GOOGLE BUSTED! - Time for a reckoning

[hooligan]

It's been three weeks since the OP. When does the reckoning start?

[BentBow]

Originally Posted by hooligan

Bing, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo and many others find your lack of faith disturbing...

Search engineering is not all that Google is involved in. Their tentacles reach far.

[yeahboy79]

Yawn....this is a whole lot of nothing. if you want to talk about skewing, this whole thing is skewing the story to play conservatives as a victim. I actually took the time and read the articles and watched the videos. I'll try to lay out a few points made and someone please tell me why it's bad.

Preface:
Can we all agree that Russians meddled in the election?
Can we agree that Russians spread misinformation about the Democratic candidates?
Can we all agree that we want an educated voting public to decide on matter of facts?
If you said No to any of those then you can probably stop reading now because you can't be helped.

So now lets get to the issues at hand in the allegations. They say Google is adjusting and providing political bias into the search results but they really don't give much facts to back it up. They also didn't provide any evidence that this was purposefully targeting conservatives. They provided an explanation of the algorithms Google is using to rank search results and it makes complete sense if you agree with the above questions.

As an example, if you searched for a term on Trump, which would you TRUST more in the search results? the article from CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC, washingtonPost, Wallstreet Journal, etc or an article on the site www.trumpisthegreatestPresident.com which was created 2 weeks ago? This same holds true, by the way, for www.WarrenWillWin.com or any other made up site that is obviously not a reliable source. The allegations also seem to just be how google RANKS the information. Seems to me like this would still be available so if you really would like to see that false information, you can just go to page 206 in the search results.

So just like any incident, anyone should be going back and saying 'how did the Russians use our service to attack the elections and how can we prevent the Russians (or anyone) from affecting the election again?' Obviously right now it looks like they are suppressing information beneficial to conservatives because, well, that was the vast majority of the Russian interference.

Finally, the big 'gotcha' was the video of the google executive saying they have to prevent another Trump situation in 2020. That sounds menacing without context but if you agree with the preface questions above, isn't that an obvious statement regardless of your political party? We definitely need to prevent the situation where foreign (and domestic) are trying to influence an election through misinformation and social engineering.

[hooligan]

Originally Posted by yeahboy79

Yawn....this is a whole lot of nothing. if you want to talk about skewing, this whole thing is skewing the story to play conservatives as a victim. I actually took the time and read the articles and watched the videos. I'll try to lay out a few points made and someone please tell me why it's bad.

Preface:
Can we all agree that Russians meddled in the election?
Can we agree that Russians spread misinformation about the Democratic candidates?
Can we all agree that we want an educated voting public to decide on matter of facts?
If you said No to any of those then you can probably stop reading now because you can't be helped.

So now lets get to the issues at hand in the allegations. They say Google is adjusting and providing political bias into the search results but they really don't give much facts to back it up. They also didn't provide any evidence that this was purposefully targeting conservatives. They provided an explanation of the algorithms Google is using to rank search results and it makes complete sense if you agree with the above questions.

As an example, if you searched for a term on Trump, which would you TRUST more in the search results? the article from CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC, washingtonPost, Wallstreet Journal, etc or an article on the site www.trumpisthegreatestPresident.com which was created 2 weeks ago? This same holds true, by the way, for www.WarrenWillWin.com or any other made up site that is obviously not a reliable source. The allegations also seem to just be how google RANKS the information. Seems to me like this would still be available so if you really would like to see that false information, you can just go to page 206 in the search results.

So just like any incident, anyone should be going back and saying 'how did the Russians use our service to attack the elections and how can we prevent the Russians (or anyone) from affecting the election again?' Obviously right now it looks like they are suppressing information beneficial to conservatives because, well, that was the vast majority of the Russian interference.

Finally, the big 'gotcha' was the video of the google executive saying they have to prevent another Trump situation in 2020. That sounds menacing without context but if you agree with the preface questions above, isn't that an obvious statement regardless of your political party? We definitely need to prevent the situation where foreign (and domestic) are trying to influence an election through misinformation and social engineering.

Exactly. It won't stop the blind partisans, however. Reps to you.

[craigiri]

Originally Posted by BentBow

Search engineering is not all that Google is involved in. Their tentacles reach far.

You mean to say the Kochs not only run 100's of various business under different names, but spend much more than any other corporation or group influencing legislation and politics!

Does google own any think tanks in DC akin to Cato and AFP and the others?

How many years have you been calling for a Koch "reckoning"?

Their tentacles extend to my toilet paper and roof....

[hooligan]

Originally Posted by BentBow

Search engineering is not all that Google is involved in. Their tentacles reach far.

What other things are they involved in that they have a "monopoly" over, do you reckon?

[craigiri]

Originally Posted by yeahboy79

Yawn....this is a whole lot of nothing. if you want to talk about skewing, this whole thing is skewing the story to play conservatives as a victim. I actually took the time and read the articles and watched the videos. I'll try to lay out a few points made and someone please tell me why it's bad.

Finally, the big 'gotcha' was the video of the google executive saying they have to prevent another Trump situation in 2020. That sounds menacing without context but if you agree with the preface questions above, isn't that an obvious statement regardless of your political party? We definitely need to prevent the situation where foreign (and domestic) are trying to influence an election through misinformation and social engineering.

Google execs and corporation are free to do anything they want to influence elections. I agree that foreign corporations should not engage in such, but since Citizens United and other ruling claim Corporations are People with the full set of Rights, Google is free to stump for logic and reason in politics.

In fact, I would expect them to do so.

So I guess we agree.

Google is trying their best to counter foreign influence as well as counter the use of their platforms to spread disinformation. At the same time, they are a company with certain values and they have the full right to put those values forward.