Social Google goes to Congress

[Higus]

EDIT: Changing the thread title to be about how congress is grilling Google's CEO and showing how little they actually understand about the internet.


https://www.businessinsider.com/goo...lieu-steve-king-2018-12?utm_source=reddit.com

WASHINGTON — A Democratic congressman went after a Republican colleague on Tuesday during a hearing with the CEO of Google, citing negative search results about a congressman who repeatedly has been accused of making racially insensitive remarks.

During a House Judiciary hearing in which Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified, California Rep. Ted Lieu singled out Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King, who saw many high-profile donors retreat from supporting him in the wake of increased scrutiny over his remarks and actions.

Lieu read headlines from a Google search about the House Majority Whip, Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise. Noting that the articles about Scalise were all positive and include citations from conservative media outlets, Lieu asked Pichai whether individuals at Google were manipulating those results to favor Scalise.

"You don't have a group of people at Google, sitting there thinking, 'Hey, we like Steve Scalise, we're going to generate positive articles on these search results," he said. "That's not what's happening, right?"

Pichai answer no, and added, "We don't deal with individual queries and with any viewpoint."

But then Lieu pivoted — pulling out his smartphone for a search in real-time — and entered King's name into Google.

King, who was sitting across the room on the powerful House panel, became visibly perturbed.

"I'm going to change one word. So I'm going to search for 'Congressman Steve King,' I'm going to hit the 'news' tab. First article that pops up is from ABC News," Lieu said. "It says Steve King's racist immigration talk prompts calls for congressional censure. That's a negative article. But you don't have a group of people at Google thinking and trying to modify search results — every time Steve King comes up, a negative article appears, that's not what's happening, right?"

Pichai again said no, reiterating that Google does not manipulate results for individuals like that.

"So let me just conclude here by stating the obvious," Lieu responded. "If you want positive search results, do positive things. If you don't want negative search results, don't do negative things."

"And to some of my colleagues across the aisle, if you're getting bad press articles and bad search results, don't blame Google or Facebook or Twitter, consider blaming yourself," he added.

Round of applause for a Democrat that actually shows some chutzpah.
Lot's of comments about Google's supposed political bias have been made around here. I think that there is some bias in the search results, but I'm more inclined to believe that it is coincidental to the algorithm rather than intentional.

 

[Rygu]

There's not as much bias as I thought

This California poop map was at the top of the searches.

Maybe Lieu has a point.

 

[OverCoronavirus Pressure]

Everything is rigged against me

 

[NoDak]

Yeah, I caught that earlier.

 

[Not A Theist]

Well, it worked for Hillary Clinton, so maybe the Republicans should take her lead on the doing good things front.

 

[Big Nasty Edison]

So this GOP guy wants to control web search engine results? Sounds like a couple countries I can think of.

 

[NoDak]

Steve King was also grilling Pichai about iPhones.

<Lmaoo>

 

[nostradumbass]

Google as a company is obviously biased, as was made obvious when James Damore got fired for trying to explain that women just aren't as interested in being software engineers and then some people looked up the staff at Google and found out they are all a bunch of left wing activists and their decisions on who hey demonetize and deplatform.

The results thing probably has more to do with the fact that left wing media is significantly more prevalent and just comes up earlier on the results for something you google. They probably suppress a few by design, but it's usually whatever Huffpo and buzzfeed write that come up first.

 

[OverCoronavirus Pressure]

Google as a company is obviously biased, as was made obvious when James Damore got fired for trying to explain that women just aren't as interested in being software engineers and then some people looked up the staff at Google and found out they are all a bunch of left wing activists and their decisions on who hey demonetize and deplatform.

The results thing probably has more to do with the fact that left wing media is significantly more prevalent and just comes up earlier on the results for something you google. They probably suppress a few by design, but it's usually whatever Huffpo and buzzfeed write that come up first.

 

[Stoic1]

White couple?

 

[Shoemaker]

I think when you start looking at how PageRank works at a basic level, it makes sense why existing, popular sites continue to appear highly relevant on Google. It calculates relevance by checking how many times the page has been shared, or linked from another site. The higher the PageRank of the site that links back, the higher PageRank score the linked-page gets. This is why sites like ABC, CNN and Fox tend to show up first in the search results. More people read those articles and share those links organically, so Google increases their relevance. Then it appears higher in search and the score compounds; more people find it in search, more people share, more relevancy. Also, the article is likely linked from the news sites main page, which probably already has a high PageRank ranking.


I see people reposting links to news outlets they don't like, and they're just feeding into the problem. If you don't like Fox but you post a Fox article, you are helping them. You're giving them more eyes on their advertisements and inadvertently assisting them in being more relevant, regardless of what levers we assume are being pulled behind the scenes. Even if no levers were being pulled (there's a ton to their search algorithm that is still secret so far be it from me to say levers aren't being pulled) behind the scenes, user behavior would still promote this kind of ranking.

 

[EradiatedHaggis]

Said it before, I will say it again. There are plenty of easy ways to prove Google has rigged their search results and the only people that havent already proven it to themselves with them are biased because it is helping the people they have taken on as their political masters...and they WONT be bothered to do otherwise until it effects them directly.

Its called being a brain dead party whore. Where the only thing that matters is party. Truth, justice, fairness or anything else do not matter unless its working against the party.

 

[Fugazy]

Said it before, I will say it again. There are plenty of easy ways to prove Google has rigged their search results and the only people that havent already proven it to themselves with them are biased because it is helping the people they have taken on as their political masters...and they WONT be bothered to do otherwise until it effects them directly.

Its called being a brain dead party whore. Where the only thing that matters is party. Truth, justice, fairness or anything else do not matter unless its working against the party.

It's pretty amazing.

This really shouldn't be a left v right issue.

One of the most pervasive and massive purveyors of information has a heavy and obvious slant. Its beyond debate or question.

But some people will take a "w" anywhere they imagine they see one so long as it comes at a cost to the other party.

 

[HunterSdVa29]

totally, b/c Google doesn't have an obvious liberal bias at all, in the slightest...

oh wait

 

[EradiatedHaggis]

It's pretty amazing.

This really shouldn't be a left v right issue.

One of the most pervasive and massive purveyors of information has a heavy and obvious slant. Its beyond debate or question.

But some people will take a "w" anywhere they imagine they see one so long as it comes at a cost to the other party.

I know, this is why I call them party whores. I will do the same to hardcore Republicans, Tea Partiers, Libertarians...its like, if you believe in something, believe in IT...what the fuck does the party have to do with it? Hold your representatives accountable, they are supposed to represent you, not the other way around.

 

[Madmick]

https://www.businessinsider.com/goo...lieu-steve-king-2018-12?utm_source=reddit.com





Round of applause for a Democrat that actually shows some chutzpah.
Lot's of comments about Google's supposed political bias have been made around here. I think that there is some bias in the search results, but I'm more inclined to believe that it is coincidental to the algorithm rather than intentional.

An argument rooted in cherry-picked outliers. What a stupid fucking argument.

But I see preaching to the choir works.

 

[Joe265]

https://www.businessinsider.com/goo...lieu-steve-king-2018-12?utm_source=reddit.com





Round of applause for a Democrat that actually shows some chutzpah.
Lot's of comments about Google's supposed political bias have been made around here. I think that there is some bias in the search results, but I'm more inclined to believe that it is coincidental to the algorithm rather than intentional.

Then you learn big business has consumed honest journalism, so the results will be tainted on multiple levels.

 

[Joe265]

Said it before, I will say it again. There are plenty of easy ways to prove Google has rigged their search results and the only people that havent already proven it to themselves with them are biased because it is helping the people they have taken on as their political masters...and they WONT be bothered to do otherwise until it effects them directly.

Its called being a brain dead party whore. Where the only thing that matters is party. Truth, justice, fairness or anything else do not matter unless its working against the party.

Yup. Corruption is inevitable in all human organized groups, because they eventually grow to a point where self-survival is all that matters. The values of its origins and founding then become lost in history.

 

[Lucifer Alpha]

Ted Lieu is Mazie Hirono levels of stupid.

 

[Higus]

Bump. These clowns in Washington have no idea how the internet works, but are absolutely sure that it's some sort of conspiracy against them.

Google CEO Had To Explain To Congress Why Googling ‘Idiot’ Shows Donald Trump

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entr...ceo-sundar-pichai_us_5c10d56de4b0ac53717a0d26

Search for the term “idiot” on Google and several photographs of President Donald Trump will appear high in the image results.

On Tuesday, the search engine giant’s CEO Sundar Pichai had the task of explaining to members of Congress why that happens during a hearing in front of the House Judiciary Committee.

Pichai refuted Rep. Zoe Lofgren’s (D-Calif.) tongue-in-cheek suggestion that it was down to “a little man sitting behind the curtain” who was skewing the results against conservatives — saying the company doesn’t “manually intervene” in searches.

“We provide search today for any time you type in a keyword. We, as Google, have gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of their pages in our index, and we take the keyword and match it against the pages and rank them based on over 200 signals,” Pichai explained.

“Things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it. And based on that, you know, at any given time, we try to find the best results for that query,” he added, during the hearing that also threw up several other self-owns for lawmakers.