Trump Accuses Google of Burying Conservative News in Search Results

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/business/media/trump-google.html

by couchand • 8 years ago

87 100 8 years ago

i_am_nomad• 8 years ago

Surely there’s a way to study this and generate some meaningful statistics on whether Google (and others) actually bury conservative stories. Or maybe it’s already been studied, and either supported or rebutted.

dagenix4• 8 years ago

First you have to figure out what a "consevative story" is. Then, you need to figure out why a search for "Trump News" shouldn't bury partisan hackery on both the left and the right. "News" used to / ought to mean something about a presentation of facts, not some particular party's preference for what it would like the facts to be.

traviscj• 8 years ago

I guess the world used to have less facts, and now they have to choose which ones to publish?

Jk. Money talks, and outrage sells better than dry facts.

yostrovs3• 8 years ago

You can open up a private tab in your browser, go to Google News and do a search for yourself.

takeda• 8 years ago

Looks like either all search engines are biased (not just Google) or Trump is.

loganekz• 8 years ago

This started from an article [1] posted on Drudge Report recently.

[1] https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-search-results-show-perv...

giardini• 8 years ago

This came out the 25 August 2018:

"96 Percent of Google Search Results for 'Trump' News Are from Liberal Media Outlets"

https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-search-results-show-perv...

Google supported Clinton and threw resources behind her campaign:

"However, one can't help but be skeptical considering that just before the 2016 presidential election, among the many leaks published by Wikileaks as part of its Podesta email campaign was Google's "strategic plan" to help democrats win the election and track voters." from

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-08-28/google-responds-tr...

More at

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-01/wikileaks-reveals-...

I fail to see how that does not continue today.

dagenix4• 8 years ago

What's the proof?

Mr. Trump’s criticism appeared to be inspired by a segment last night from Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs. During the program, Mr. Dobbs highlighted an article by a conservative website, PJ Media, that said that it had conducted an unscientific study in which 96 percent of Google search results for the word “Trump” were articles from “left-leaning sites.”

Oh boy: an "unscientific study", whatever that is.

nkozyra• 8 years ago

Oh boy: an "unscientific study", whatever that is.

Otherwise known as an "anecdote."

Gys• 8 years ago

Trump loves anecdotes. Probably a lot of people prefer anecdotes to anything scientific :-(

cimmanom• 8 years ago

So "left leaning" meaning anything to the left of Breitbart and thus even vaguely fact-based?

ebikelaw• 8 years ago

Google should go all-in and just run factual blurbs about Trump's various crimes on the Chrome new tab page. I don't know why anybody puts up with the abuse from this guy.

yostrovs3• 8 years ago

Try searching for "American inventors" or "American scientists" on Google and tell me if you notice anything odd.

tango24• 8 years ago

What is your suspicion here?

rory3• 8 years ago

I think the poster's referring to the overrepresentation of black scientists in that result, implying political motivation. It's pretty clear that it's just an artifact of the collision with the common search term "african american scientists". The result for "united states scientists" more or less proves this to be the case.

pacerwpg2• 8 years ago

I don't see anything odd. I see a lot of American scientists and inventors.

dagenix4• 8 years ago

Would you care to further explain your point and how that relates to the article at all? Bonus points if you can do it without saying something racist or already debunked.

ramblerman2• 8 years ago

I would wager it's not the default list resulting from their algorithms, and was in fact explicitly manipulated to present the list you see now.

The original article claims something similar albeit on a different search result.

the underlying idea is that google is not just using pagerank and algorithms to show us the current state of the internet. But rather is adding their own bias to push up / down certain results.

cocacola1• 8 years ago

I'm seeing a bunch of scientists and inventors.

patorjk2• 8 years ago

I'll admit, that does seem a bit odd. Everyone else is playing dumb, but they're being disingenuous. From what I see, on both lists, there's only 1 white male in the first 10 results, and in both cases they're not in the top 5. It certainly looks like a curated list and they've gone out of their way to make sure there's representation for a wide array of people.

Is this bad? Should they have done something different? I don't know. I guess it comes down to what you expect when you search for those terms, who is searching for those terms, and if these lists have proven to be helpful to those searching for these terms.

michaelmrose10• 8 years ago

Everyone else isn't playing dumb Trump is just living it.

As someone else already insightfully said results for American Scientists results a result set an awful lot like African American Scientists whereas US scientists or United States Scientists returns a results set more like you would expect.

In 2015 google photos was classifying black people as Gorillas that wasn't on purpose either.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go...

michaelmrose10• 8 years ago

Google isn't an oracle of truth its a best guess at what you want to read given a search term.

Wherein they try to provide actual answers to questions more complicated than 2+2 or what is the weather like they have ended up with interesting results drawn from the nonsense that is the internet.

"Instant answers have attracted criticism for years. In 2014, Google results highlighted a Breitbart story saying Barack Obama was the king of America, and the next year, Google got flak for providing an excerpt from a creationist website saying dinosaurs were tools of indoctrination in response to the question, "What happened to dinosaurs?"

Conspiracy-mongering instant answers drew attention in March after the website Search Engine Land pointed out that Googling "Is Obama planning a coup?" displayed an answer from a website called SECRETS OF THE FED saying Obama was indeed planning a coup with the help of "the communist Chinese."

https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/google-instant-ans...

Imputing bias from search results may be a mistake. Especially when in some cases it might even be a correct guess at what the searcher actually wanted to read.

brianbreslin2• 8 years ago

this got me curious and i found this post about this: http://www.unz.com/isteve/great-moments-in-google-american-i...

closetohome• 8 years ago

You found an alt-right blog complaining about a glitch in an algorithm that accidentally promoted afraican americans?

Shocking.

yongjik• 8 years ago

It has a plausible explanation. People searching for Oppenheimer or Gell-Mann don't type "American scientists", they just type "Oppenheimer" and "Gell-Mann". And a website talking about Oppenheimer doesn't spend much time about his being American---after all, that might be the least interesting fact about Oppenheimer's life.

OTOH, I'll bet there are websites that talk about, say, "George Washington Carver, an American scientist you have never heard about."

That said, the quality of curation seems rather poor.

mc32• 8 years ago

If you go to google.de or google.jp you get a diff selection to the same query “anerican scientists” (in local language).

yostrovs3• 8 years ago

Why aren't there more Scottish American or Italian American or Jewish American inventors in the list though?

ABCLAW• 8 years ago

Try searching for "USA inventors".

Oddly, when your search isn't a substring of "African American Inventors" you don't get weird results.

It's almost like the search algo isn't perfect.

scratchnsniff• 8 years ago

Search "American inventors" with the quotes and you'll get what you're looking for. Without the quotes you have to assess each word individually and with order independence. The "American" portion of the search phrase will result in a higher connected relevancy for "American inventors" who are also "African American" due to their shared keyword space. This is also probably why you're not seeing similar results when trying to repeat the experiment for other countries.

FilterSweep• 8 years ago

If you were to take Google’s “organic results” to heart this would be largely explained by the greater number of people (from all political slants) seeking out AA inventors for the sake of their online disputes.

Furthermore, to be honest, this “organic” search has largely been used to debunk racist claims. And the search has been used for over a decade.

moonka• 8 years ago

Maybe we should bring back the FCC fairness doctrine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

repolfx3• 8 years ago

I don't think that would help.

The UK has such a regulation still, for TV broadcasters only. It also has the BBC which is committed to such fairness and neutrality in its charter.

In practice it is not enforced. For example the senior management of Channel 4 news have routinely made tweets that indicate they hate the Conservative party. And I mean really hate.

Their head of output retweeted a message that said, "Writing from America & I can assure you that conservatives will absolutely keep needed medicine out of the hands of those who require it, if you let them"

One of their most famous and senior journalists (Jon Snow) went to a music festival, someone who partied with him claimed he shouted "fuck the Tories" and "I'm supposed to be neutral". He claims he can't remember if he said it or not.

The chief editor of C4 News liked a tweet that said simply, "Boris Johnson is a cunt". Johnson is one of the most well known conservative politicians in the UK and was a cabinet minister until he resigned quite recently over a policy dispute.

You can see a pattern - journalists who are supposed to be neutral by law have no problem with broadcasting to the whole world personal insults against conservative politicians on Twitter. They get away with it because the regulator stands by and does nothing.

The FCC fairness doctrine is unlikely to work out much differently. The USA is right to avoid it.

michaelmrose10• 8 years ago

Even if news programs report the news in an unbiased fashion people are bound to have personal opinions and express them on their own time.

In response to "Writing from America & I can assure you that conservatives will absolutely keep needed medicine out of the hands of those who require it, if you let them"

Wouldn't it be a greater crime to ignore this? It seems as if the only reason you don't want a fairness doctrine is not because its a terrible idea but because it wouldn't be effective enough at distorting reality to the peasants.

michaelmrose10• 8 years ago

Maybe you should start your own search engine. The fairness doctrine makes no coherent sense in context.

How many sides are there in every multidimensional issue. Who decides which sides should be represented and how? Do we force every piece of content in the universe to have an unmoderated comments section filled with racist invectives and conspiracy theories? How "fair" will it be when nobody reads it.

Implementation aside the internet is already as fair as can be expected. It has never been cheaper to set up a site and have your voice heard. This of course merely guarantees that you can be heard not that you will have an audience.

Edit: US inventors never did show such results you are mistaken or misleading

vitro• 8 years ago

Not me, not me, always them.

Dwolb• 8 years ago

Yikes this is a complex topic.

There’s a couple of things at play:

Google does control (unbiased or biased) a significant portion of what internet users see

This control has the potential to sway public opinion, direct discourse, and economically make or break businesses (even those that extend beyond media)

Personally I believe gigantic internet companies like Google require more regulation because they can’t be trusted to act responsibly indefinitely.

However I do not believe the current administration has shown thoughtfulness and care for the republic in a way that I would trust them to enact this regulation.

YinglingLight2• 8 years ago

I do not believe Silicon Valley has shown thoughtfulness and care for the republic in a way that I would trust them to enact this regulation.

mindcrime2• 8 years ago

I do not believe Silicon Valley has shown thoughtfulness and care for the republic in a way that I would trust them to enact this regulation.

I trust Silicon Valley a hell of a lot more than I trust our government...

michaelmrose10• 8 years ago

The fact that a search engine has such a singular importance in deciding what the public sees. The very reason you would desire regulation is the very reason that you don't want the government regulating it.

If google fails its userbase they can switch to a different search engine in 30 seconds by opening a new tab.

How fast can you change governments?

core-questions2• 8 years ago

If google fails its userbase

If their userbase can actually tell that they are _being_ failed. I don't know that this is deliberate and not just a result of SEO and ranking algorithms, but if what we see is being influenced, how would we know, and how would we generate enough energy to actually have a significant number of people digitally uproot themselves in order to force Google to respond somehow?

they can switch to a different search engine in 30 seconds by opening a new tab.

Individual users can switch search engines, but what about switching away from Gmail, Youtube, etc. that are all tied together? It's pretty difficult, especially considering you can't bring your network of viewers/friends/etc with you.

How fast can you change governments?

Happens every 4-8 years and takes a few months. Fairly well-oiled process, at this point.

niyikiza• 8 years ago

- Google is better than government (you can go for a competitor) and it's better than a decentralized search engine (if anything the swaying of public opinion calls for a closer control of what Google shows people. If Facebook didn't have any censorship policies at all, the incidents of 2016 would have been worse.)

- Google never promised you to give you truth all the time (for most of the things people search for there just is no truth). It's meant to direct you to the most "relevant" contents. Everyone will always think that they are more relevant than search engines believe.

insickness• 8 years ago

The question isn't whether Google is 'better' than government, it's whether Google's proprietary algorithm can be trusted to be unbiased. If Google is found to be biased, that doesn't necessarily mean government should step in but at least the market can account for this bias once they know about it.

The media has been squawking that Trump is wrong (CNN: "Media says Trump search is rigged. It's not."). Wrong or right, in shedding light on this, Trump has forced Google to be more careful not to bias search results if in fact they were.

jocs_• 8 years ago

Google has created ridiculous conditions where there is a massive arms race to be on that first result page on any give subject.

The truth is Google results should not exist for anything and everthing. Especially ambiguous subjects. Who does anyone think wins these arms races that are being set up?

It is as retarded as having the supreme court pumping out decisions in real time. Why does that not happen? The tech exists. The bench can sit on twitter and keep pumping out their mid process thoughts on anything and everything. Imagine if they did that trying to constantly optimize for more like and follower counts rather than optimizing for outcomes that serve justice.

The current architecture to address ambiguity is pure shit. Where people need to be pushed into slow deliberate thinking or where they need to be signaled they have a second graders understanding on a subject, Google is playing a huge role in signalling the opposite.

It's doing a whole lot of unintended evil by setting up these arms races around ambiguous issues.

lotu2• 8 years ago

Are you literally suggesting that for some of the most important queries that people make Google should just return no results because it is too hard to decide who is on top?

Fjolsvith2• 8 years ago

Actually, there is a nice method by which anyone can have their "result" on the first page of a searcher. It's called a bidding war, and it out performs any SEO tweaking out there.

pizzazzaro• 8 years ago

I would just like to add some context:

Alex Jones is advising Trump about this very topic.

https://www.newsy.com/stories/infowars-alex-jones-says-he-s-...

Relevant:

Trump's Razor - the heuristic of discerning the most likely scenario by discerning the stupidest possible option.

wilsonnb3• 8 years ago

"Old man shouts at cloud"

This has been a conservative talking point for a while. I'm surprised it's taken him this long to publicly complain about it.

itbeho• 8 years ago

Seems like conservative news sites that are claiming this ought to be able to use Google’s own analytic tools to highlight any trends against them.

repolfx3• 8 years ago

There's a dupe that got flagged here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858874

Perhaps this story will also get flagged - it seems there's a lot of people who don't like discussion of political bias in Silicon Valley companies on HN.

It's pretty easy to see why Trump thinks this. Just go to Google News and search Trump, then look at which news sources are selected. Or just look at this helpful pie chart:

https://static.pjmedia.com/trending/user-content/51/files/20...

The way News selects and ranks sources is even more opaque than web search. Web search at least has some papers describing how it works, but News searches only over a subset of the web selected by humans.

What policies do they use to decide what gets to be included?

https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/6204...

They state:

We do not allow content that sends messages intended to harass, bully, or physically or sexually threaten others.

We do not allow sites or accounts that engage in coordinated activity to mislead users

We do not allow content that promotes violence or harassment against an individual or group based on ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, sexual orientation or gender identity.

Well, that's going to be a problem for Google because by now everyone got the memo that the student generation that Google has been hiring extensively from for years now is willing to define almost any kind of viewpoint that isn't extremely liberal as "harassment" or "hate". Including fairly anodyne policies Trump has, like there being limits on immigration.

How will Google credibly argue they aren't biased when their inclusion policy for Google News reads like a list of guidelines to a university safe space?

pacerwpg2• 8 years ago

CNBC, Politico and the Atlantic being flagged as liberal is evidence of the bias in the study.

danjoc2• 8 years ago

According to The Atlantic, The Atlantic endorsed Clinton. Only the third candidate they've endorsed since 1860.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-cas...

Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, Hillary Clinton.

michaelmrose10• 8 years ago

Looking at the chart can you please tell me what you would consider a conservative news organization?

I'm guessing Infowars Fox Breitbart. The problem for people on the far right is that their perspective is so profoundly distorted that even moderate news articles are written off as liberal rags.

Imagine if you were a young earth creationist wouldn't you be shocked to search for fossils and find page after page of honest scientific discussion and almost no pages talking about how the devil hid them to test peoples faith?

dx87• 8 years ago

Whether or not the bias is intentional, this reminds me of the fairly recent accusations that claimed twitter was deliberatley preventing republican congressman from showing up on the front page. They said it wasn't deliberate, it was all done by an algorithm...that just happened to be written in a way that only flagged members of one political party.

Looking at the bigger picture, this may be a case of big tech companies not caring about political diversity while hiring, creating a cultural bias in their products. Just like the Usenix talk by the Harvard professor citing a study that facial recognition developed by a Japanese company had trouble recognizing non-asian faces, if a company's culture is mostly homogenous and leans heavily toward one end of the political spectrum, the developers could be adding an unconcsious bias to their algorithms that ranks people and websites at the other end of the political spectrum as untrustworthy or malicious. Normally political bias doesn't matter when it comes to products, a chair functions the same whether a liberal or conservative made it, but when the product is a list of relevant and trustworthy sites in response to a query, political bias can be very evident in the product.

An example I've seen of the news bias was shortly after Trump was elected, their was a covert raid on an Al Qaeda compound in Yemen. On CNN, the headline was something like "Trump authorizes covert raid that results in multiple Navy SEAL casualties." The Fox headline was something like "Trump authorizes covert raid of Al Qaeda stronghold that results in trove of intelligence data". Both are true, but the focus and tone of the articles was wildly different. If Google's algorithm results in only sites with a negative bias against Trump being pushed to the top of search results, I don't see why it shouldn't be investigated for the same reason that pro-Trump Russian influence is being investigated on social media sites. I think everyone can agree that covert meddling in politics, whether intentional or not, is a threat to democracy and fair elections.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentat...

legitster• 8 years ago

The tweets in question:

Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of....
....results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!

lovehashbrowns2• 8 years ago

Isn't this the same administration/party that is desperate to get rid of Net Neutrality so that the government isn't meddling in private business? But then there's this:

“This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!”

Wonder what makes Google different/worse from an ISP.

tj-teej• 8 years ago

Why isn't the problem that Google has a monopoly on search?

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 monopolies)

lovehashbrowns2• 8 years ago

Why is something like Bing not a real competitor?

Eridrus• 8 years ago

The issue here isn't that conservatives can't go somewhere else to get their news, the issue is that everyone involved in this debate wants to have their view of what people should read imposed on others.

So while doing something to spread out eyeballs among various search engines would make this argument moot because there is no longer a single entity you can pressure, I think it misses the heart of why people complain about bias. Despite a wide variety of media outlets, conservatives regularly complain about liberal bias in the media - there's just no single entity they can pressure.

Maybe that's for the best, but I think it's important to realise that this is not really a good faith argument.

funwie• 8 years ago

Which data is this accusation based on?

I see google as a mirror that reflects what the world says about you. Of course, they moderate results but I don’t think that they do it to such an extend that only negative results will show for a person seen as positive in the world.

Trump is denying his reflection in the mirror (Google search). He doesn’t want to accept that Google’s result is how the world sees him now.

Google does not write the negative content

nitwit005• 8 years ago

My grandmother is currently watching MSNBC, which is constant Trump bashing, and she quite enjoys it. The New York Times most read almost always includes negative stories about Trump.

I suspect the "problem" is just that people enjoy reading these negative articles. Google is trying to point people to what they're likely to click on.

factsaresacred• 8 years ago

Whether or not Google are doing this, keep in mind:

- Facebook's short-lived 'trending News' came under fire after employees admitted to routinely suppressing conservative news stories.

- Every newspaper endorsed Trump's opponent so any news source is potentially anti-Trump. Some, like CNN, aren't even trying to be objective (every article reads like an editorial with a little too much snark), while others like the NYT released a post-election letter that just fell short of admitting their bias ("we believe we reported on both candidates fairly").

- Twitter was found to hide many Republican politicians from autosearch results.

None of this makes Trump's accusation true, but it highlights that there is a precedent.

mullingitover3• 8 years ago

So what.

Google should be able to blacklist every conservative (or liberal) site if they feel like it. They're a private business, and we have a Constitution that prohibits would-be tyrants from interfering with free speech. Trump should be run out of town on a rail for even hinting that he'd like to undermine freedom of speech.

reversecs2• 8 years ago

It's complex because if a single corporation has a monopoly on all the news, a single company can filter all speech. There are alternatives currently but it doesn't make it less of a monopoly.

mullingitover3• 8 years ago

This is really simple, however: Google does not have a monopoly on news.

thomk• 8 years ago

I wonder if he saw this article?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/17/trump-idiot-...

Also, you should try it. Its remarkable really, search for idiot in google images.

dddw• 8 years ago

I wish they actually did... can't open the newspaper anyday now without this twerp popping up all the time.

Trump Accuses Google of Burying Conservative News in Search Results

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