Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account • Hacker News Board

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#131

Post by Syama » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 9:29 PM UTC

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #105

xster wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you think The Verge/Comcast is an independent source when MSNBC/Comcast spent years firing their anchormen for questioning foreign invasions and WMDs. If you boiled Gabbard down to a single issue, it would be anti-war.

Weird, I'd say "pro-dictator." That kinda jives with anti-war, depending on which war you're talking about, though, I suppose. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/26/tulsi-gabbar... https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/06/politics/tulsi-gabbard-syria-...

Tulsi's trip was preapproved a month in advance by the House Ethics committee.

She was assigned to and serves on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, determining policy that directly impacts the entire world. Visiting other countries on fact-finding missions falls cleanly within the jurisdiction of her responsibilities to her constituents and to our country.

Seeking to understand all sides in the Syrian conflict, Tulsi met with Assad's opposition, displaced families and Gov officials from several countries. She did not plan to meet with Assad, but when invited took the chance to search for a peaceful solution. https://medium.com/@TulsiGabbard/the-syrian-people-desperate...

Tulsi was heroic for calling out the plan to arm al-Qaeda to overthrow the gov of Syria and heroic for meeting with Assad at the risk of political backlash, in the name of peace.

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#132

Post by Laukhi64 » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 9:44 PM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #125

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assad is not and never has been a threat to you or anyone you know 1. That's an interesting assumption you make. 2. Why would I have to know someone personally to empathize with them? 3. U.S. foreign policy, as conducted by our military, has pretty consistently been a disaster for decades. I agree wholeheartedly with you on that point.

1. It would be easy to refute, wouldn't it? If you or anyone in your family have ever been ISIS members, by all means correct me. 2. I'm glad to know that you have empathy for war victims. When has a war with USA ever saved lives? Didn't the ramp-up to the planned Syria war look just like previous ramp-ups to our wars in other Muslim nations? Those media projects were later found to be completely false (as has the Sy…

I don't really disagree with anything else you say, but...

>When has a war with USA ever saved lives?

I don't know. I think there was a war of note which might have been around the 1940s?

It's fine to say that the costs of an interventionist foreign policy don't outweigh the benefits; I don't necessarily disagree with that. But it's absolutely inaccurate to say that the benefits don't exist. USA at the very least contributed a great deal to the European Theatre, and Imperial Japan was dethroned almost entirely due to their effort.

It turns out that all three of Italy, Germany, and Japan were successfully occupied and now have stable and democratic governments, as well.

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#133

Post by DoreenMichele » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 9:54 PM UTC

Laukhi64 wrote: post #132

jessaustin wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. It would be easy to refute, wouldn't it? If you or anyone in your family have ever been ISIS members, by all means correct me. 2. I'm glad to know that you have empathy for war victims. When has a war with USA ever saved lives? Didn't the ramp-up to the planned Syria war look just like previous ramp-ups to our wars in other Muslim nations? Those media projects were later found to be completely false (as has the Sy…

I don't really disagree with anything else you say, but... >When has a war with USA ever saved lives? I don't know. I think there was a war of note which might have been around the 1940s? It's fine to say that the costs of an interventionist foreign policy don't outweigh the benefits; I don't necessarily disagree with that. But it's absolutely inaccurate to say that the benefits don't exist. USA at the very least con…

I don't know. I think there was a war of note which might have been around the 1940s?

Nitpicking your nitpick:

Contrary to the American tendency to act like we singlehandedly won WW2, we were a latecomer to the war and not a central power prior to that war. There were many countries involved in it.

It's possible that the US played a critical role in Japan's surrender. It's also possible they would have surrendered anyway, we just have no means to go back in time, run the scenario twice and see how it would go without the US.

In the United States, generations were taught that Japan would never have surrendered so quickly without use of the atomic bomb and that victory would have required a bloody invasion of the Japanese mainland, costing hundreds of thousands of lives.

Japanese students were generally taught a very different narrative: that Japan already had been defeated and dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki three days apart was a geopolitical calculation to keep the Soviet Union at bay.

https://www.stripes.com/news/special-reports/world-war-ii-th...

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#134

Post by jinushaun » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 10:00 PM UTC

cwkoss wrote: post #17

slg wrote: post #9

It might be more appropriate to link to a indepdent article about this rather than Gabbard's site. Here is one from The Verge [1]. It sounds like Google's fraud/spam algorithms automatically triggered the suspension (maybe due to a large increase in spend meant to build on Gabbard's post debate momentum). The account was unlocked after human intervention. Gabbard insinuates the initial suspension was politically moti…

> Gabbard insinuates the initial suspension was politically motivated The subtext I'm reading is that the "major" political accounts probably have specific flags set by Google internally to prevent automated shut-offs like this. If Google is not applying these whitelist flags to all candidates in a fair and systematic fashion, it would effectively be utilizing their corporate resources to disproportionately benefit c…

It's like keeping track of pirated content. You're assuming Google is on top of everything happening in the world. They're not and simply can't be.

I would not be surprised if this was a manually curated whitelist that a human has to add to a table.

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#135

Post by jessaustin » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

Laukhi64 wrote: post #132

jessaustin wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. It would be easy to refute, wouldn't it? If you or anyone in your family have ever been ISIS members, by all means correct me. 2. I'm glad to know that you have empathy for war victims. When has a war with USA ever saved lives? Didn't the ramp-up to the planned Syria war look just like previous ramp-ups to our wars in other Muslim nations? Those media projects were later found to be completely false (as has the Sy…

I don't really disagree with anything else you say, but... >When has a war with USA ever saved lives? I don't know. I think there was a war of note which might have been around the 1940s? It's fine to say that the costs of an interventionist foreign policy don't outweigh the benefits; I don't necessarily disagree with that. But it's absolutely inaccurate to say that the benefits don't exist. USA at the very least con…

OK sure that might be an exception, not least because the Nazis were, like... Nazis. [EDIT: The "might" is intentional. If USA had stayed home, the war might have ended in 1943. Isn't it possible that fewer people would have died in a much shorter war?] If you don't like Nazis, however, I don't think you can support Wilson's lying our way into WWI. That certainly cost lives, and by forcing Germany into an untenable position it created the Nazis, the Holocaust, the horrific casualties suffered by the Soviets, etc. None of those things were actually prevented by our entering WWII, either.

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#136

Post by bhk » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 10:11 PM UTC

moultano wrote: post #111

word-reader wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as an example: a controversial political figure's popular website is buried on page 5 of Google results (underneath a mountain of criticism) when you search for his name, despite being in the top 3 results of page 1 for all of Qwant, DDG, Bing, Mojeek, and Yandex. Obviously, the website is being downranked for being full of "conspiracy theories and fake news" (I wouldn't completely disagree that it is). But who…

I'd be happy to pass it along to debug if you have a specific query in mind. In the cases of this I've seen in the past, there's been a specific actionable bug that we were able to fix. (Lots of other search engines use each other as backends, so don't be too surprised when they return consistent results.)

Infowars being buried so deeply in the "Alex Jones" results is highly suspicious. How can Google's results be so ineffective compared to other search engines?

The "Pelosi drunk" results are also markedly different from DDG. I just now tried this one because the results were being manually short-circuited the day after the video went viral, both by DDG and Google (but not Bing). It appears that DDG has reverted to delivering actual results for that query while Google's appear curated.

During the election some fuss was made over auto-completion for "Hillary" vs. "Trump" searches ... apparently embarrassing for Google because these were soon "fixed".

I could go on and on.

Do you at least admit that Google restricts searches for the Christchurch shooting video? Maybe your definition of "political reasons" is very narrow.

I don't actually have a problem with burying Alex Jones. The only reason I have enough interest to engage in this discussion is that Google continues to deny these things.

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#137

Post by moultano » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

word-reader wrote: post #116

moultano wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be happy to pass it along to debug if you have a specific query in mind. In the cases of this I've seen in the past, there's been a specific actionable bug that we were able to fix. (Lots of other search engines use each other as backends, so don't be too surprised when they return consistent results.)

I think DDG and Qwant basically use Bing as a backend, potentially augmenting with their own crawlers. Yandex and Mojeek use all their own stuff, as far as I can tell. The query is "alex jones". At least put the garbage website at the bottom of page 1 where most people who aren't already looking for it still won't click it, page 5 is just lacking in subtlety.

Thanks, I'll pass it along.

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#138

Post by favorited » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

cwkoss wrote: post #117

favorited wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sort of like how Bernie got locked out of DNC databases You mean after his staff got caught snooping around Hillary's campaign data? https://time.com/4155185/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-data...

Bernie's campaign reported the vulnerability in NGPVan's platform to them and campaign asked the user who saw HRC data to resign. Then they were suspended and the 'snooping in Hillary's data' spin appeared the next day.

Logs showed 4 staffers accessed the data (including running more than 20 search queries), and only one was fired (and he was fired, not "asked to resign").

It's not spin, it's what happened.

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#139

Post by cwkoss » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 10:19 PM UTC

favorited wrote: post #138

cwkoss wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bernie's campaign reported the vulnerability in NGPVan's platform to them and campaign asked the user who saw HRC data to resign. Then they were suspended and the 'snooping in Hillary's data' spin appeared the next day.

Logs showed 4 staffers accessed the data (including running more than 20 search queries), and only one was fired (and he was fired, not "asked to resign"). It's not spin, it's what happened.

NGPVan is a buggy SaaS platform. They discovered and reported a bug in the platform that displayed HRC's information to the wrong customer.

'Snooping' is a biased mischaracterization.

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#140

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 10:21 PM UTC

jinushaun wrote: post #134

cwkoss wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gabbard insinuates the initial suspension was politically motivated The subtext I'm reading is that the "major" political accounts probably have specific flags set by Google internally to prevent automated shut-offs like this. If Google is not applying these whitelist flags to all candidates in a fair and systematic fashion, it would effectively be utilizing their corporate resources to disproportionately benefit c…

It's like keeping track of pirated content. You're assuming Google is on top of everything happening in the world. They're not and simply can't be. I would not be surprised if this was a manually curated whitelist that a human has to add to a table.

[deleted]