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I feel a grim certainty that this article is going to provoke a massive freakout among people who misunderstand what it’s reporting. dailycaller.com/2019/04/09/goo…
It does not say Google is manually tweaking its core search results—the stuff you’re thinking about when you think about “search results,” in other words—or that they’re systematically blacklisting conservatives from *any* results.
What it says is that, for categories of specialized results a normal person would interpret as being endorsed or validated by Google in some way, they try to screen out sites that Google believes frequently spread false or misleading information.
It would be (a) pretty irresponsible NOT to do when you’re curating and branding a subset of results as “News,” according to Google, and (b) extremely surprising if *some* of the sites deemed unreliable were not conservative.
Conspicuously, the article doesn’t claim a disproportionate percentage of the filtered sites are conservative, or that reliable sites are misclassified in some obviously unreasonable way.
But if a special curated section of results Google is willing to present as “news” includes National Review & excludes Gateway Pundit or Infowars, that’s not really suggestive of bias against conservatives. It’s suggestive of good judgment.
You can disagree with their judgment,, because you think Gateway Pundit is a reliable news source. You’d be wrong, but bracket that. The whole concept of a curated section Google is willing to brand “News” definitionally requires them to make those judgment calls.
So it’s not some kind of “gotcha” that they do this. If they didn’t make decisions about what outlets qualify as “news,” then the news tab would just be… the regular search results.
This is where “bias” gets tossed around loosely in a way that begs the question. Is it biased to treat the New York Times as more reliable than Infowars? Well, no, not if they ARE more reliable. In that case, “bias” would be treating them as equivalent.
If you think Infowars is more reliable, then of course you think privileging the New York Times is biased, relative to your own assessment, which more or less by definition you think reflects reality.
But then claiming “bias” just means “when judgments diverge, I think mine are correct”. Which... duh? If you want the claim to have non-tautological bite, you’ve got to have evidence beyond the fact of disagreement, and the fact that you’re one of the parties to it.
Anyway, the article: the Caller is actually relatively restrained in what they claim. The main supposed gotcha is that Google has said they don’t manually tweak “any” search results, and — Oho! — here are some search results they DO manually tweak! Except this is very silly.
The claim that they don’t tweak search results refers—one would think obviously—to the idea that they’re manually “correcting” what comes up as a result for a particular search term like “Trump” or “healthcare” or “idiot”... because that’s the question they were answering.
It doesn’t mean that when they have a tab called “news” there’s no human judgment about what sites count as news involved. Of course there is. How the f**k would an algorithm do that? They’d have invented honest-to-God Strong AI if they could do that.
In which case we’d be too busy bowing to our new machine overlords to worry about politically biased search results. And, on reflection: Faster, please.
