But since the homepage feed (or any medium really) displays contents in a certain order, some selection must take place.
Typically some algorithm (usually a recommender system together with some business logic) is used to determine which contents from all that's available to you are actually shown to you and in what order.
Bias seems to be an unavoidable part of the design to me.
Abstract ideas of unavoidable bias are only of academic interest; the right wing of politics is justified in seeing Google as a direct political threat. That would not be justified if Google had a strict "no political talk, no political campaigning, we are the Switzerland of the internet" style policy for their workplace.
>the outcome of a democratic election conflicts with Google's values.
What's wrong with this? The outcomes of the previous Presidential elections conflicted with many other companies' values. Every political election's outcome conflicts with some company's values, because companies stand to gain or lose depending on the policies enacted by that politician.
I'm curious that you would assume that as being the default position ?
Google could have avoided this situation by not explicitly championing political views inside their organisation.
Also the energy situations you cite aren't really comparable, the companies are only lobbying for things that make them more money and they don't have the same sort of power as Google in the political sphere.
>the companies are only lobbying for things that make them more money
Every company does this if they can, and it's either going to help or hurt some political side. The case you're making here is that Google is bad for Republicans. Maybe, but coal companies are bad for Democrats (they give money to Republicans to help them win races), so why is this OK for coal companies, but not Google? I don't see the difference. As long as other companies or industries are allowed to influence politics with money, it's perfectly OK for Google to influence elections however they want, and it would be wrong to break them up because, as I said before, the Republican party is opposed to anti-trust law.
Circumstances were different - Microsoft wasn't doing anything particularly political. They aren't pro-Republican. This is the difference between politically attacking an entity because it is a corporation (a bad reason) vs attacking because they are politically active (an acceptable reason).
That is the central point. Google are removing potential defences against a political attack.
> Maybe, but coal companies are bad for Democrats (they give money to Republicans to help them win races), so why is this OK for coal companies, but not Google?
It is OK for Google, they can donate to whoever they want to. The issue is if they are going to be an partisan actor they control too much information and have too much influence on how people gather information.
If they can donate to whomever they want, they are also morally correct to control information however they want. Giving money to politicians is bribery, and is much more direct than merely controlling information on the internet. Personally, as long as bribery is legal, I have no problems with Google using a different tactic. It's much more ethical to try to shape peoples' opinions at large than to directly bribe politicians.
Compared to news media where the actors are highly partisan but there are strong voices and opportunities to be heard for all points of view. The alternatives are a lot thinner for Web search and Youtube; and most people would be shocked if it did turn out they were actively pushing a message.
Besides, I'd expect political donation laws to come under attack to. It is a very political question. Google should have stuck to strategies and pronouncements that are neutral so that they were less likely to get involved in partisan politics.
It doesn't really matter whether you see it as ethical or not; what matters is that Google has huge and largely unchallenged reach in a field and appear to be official stances by management on social issues that they do not need to. This makes them a legitimate political target.
As long as the experimental process is rigorous and the people are incentivised to use the right metric (and the metric isn't politically biased), then it should be fine.
However, upon making that argument I find myself concerned at the possibility that Google's corporate interests (and perhaps some political interests) may shape which questions get asked, and thus the direction the service takes.
It's quite analagous to Chomsky's views of news organisations in Manufacturing Consent.
I know I'm setting up a bit of a straw man here but my point is even chronological order can be exploited.
Especially as this thread has already mostly said spam filtering (which your example would easily trigger) isn’t in opposition towards a goal of neutral status.
The question is, how easy can it be?
The straw man, is indeed, that you can filter such, client- or server-side. If you see the same shit the whole time, you ignore it all. Easy; even IRC clients with scripting had such features in the 90s. Here is a list of techniques used in e-mail filtering [1]
And years before Facebook was even created, a middle way was also proposed where a carrier like Facebook wouldn't be legally responsible for the content they carried, unless they started to select and/or moderate that content, at which point they would lose the carrier status, becoming a simple broadcaster, which would be legally responsible for everything that they would help to broadcast.