News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by lelandfe on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @09:45AM (#30273171)
> Google's been caught red handed deliberately manipulating political content

Sorry, do you have a better link handy? This primarily looks like a fundraising page.

Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by maxehmookau on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @09:54AM (#30273280)
A really strange fundraising page too that claims to be non-partisan but quotes three different far-right hacks.
Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by cloutchaser on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @09:56AM (#30273317)
I'm really curious, can you name someone who you think is just "right"? Like who isn't "far-right" in your opinion?
Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by AlexandrB on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:06AM (#30273454)
I would generally call most of the "never Trump" conservatives "right but not far-right". I.e. people like Rick Wilson and Mitt Romney.
Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by maxehmookau on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:02AM (#30273400)
I'm from the UK, so it's a relative concept. The US, except for some fairly small pockets of actual socialist left-wing thinking, is much further to the right. A lot of western europe loved Obama, but in reality he was closer to the UK Conservative party than the UK Labour party.

But I'm even more curious, would you not describe Tucker Carlson as far right in his views?

Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by Dma54rhs on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:15AM (#30273557)
On social issues average European and its country is way more conservative than average American. You're comparing economical standpoint here and I agree with that.
Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by ericmay on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:45AM (#30273994)
At great risk here, I have to say I agree based on my own experience. Often times people conflate government-funded systems like healthcare or taxpayer-funded university as being socially progressive. I wouldn't do that. You can have universal healthcare and ban gay marriage in your country, for example.
Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by conjectures on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:26AM (#30273685)
> On social issues average European and its country is way more conservative than average American.

Dubious.

Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by rtsil on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:36AM (#30273842)
Certainly not Western Europe.
Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by Dma54rhs on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @01:33PM (#30276378)
I mean it's simply not true, ask any non-European person who has lived on both continents where he feels more welcome.

On what social issues are excatly Euros more left wing compared to Americans?

Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by rtsil on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @02:11PM (#30277004)
Universal healthcare, unemployment benefits, workers' rights, LGBTQ rights, prison policy, police behavior and control, social safety net, lack of religion in politics, free or extremely cheap education including higher education, and that's just off the top if my mind?

> ask any non-European person who has lived on both continents where he feels more welcome.

I gladly concede this, but this is just one element of social issues.

Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by Dma54rhs on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @04:00PM (#30278406)
LGBT rights are definetly better off in America and then you listed a lot of economical issues that have very little to do with left or right in Europe. Matter of a fact in Eastern Europe the left wing economical policies are what is keeping socially Conservative people in power.
Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by rtsil on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @09:31PM (#30281766)
I really don't see how these are economical issues:

> Universal healthcare, unemployment benefits, workers' rights, LGBTQ rights, prison policy, police behavior and control, social safety net, lack of religion in politics, free or extremely cheap education including higher education

> Matter of a fact in Eastern Europe...

Thats why my first answer was: Certainly not Western Europe. My knowledge of Easter Europe is nonexistent, so I won't dare say anything about their circumstances.

Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by boringg on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:45AM (#30274001)
Tucker Carlson is unhinged from reality and espouses wild conspiracies which falls squarely in the far right.
Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by spinny on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @04:08PM (#30278489)
> wild conspiracies

which ones ?? russiagate hrc lies ??

Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by Spellman on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @11:55AM (#30274905)
David Frum

Liz Cheney

Mitt Romney

David French

Reason media (Libertarian)

Andrew Sullivan

These all tend to fall under the more 80s/90s Neoconservative or Liberalism banner instead of the more aggressive New Right

Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by robbedpeter on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:37AM (#30273860)
That's a coverage artifact - if Google is manipulating politics in favor of democrats, then the only coverage you'll find is going to be on the center to the right wing platforms. American media in all its glory.
[dead]
Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by lelandfe on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:09AM (#30273475)
On that Wikipedia page, the two Robert Epstein sources (one a PNAS paper[1], the other a Politico article[2]) are theoretical ("whether they could be manipulated") and pre-2016. The other main source[3] is similarly theoretical and provides policy recommendations to combat SEME.

It also has a Washington Post article[4] discussing a (since-deleted) video that purportedly showed potentially-manipulated differences between how Bing and Google autocompleted "Hillary Clinton" searches. But none of the 3 main sources cover what the impact of autocomplete could be.

Do you have any links about Google being caught red-handed politicizing ranking order?

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4547273/

[2] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-c...

[3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jinfopoli.9.2019.0370#m...

[4] https://archive.is/fHzW8. Is Politifact trustworthy? They investigated this and found "Google’s suggested searches, for the most part, avoid offensive suggestions for everyone, not just Clinton." That isn't a total debunk, of course. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/jun/23/andrew-nap...

Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by robbedpeter on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:35AM (#30273818)
>>The 2020 presidential election monitoring project successfully recruited a diverse group of 732 registered voters in three battleground states: Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina. It preserved more than 500,000 ephemeral experiences on Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, and Facebook. These are the fleeting experiences that Big Tech companies use to influence votes and opinions worldwide and that are normally lost forever.

>>A preliminary analysis of the data shows that Google search results (but NOT search results on Bing or Yahoo) had a significant liberal bias – enough to have shifted at least 6 million votes in the months leading up to the election.

You need to know the methodology being used to understand the results, as they tracked ephemeral experiences using surveillance software with volunteers.

This guy needs a website team in the biggest way. It's hard to find the information and it's scattershot. It's very frustrating because the work he's doing is solid. Don't let the shitty web presence deter you.

The Rogan podcast was awkward af but he does provide a lot of substantive content if you're open to listening.

https://www.aibrt.org/index.php/internet-studies is probably the most coherent site, but there's no salient tldr breakdown, to learn more you'll need to watch the videos.

https://youtu.be/-7qT_38iRSc is the most comprehensive video, but I'll need to spend more time later to gather better links.

Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by jjulius on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:55AM (#30274133)
Preface: I'm pretty big on the "fuck Google/Big Tech" train.

>Google's been caught red handed deliberately manipulating political content.

>https://mygoogleresearch.com/

There's no research on that page. Many of the linked articles that this individual has written also are vague on actual details/proof and only contain vague "this could happen!" comments. Beyond that, many of them also end with a plea for more fundraising.

>This guy needs a website team in the biggest way. It's hard to find the information and it's scattershot. It's very frustrating because the work he's doing is solid. Don't let the shitty web presence deter you.

All he needs to do is spend a little more time uploading data and evidence, and less time shoving as many "DONATE" buttons onto his page as he can. None of this looks like solid work, even his television appearances; it looks like someone who goes around throwing out lots and lots of loose speculation while asking to be paid to do so.

Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by lelandfe on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @11:17AM (#30274412)
OK, his SEME bias analysis is based on recruiting people through a "passive monitoring system," which recorded SERP rankings over time (what Epstein deems "ephemeral experiences"). Participants' SERP rankings, and raw HTML of each of the top X links, were stored on Epstein's servers. He then had "online workers" (likely mturk?) rate each archived page as pro-Trump or Clinton.[0]

He submitted a paper on this in June 2021 to the AABSS but they have yet to publish it. He also has 5 other, earlier SEME papers submitted for publication.[1]

I appreciate you going the distance on providing these links but I'm loath to trust this data until it's been peer-reviewed.

His AIBRT presentation[2] has some seemingly spurious logic. Here's one slide: https://i.imgur.com/t4rGv3e.png

The graph depicts 300k undecided voters resolving to a party over time. Here's Epstein talking about it:

> ...by the time we hit election day, we have an enormous gap - more than 100,000 people - between the conservatives and liberals. And we've created that gap with our biased search results.

Assigning that movement to a single cause seems unlikely to me.

His presentation does include a relevant WSJ article titled "Google Workers Discussed Tweaking Search Function to Counter Travel Ban."[3] That's not "red-handed," since they didn't do it, but it's very relevant. HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036353

[0] https://hackernoon.com/taming-big-tech-5fef0df0f00d

[1] https://drrobertepstein.com/pdf/vita.pdf

[2] Video: https://www.aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_et_al_2021-Large-Sca...

[3] https://archive.is/tM18I

Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by nsajko on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:47AM (#30274029)
Podcasts are entertainment, they're a wildly inappropriate medium for rational argumentation or giving evidence or anything similar.

Put another way, you can't expect me to spend my time listening to a podcast just to be able to guess at what your argument is.

Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by jppittma on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:29AM (#30273727)
I can't believe I'm seeing junk like this on HN. I thought this forum was populated by people who actually work in tech?
Re:TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s ... by mhh__ on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @11:11AM (#30274335)
HN on politics is not HN on tech sadly. The discourse around the George Floyd murder was really horrid at times