Statistics professor at Columbia and Georgetown banned from all Google services

https://twitter.com/salilstatistics/status/898906185969139714

by mbgaxyz • 9 years ago

148 90 9 years ago

twitter.com

shitgoose2• 9 years ago

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-21/one-statistics-prof...

"Have worked with both the Obama administration and advised on polling statistics for the Trump campaign"

as Joseph Stalin said - "no one is innocent". just have to dig deep enough.

asdffdsa321• 9 years ago

What's your claim?

shitgoose2• 9 years ago

isn't collaboration with Trump enough ground for ostracism? all of progressive humanity should spit in the face of that professor and demand justice.

on a serious note: it is quite fascinating for watch US walk down this path. i see striking similarities between what is happening now - war with monuments, renaming the streets, "tolerant" left screaming for blood, witch hunt... between all of this and life in USSR under Stalin. of course, no executions, but everything else is in place. soon you will be removing pictures of enemies of the state from schoolbooks: http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/52af668569bedd3b264...

(and this is without Photoshop btw!). stroke of a pen, and confederates are removed from the history! the thing is that in Soviet Union they couldn't keep up with removing - once you start erasing the past, you cannot stop. it is very sad and disappointing to see US going down that path. of all countries...

meri_dian• 9 years ago

Both working with the Obama administration and advising the Trump campaign on polling statistics are innocent activities...?

mc322• 9 years ago

Im not sure what you're trying to imply. No one needs to be completely innocent. And no one is.

What's preposterous is shutting someone down for merely showing some statistical evidence of something contrary to a particular narrative

jmcgough• 9 years ago

Zero Hedge is like the rantings of paranoid conspiracy theorists

puranjay• 9 years ago

The good part about predicting economic apocalypse is that you are bound to be proven right every ten years or so.

dang2• 9 years ago

Would you please not post ideological flamebait to HN? It's just the thing we're trying to avoid here, and the site guidelines explicitly ask you not to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ForHackernews• 9 years ago

Contrary to some of the other comments, I highly doubt there's any political agenda at play here. More likely, this user inadvertently tripped some automated algorithm somewhere, and then failed the automated appeals process.

That said, it's their service and their rules. Don't host data you care about on free services run by capricious multinationals.

falcolas8• 9 years ago

Given the importance of email and other online services - should multinational corporations be allowed to be capricious about who they provide service to, and how those users are cut off from their digital lifeline?

SamReidHughes4• 9 years ago

Yes, because it's their computers.

ucaetano4• 9 years ago

What do you propose?

emmab• 9 years ago

Don't host data you care about on free services run by capricious multinationals.

But people recommend to me not rolling out my own email domain and/or service to manage my account recovery emails for various websites as it's much more likely to get hacked.

What do you use for that?

marcosdumay• 9 years ago

Automated algorithms have agendas too, and very unreliable ones. That does not make them better, but worse.

gaius4• 9 years ago

Automated algorithms have agendas too, and very unreliable ones.

No, they are perfectly reliable. They exactly mirror the agenda of whoever curated the training set.

alexanderstears• 9 years ago

That said, it's their service and their rules. Don't host data you care about on free services run by capricious multinationals.

I 100% agree. Their service, their rules.

However, these platforms have carved out special rules for themselves on the basis of neutrality - look at the DMCA Safe Harbor provision. They've portrayed themselves as neutral platforms that accommodate everyone who can follow the terms of service. However, they seem to either apply the TOS more rigorously to some groups than others - that's completely antithetical to the idea of a neutrality.

In addition to saying "their service their rules" we should say "their service, their accountability". Strip them of the immunity they enjoy as platform providers and hold them accountable for all the content on their platforms - they curate the content, obviously everything that isn't banned or under review is content they support.

Also, through the disparate impact standards this probably merits some equal accommodation scrutiny. I don't have all the information in front of me, but it looks like Google's censorship for American users seems to catch more socially conservative users than socially liberal users - that probably has a desperate impact across a few protected classes (age and religion come to mind).

Now, I'm not saying that Google is guilty of refusing service to some protected classes. But I think their behavior merits some investigation to make sure that they're fulfilling their equal accommodation obligations like other American corporations.

hellbanner2• 9 years ago

Do you think there's a possibility of political agenda?

For examples of Google censorship that, IMO have political agendas:

Google blocked every one of the WSWS’s 45 top search terms : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14975338

and Google's "AI" censoring war crime evidence from Youtube: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14998429

Youtube "AI" censoring US Army destroying Nuremburg swatzika: https://boingboing.net/2017/08/14/film-of-u-s-army-destroyin...

daxorid2• 9 years ago

Our email accounts are widely considered the gateway to all of our other services, particularly in light of the ability to reset passwords with access to the account's address.

It is for this reason that we consider email account security of paramount importance, and Google's early implementation of Google Authenticator, U2F token support, etc, is admirable.

But now we have entered an era in which we need to consider the capricious, political whims of our email providers as a significant part of our threat model.

caseydurfee• 9 years ago

"If you show probability work like Hillary having lower election odds, then this is new definition of hate speech."

I get that the guy is angry. I would be too if I got locked out of my accounts, but this is a ludicrous accusation -- the new definition of hate speech?

"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity." The idea that google is waging war on this guy because of election predictions he made 12 months ago is absurd on the face of it.

Our society has been completely taken over by Hofstadter's [paranoid style](https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...). Everything is taken as evidence of some vast conspiracy of fascists or communists. (A couple weeks ago there was an article posted here alleging that google was suppressing anti-communist websites.)

Replace "freemasons" or "international bankers" with "social justice warriors" and we're right back in the 1950's again.

mc322• 9 years ago

I think you're right and I hope you're right. However, their system seems exceedingly sensitive to a certain political narrative.

I've heard about both antifa and alt right bearing most of the auto trips, but many incidental opinions such as this are getting caught up in their dragnet. That's not a good thing.

whipoodle• 9 years ago

The backlash is on. One of their boys got fired, and they're pissed. Sad to see Taleb going along with this.

5trokerac3• 9 years ago

I would be inclined to believe it wasn't something very deliberate if it was only one or a few services getting shut down, but everything is fully removed. Even his [blog](https://statisticalideas.blogspot.com) has a "this has been removed" header.

That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if there's more to this story than what's come out so far. I think it's worth following.

xiaoma• 9 years ago

And due to that removal, NYT articles like this one now have broken links to his blog: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/business/the-stock-market...

ucaetano4• 9 years ago

but everything is fully removed

It is always like that. Google doesn't disable a service, they disable your entire Google account.

puzzle2• 9 years ago

There's no such thing as a partial account removal. It's like your LDAP or AD account: you disable it and all services stop working, without having to worry about how each of them does access control on the front end as well as the back end. The latter can be the tricky and non obvious part.

throwaway6138343• 9 years ago

It seems the blog is back?

jules2• 9 years ago

Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor, also got locked out of his account. He also happens to have incorrect views. Have any other professors been locked out of their account?

Animats3• 9 years ago

Google took down his blog, too: http://statisticalideas.blogspot.com/

Last archive.org copy: [1] (Useless; it just displays a "Blogger gear", because the content is dynamically loaded.)

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170518181642/http://statistica...

gaius4• 9 years ago

it just displays a "Blogger gear", because the content is dynamically loaded

I wonder why Google made that particular design decision?

Animats3• 9 years ago

That probably predates Google's acquisition of Blogger.

redm• 9 years ago

I think the Zerohedge article should have been linked directly, it provides much more information on what happened.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-21/one-statistics-prof...

It does indeed seem he was shut down, but it's unclear as to "why" it was done. Google's standard black box in effect. That may be the most frustrating part.

Zarathust• 9 years ago

It is still not clear to me what happened. The reply from Google sums up to "You angered us, figure it out. It's in the TOS".

puzzle2• 9 years ago

If they reply like that when turning down appeals, it's usually for something very egregious that might have legal ramifications. Look up "thomasmonopoly" for a case at the very edge of legality that made it to HN years ago. (I'm not saying that it's the case here, but it gives you an idea of the seriousness, especially if VPs go silent.)

brightball2• 9 years ago

Not familiar with Zerohedge but the entire thing does seem pretty questionable, especially non-reinstatement after review.

Google needs to get on clarifying this and the reasons behind ASAP because right now it looks like an entire internet presence was shut down due to publishing unpopular math.

rdtsc• 9 years ago

advised on polling statistics for the Trump campaign

Going out on a limb here, I'd guess it might have something to do with that? It would also be very foolish of them to ever admit it and I bet they will come back and say it was an innocent "algorithm" mistake if this blows up too much. Unless someone internally leaks the mechanism or the reason it would be hard to tell.

I think Google, Facebook, maybe Twitter and others are furiously working to fill the void left the failure of the traditional media to manufacture consent. Large traditional media conglomerates had one job and that was to make sure a particular presidential candidate won and they failed. Very quickly after Facebook and Google issued a statement how they are blaming "Fake News" and how they will be working on controlling and eliminating that.

While it all seems innocent and helpful "Oh look Google is working on eliminating hate and fake news, isn't that nice". It is also a signal to those who have billions to spend on campaigns (political, marketing, etc) saying "Want to manufacture some consent? Come to us, let us help you. CNN/NBC/NYT are too crusty and old and not effective anymore. Inconvenient statistics getting in your way, don't worry, they will be silenced".

As others have said it KGB or Stasi would have given everything to have access to the kinds of data Google and Facebook has. I think it is foolish to assume these companies will just use that data just to sell ads, share cat pictures and connect you with your old classmates. I think they will start selling "silencing" as a service (SaaS) at some point.

hellbanner2• 9 years ago

"Google blocked every one of the WSWS’s 45 top search terms" (recent)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14975338

aestetix• 9 years ago

If he hasn't yet, he should submit this to https://onlinecensorship.org/. Curious how often this happens, I don't have a good data set but it seems like this has been happening a lot more recently.

existencebox• 9 years ago

At the risk of being tangential to the topic: Let this be a friendly reminder that if you, like me, use google services heavily, it may be in your best interest to do regular backups of your account state. (I have no affiliation etc; I just realized when reading this that it had been almost a year since my last backup)

Here's a link to support documenting "how". https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en

pkilgore• 9 years ago

Great I'll just throw it on my ....Google drive. Dammit.

throwaway6138343• 9 years ago

Do you know of any way to automate it (besides scripting a full browser)?

daxorid2• 9 years ago

The bubble cheerleaders that dominate HN groupthink don't consider ZH a credible source, so indirect linkage was likely done to avoid the insta-flag effect.

mywittyname• 9 years ago

The problem with ZH is, once people know the story, they can predict the narrative. That's a pretty clear indicator of bias.

Admittedly, in this case it was rather cut-and-dry.

dang2• 9 years ago

Unless you have data, please don't post generalizations about HN as ammunition in an argument. Those are off-topic and nearly always false.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15066201 and marked it off-topic.

tweedledee• 9 years ago

In his tweets on Aug 15th he suggests that the Charlottesville incident has not hurt Trumps popularity.

Kinda scary, but if true we should be addressing it as is instead of burying it.

Edit: it looks like Trump has actually had a small increase in popularity

sageikosa• 9 years ago

That sounds like the kind of thing that would trip an algorithm.

mcphage2• 9 years ago

That's also been covered in mainstream media, it's not why he was blocked.

slackstation• 9 years ago

This has to be a mistake. Whenever you outright ban someone with the minimalist interaction the way Google does it, you open yourself up to accusations of all kinds of suppression. You allow the person who being banned to define why they were in the absence of any message from Google.

Now, it's all well and good to go and ban white supremacists, KKK members, hate groups, etc. It's monumental stupidity to ban an academic with proper credentials. It's even in effective. Even in the most extreme case, his careful scholarly screeds about statistics isn't exactly going to make frothing hordes of racists; not near the same way as banning him without cause, reason or explanation.

It's silly. His twitter shows him writing article headlines in provocative ways (for an academic) but, nothing even close to supporting a group like the KKK but, in this atmosphere and with Google trying mobilize probably thousands of young, probably uneducated (cheap) people review accounts for deletion, it was probably someone who saw one of these procative headlines and marked this blog for deletion without looking or realizing who this person was.

Strangely, the same thing happen to Jordan Peterson not even a month ago. Another academic but, with far more controversial views but, far more outcry came of it and Google reversed it in a few days.

All of this is embarassing for Google who for years has invested in very light touch style of customer service and it's coming back to bite them in the ass.

jules2• 9 years ago

It's even ineffective.

I wouldn't be so sure. Do this to a few people and thousands of others start to mince their words. It could be extremely effective if it were employed as a political strategy, because being locked out of your Google account is a major problem for most people.

snksnk• 9 years ago

Do not rely on Google and its services if your public beliefs / opinions do not align with the establishment, are politically incorrect in even the slightest degree, or if you value your privacy. There are good alternatives (preferably open source).

https://www.privacytools.io/ https://www.prism-break.org/

brightball2• 9 years ago

Have there been some HN articles about good alternatives to Google services?

I seem to remember Mail-in-a-box getting some support for running your own server. I've also seen kolabnow.com looking promising.

icu• 9 years ago

I use protonmail.com and I'm happy with them vs Gmail.

Duck Duck Go is my default search tool.

I mainly use Firefox as a browser and I use my work Outlook for calendar/contacts.

I know I can use more open source/portable tools but it's gotten me out of the Google bubble.

Unfortunately I can't get away from Android... and I like Apple's ethics less than Alphabet, so I'm stuck there.

prh8• 9 years ago

I moved to FastMail for email, it's been really great. I use it with a custom domain (multiple in fact) and its web and mobile apps are pretty good.

exolymph• 9 years ago

Like prh8, I am super satisfied with FastMail. I've also heard good things about Protonmail.

mdavidn• 9 years ago

Like prh8, I too use FastMail. I trust the FastMail team, but a custom domain means I can switch e-mail providers without changing my e-mail address.

ignoramceisblis• 9 years ago

caseydurfee:

this is a ludicrous accusation -- the new definition of hate speech?

slackstation:

This has to be a mistake. it was probably someone who saw one of these procative headlines and marked this blog for deletion without looking or realizing who this person was.

redm:

It does indeed seem he was shut down, but it's unclear as to "why" it was done. Google's standard black box in effect.

ForHackernews:

I highly doubt there's any political agenda at play here.

At least 4 out of 11 parent comments so far cover: the "ludicrous accusation" of the censored victim, "it was probably mistakenly banned and repeatedly denied further attempts at access", "we're not sure why he's banned", and "we're not sure why he's banned, but it's certainly not related to all of the other political censorship and outright subversive manipulation that's been occurring towards anyone who doesn't subscribe to the mainstream media narrative".

That's right, nothing to see here folks. Dismiss this crazy person for speaking the truth. Statistics should be supressed. Deny their ability to speak out against the extreme subversion that is taking place. Deny their ability to organize. Isolate and destroy. Or you're next.

bbdbdbdbsbwhs2• 9 years ago

Here on HN I was introduced to the characterization of our current political gridlock as a "cold civil war", which is, perhaps, manifest in this post.

bbdbdbdbsbwhs2• 9 years ago

Manifest in the thread. I am in agreement with the parent!

godshatter• 9 years ago

Time to step up my move from gmail, I guess. Who knows what opinion I might express that might inadvertently trigger such a reaction. I'm a member of the "let them talk - they'll hang themselves with their own noose" school of thought. Google can do what they want, of course. But so can I. I've already ditched yahoo mail for fastmail and was planning on moving from gmail eventually. Guess I'll step that up.

ryandrake• 9 years ago

First step for me was moving my E-mail address to a domain I control (or at least I think I do, for now). That way, at least my identity is mine, should G decide to no longer host my content. Scary to have to think about this, but an opinion that is uncontroversial today may be unutterable tomorrow, given the relentless and accelerating march of political correctness.

binaryphile• 9 years ago

The irony of using the example of a statistics professor to prove a systemic conspiracy with a sample size of 1 is not lost on me.

Animats3• 9 years ago

Has anybody found out yet what this is all about?

ucaetano4• 9 years ago

Result:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6305625...

throwaway6138343• 9 years ago

Thank you all very much, in recent days, for the outpouring of support in my Google predicament. I love you, and together we can and will always achieve great things. Have also spoken with the leadership there, and they restored accounts. I also don’t carry any grievance towards any part of Google, and have no intention of further comments.

That seems like a really strange reply. Why would he word it like that? The only possibilities I can think of are that either Google required such a reply in order to re-enable his account in order to not get in trouble, or he has done something wrong but doesn't want to talk about it.

Statistics professor at Columbia and Georgetown banned from all Google services

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