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A comment on The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence. Parent comment

Re:The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle fo... by coldtea on Thursday March 10, 2016 @10:34AM (#11259758)
>The library is a catalog of books produced by publishers for the sake of making money.

That's not what he asked though. Generally libraries don't have special "sponsored" books, and don't control and push certain books to people more than others.

Those libraries that do, fall into 2 categories:

1) Promoting widely recognized cultural works (e.g. with events like "Mark Twain Year", etc).

2) Promoting some ideological agenda (e.g. a creationist library in a religious school).

The latter are dangerous.

Google, besides the opportunities for pushing its own corporate/political agenda, has also financial motives for pushing ads/brands.

Besides there's another key difference: there are thousands upon thousands of libraries (and people don't care much about them anyway). There's only one Google (and the majority of web users use it everyday).

>That doesn't make it wrong.

I wonder what some people DO find wrong. Apart from things like cannibalism and hurting kittens, which we all probably agree on.

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Re:The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle fo... by pcmaffey on Thursday March 10, 2016 @11:26AM (#11260108)
You're missing the point that organic results are also hugely influenced by financial motive. The underlying concept is that all information is biased.

A system that incorporates bias is vastly more useful than one that ignores it.

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Re:The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle fo... by md224 on Thursday March 10, 2016 @12:25PM (#11260497)
> The underlying concept is that all information is biased.

Right, but why add more bias if we don't have to?

Organic results are influenced by the content of the pages as well as their relationship to other pages. Sure, people spend thousands of dollars on SEO to make their page more attractive to Google, but at least they're trying to fit Google's idea of what makes a useful web page. With AdWords, money is directly influencing rank. Why is it good for Google to incorporate more financial bias than it has to?

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Re:The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle fo... by ArkyBeagle on Thursday March 10, 2016 @01:20PM (#11260913)
"Wrong" is at best ordinal. Not absolute. We make up our own lines we won't cross and then complain because others disagree.
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