmically derived. However other results presented may be editorialized, or promoted for various reasons.
The issue is determining what are web search results and what could be editorial, since it's not 100% clear to non-techies what is even an ad (which would be promoted content).
Further a specific URL or range of URLs can be weighted, thus presented lower in the overall results, or higher. Of course URLs can be excluded entirely. This is entirely by design, and was not created to skew results, but that doesn't mean it can't be, its purpose is to help filter suspect or known sites whose content is or maybe illegal in that market.
Now whether or not any of this is being done to promote an agenda or not is not known. But I can guarantee Google can manage on a case by case basis whether any URL is higher or lower in the ranking, with sufficient effort it could be used to promote an agenda. Finally of course the actual algorithmic results are not immune to validation bias, all things algorithmic are limited by the perceptions of their creators, where the algorithm is operating at high granularity (say sorting), the inherent bias is low, but when you move into low granularity (more subjective), inherent biases can become problematic, typically your run a tenth man protocol who's sole role is to prove algorithmic bias, however there may be lower reward for identifying bias than not.
The issue is that conformity is a strong motivation working in any group, those who do not conform are often "managed out" even in tech, there is an acceptable level of non-conformity, see how long someone will last at interview at any tech if they say they don't like that companies products, and that there are better alternatives. It's a significant problem, and very hard to fix.
OP, since you seem to like the propaganda Tucker spews I would recommend a documentary on Amazon Prime titled "The Creepy Line". Carlson had his hand in the movie. It was so extremely biased that I couldnt finish watching it.
Simple solution. Don't use their products if you don't agree with their policies.
I haven't used facebook for years since it became clear they had NO intention of keeping any data you had on their site private.
That's easier said than done. Maybe one can easily log off Facebook forever but it's not so easy with Google. When they hold as large a share of the market as they do, they wield a huge amount of influence. To say otherwise is dishonest or naive.
The only people that are going to have full understanding of Googles algo is a handful of Google engineers at the top. Google claims it is blind but that doesn't mean it's not intentionally or unintentionally bias. In fact studying and trying to understand those biases is a huge industry, there are people that have sites they have been analyzing forever. It's constantly being tweaked and it can be tweaked as often as each month. I'm rebuilding a website for friend's business now and looking at the competition I was able to guarantee him top search results above them. I'm no expert but have been around long enough to know what works well in moderately competitive field.
To have a site rank well there is many factors considered. Content, who is linking to you, who you are linking to,correct markup, is the site mobile friendly, do have a lot of content above the "fold", server speed, age of the site on and on.
In any event it would be very difficult to know if Google Search is intentionally being biased one way or the other.
Web search results are algorithmically derived. However other results presented may be editorialized, or promoted for various reasons.
Ads on the "organic" Google search results will always be tagged as ads. As far as manual actions against site they will be listed in Google Search console if you have an account. That is typically the result of hacked server spewing malware though.
Simple solution. Don't use their products if you don't agree with their policies.
Me giving up Google changes nothing. How are personal boycotts any kind of solution to the problem of these mega-corporations' malign influence on society? Please explain.
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