111–120 of 138 posts
The vast majority of major accredited news media is negative towards Trump, ergo searches mostly reflect that. Shocking revelation.
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> The quickness by the administration to attack media, promote propaganda, and now censorship is frightening. How exactly is trump promoting censorship here? Isn't he doing the exact opposite? Isn't he promoting free speech? And frankly, I think it's great that the media and the president have an adversarial relationship. The president should attack the media ( free speech ) and the media should attack the president…
Censorship isn't the best word for this, but he's certainly not promoting free speech here. Promoting free speech would mean acknowledging that Google can do whatever it wants, and say whatever it wants to say via its search results, whether the government likes the results or not. Regarding the media, there's nothing wrong with the president and the media having an adversarial relationship and in fact I think that's…
What if Google holds a monopolistic position in the search market, and its actions are detrimental to its users? What if what the government is doing is enforcing anti-trust rules?
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We live in such a country now but that could change at any time. If the government starts dictating search results then we will not be a free country. Unfortunately causality doesn't go the other way.
As a republic, governed by the US Constitution, the 1st Amendment is clearly written to prevent such stupidity. I can't believe this is even being entertained on HN.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Patreon and others were able to grow to the size they did based on Safe Harbor provisions that exempted them from libel laws under the premise that they were neutral platforms that allowed anybody to post content etc.. Newspapers and television stations are held liable for their content. Once they started to editorialize by banning things under subjective pretexts such as "hate speech" they…
Google, in particular, did not, because web crawler results are not user-submitted content and thus are not within the scope of the CDA safe harbor.
They are, instead protected from libel a way that is open to, and frequently used by, newspapers: they mostly (i.e., in the form of search results) report what amounts to “X person said Y”, which is (to the extent it is true, whether or not Y is true) absolutely protected from libel in the US. And that would be true even if they preferentially promoted (or even exclusively carried) content favorable to (or, alternatively, disfavorable to) one viewpoint.
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As a republic, governed by the US Constitution, the 1st Amendment is clearly written to prevent such stupidity. I can't believe this is even being entertained on HN.
The first amendment is just a piece of paper unless someone enforces it. When the head of the executive branch of government starts talking openly about violating it, it's (past) time to take the threat seriously.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Patreon and others were able to grow to the size they did based on Safe Harbor provisions that exempted them from libel laws under the premise that they were neutral platforms that allowed anybody to post content etc.. Newspapers and television stations are held liable for their content. Once they started to editorialize by banning things under subjective pretexts such as "hate speech" they…
It's also possible that they consciously decided to stop being neutral (e.g. Zuckerberg's statement in Congress about being like a publisher) which would ultimately lead to regulation and thus reduce competition against them and "outsource" all the drama against them over to Congress.
Why would acting as a publisher lead to government content regulations? Do we not have freedom of the press guaranteed by the Constitution?
IF (a big IF) Google was actually biased, you could go to their competitor. But if there's no other real competitor then IMO the solution isn't to regulate Google, but to fix root cause problems which led to there only being one company controlling all search (AKA breaking up the monopoly)
I think it's appropriate to quote Vint Cerf here, "The internet is a reflection of our society and that mirror is going to be reflecting what we see. If we do not like what we see in that mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society." ―Vint Cerf https://icannwiki.org/Vinton_Cerf
Now replace “voting” with “posting” and you’re pretty close to how modern social media works.
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This is a weird argument to have. It raises many questions. Like, it's one thing to suggest maybe libel laws should apply to big tech companies. But do we really want to force them to be "politically neutral?" Such a thing literally does not exist, for one thing; but who gets to define it? For example, can the president order that a given news source appear higher in the rankings? Who decides what deserves to be rank…
> But do we really want to force them to be "politically neutral?" Such a thing literally does not exist, for one thing; but who gets to define it? Just a naive idea but personally, I'd say a platform is politically neutral if it takes no action to prioritise or remove content unless required by law. This puts what should and shouldn't be on the platform in the hands of lawmakers, who, theoretically at least, represe…
Let's say a far right conspiracy blog is posting a conspiracy about a school shooting before any information is really available. Suddenly, it's on top of Google and being surfaced prominently on Facebook.
People don't like this because these neutral companies are now promoting fake, definitely potentially harmful stories.
But if you penalize them for this, from one viewpoint, you are suppressing political opinion.
That's with a conspiracy; but if you drag the slider backwards, you find that there's no actual tipping point where it's clear action should be taken. Further, what if the far right has more conspiracy theorist than the far left? It would be partisan to not run fake news!
Going more subtle, bias in algorithms is a thing. Like PageRank is based on the number of high quality links to your page, right? What happens when rightwing views are underrepresented because their network of links is naturally considered less high quality due to being less linked around the web?
And if you think people would never make arguments like this, try to remember how often people fight over the correlation of politics and population density. It's why the United States has a Senate and a House.
Now, they just head straight for the front door themselves: “we don't like (what we perceive as) the political viewpoint on Google results, so we’re considering regulating it so that they have to say what we’d prefer”.
Short of the kind of coordinated activity with a campaign that would be an illegal contribution (which Trump should know plenty about, since he's been directly implicated in it with regard to AMI and the payoff to cover up his affair with Karen McDougal), even if Google's presentation was deliberately, partisanly, politically biased, that would be core free speech/press protected by he first Amendment.