So, did some research about the background of the paper. One of the authors: His website, which features mental health screening tests, was blocked for serving malware that could infect visitors to the site. Epstein emailed "Larry Page, Google's chief executive; David Drummond, Google’s legal counsel; Dr. Epstein's congressman; and journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, and Newsweek."In it, Epstein threatened legal action if the warning concerning his website was not removed, and denied that any problems with his website existed. Several weeks later, Epstein admitted his website had been hacked, but still blamed Google for tarnishing his name and not helping him find the infection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Epstein And I'd been wondering why the paper was so visibly anti-Google. edit: I've also been trying to find information about PNAS' peer review process, and this is the first thing I could find that wasn't written by PNAS itself (the link contains both article and comments to the article, encompassing a variety of opinions): http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-publishing-the-inside-track-1.15424 There's also this background info on politico.com: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politico So, someone had a public beef with Google that turned out to be partly his own fault and all sorts of press got involved, this author is a contributor to Huffington Post, several years later writes a paper about how election results can be swayed by Google, which is suspiciously anti-Google, his paper is hosted on a website whose peer review process is very difficult to find details about, and then a link to the article is posted on a pro-Republican website, at about the same time a liberal potential presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, is getting a huge, growing amount of attention on the internet, which is heavily associated with Google (it being the most popular search engine), and some are hopeful this internet movement may sway actual votes. Some of this seems a bit fishy to me.In 2012, Epstein publicly disputed with Google Search over a security warning placed on links to his website.
Politico is a political journalism organization based in Arlington County, Virginia, that covers the issues, ideas and personalities behind politics and policy in the United States and in the global arena. Its content is distributed via television, the Internet, newspaper and radio. Its coverage in Washington, D.C. includes the U.S. Congress, lobbying, media and the Presidency.[3] It was a sponsor of the 2008 Republican Presidential candidates debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on May 3, 2007, the 2008 Democratic Presidential candidates debate at the Kodak Theater on January 31, 2008, and the 2012 Republican Presidential candidates debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on September 7, 2011.
Holy crap, this is getting better and better. Just checked out the articles Robert Epstein has written on Huffington post, and many of them are heavily anti-Google and he seems to sway more towards the Republican end of the political spectrum:
Why does that even matter? It should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that it's possible to manipulate votes with social media. Now, I doubt google would be able to do this -- it would require the silence of hundreds of employees at the minimum -- but it should at least make you second-guess putting all of your trust into these black boxes like facebook and google. Personally I don't put any trust in them.
That was actually a pretty rude "reply"... What dingus said is entirely correct. Yes, we should take an author's background and possible external motivations into account. But if the contents of a piece are factually correct, they ought to be treated as such.
edit: sorry, that was harsh, you didn't deserve that. To provide context: that's not the first time that person has been negative in comments and posts I've been in. In this comment thread, I fully acknowledged that it is possible to influence voting results, to influence behavior, and that this is a scientifically tested phenomenon. What I questioned is 1) why this paper was focusing on Google specifically and 2) the poor quality of the paper itself. So I did research first on the author, then did research on the peer review process of the site the paper was hosted on, and found that the author of the paper was biased, and there was no way to verify the validity of the paper. The paper was also badly presented. I then did further research, and found that the author of this badly presented paper has had a history of bad blood with Google, and therefore the way this paper was phrased just didn't sit right with me. If the paper had been about search engines in general, and hadn't included Google in the title, while I still would've been dismayed by the poor presentation and scientific flaws, I wouldn't have questioned it so heavily. So then some user comes along, making the jump to conclusions assumption that I was dismissing one of the premises of the linked paper: that influencing voting behavior by a search engine is possible. Which I never had done. I.e.: I said things, someone made generalized assumptions about the things I'd said, turned it into absolutism, and was acting like I was wrong, which made no sense. And now I give up trying to have a rational conversation with anyone else in this thread. Have a lovely day.
Not sure if that was directed at me or someone else. If at me: please tell me where in this comment thread I said that it's not possible for a search engine to skew data in order to influence election results. If it was not directed at me: my apologies.
Contrary to some of the commenters in this thread, I don't believe that it's necessarily relevant if Google is presently manipulating any voting outcomes. If we identify a case where a private company has the power to significantly, singularly and covertly manipulate the outcome of our elections, I think we automatically have some very serious implications to consider. Apparently, this kind of view is not very fashionable. It's strange, this new "normal" we live in.
I mean, you're describing every media company ever. This isn't the new normal, it's the old normal in a new dress. Outside of media companies that try to sway subconscious thought about a candidate, there are private companies that make voting machines which could be easily hacked to physically change votes. The fact that Google could, potentially, one day, maybe sway people seems to take a back seat to that. In my eyes at least.
Well of course (possible and factual) manipulation of elections isn't anything new. But much like I don't get how "Well Google and Facebook do it, too" makes Microsoft's behavior any better, I don't understand how "traditional media and manufacturers of voting machines need to be questioned critically, too" makes it any less important to understand what google is capable of. Plus, you can't compare google to traditional media companies. Google is not a station or a paper. Google is the search engine. They are the provider of online videos. They are a huge part of most people's digital ecosystem. And people view google as this neutral provider of information on demand. People (at least those who aren't entirely beyond help) don't watch fox news with that attitude. People understand that when they read the NYT, there's a person behind that article and that guy has an opinion. That's not how we look at the order of our google search results, is it?
I find this interesting despite the weird fixation Epstein has on Google specifically. I don't agree with Epstein that government regulation is the right solution. I imagine gerrymandered search results, or the situation on NPR where until recently, they felt they had to present climate change deniers as equal balance to the vast majority of respected scientists.
This is partly why we have the electoral college. It's actually relevant for once. The Founding Fathers weren't about to let just anyone make important decisions. They could be influenced to easily. So, electoral college. Of course, if it actually tried anything, 2000 is going to look like a neighborhood barbecue.
I understand to some extent what they mean when they talk about search rank, but I wish they went into more detail what that actually entails. I may even need some clarifications on it. To my understanding search ranking determines your placement in the search results. Being in the top five search results in google gives you a serious advantage over other links in the category. What I don't understand is the basic experiment they conducted. The participants are given 15 minutes to research the candidates and the one with the higher ranking usually had the more positive results. What are these people searching though? I mean if I for instance search Bernie Sanders, how is Hillary Clinton having a higher search rank going to affect the results I receive? Now, if I look up 2016 presidential election I can understand how that could be affected by Search rank. Am I missing something? Are people not searching specifically by name? Are there searches on elections more general?
Did anything in that article talk about actual facts, rather than hypothetical conjectures and mock scenarios? This article reminded me very much of a basic way to sway public opinion: merely suggest something, even if it's not true, and it becomes true in people's minds. Not saying it's true or untrue, but I found very little of actual academic value in this read. I may be missing something, however, as I'm far from perfect.
They literally put the paper of their experiment in the article.
Yes, I saw that. I don't see anywhere they actually found evidence of Google manipulating election related results. The most relevant aspect of their paper talked about a hypothetical test they ran, where they deliberately presented three different types of search results (that they created themselves) to three different groups, and showing that whatever their fake search results showed to the test group, said test group was biased in its favor. That's the extent of the evidence based data I could find. Everything else was a bunch of "could", "might" and so forth. If the entire point of this was to show that people can be swayed by how information is presented to them, that is a basic psychological fact that has been scientifically tested and proven time and time again, in a variety of experiments and studies. So what's the real point of the paper, and why was the name "Google" dragged into it? Again, I might be missing something.Search rankings for the three experiments in study 1. (A) For subjects in group 1 of experiment 1, 30 search results that linked to 30 corresponding Web pages were ranked in a fixed order that favored candidate Julia Gillard, as follows: those favoring Gillard (from highest to lowest rated pages), then those favoring neither candidate, then those favoring Abbott (from lowest to highest rated pages). (B) For subjects in group 2 of experiment 1, the search results were displayed in precisely the opposite order so that they favored the opposing candidate, Tony Abbott. (C) For subjects in group 3 of experiment 1 (the control group), the ranking favored neither candidate. (D) For subjects in groups 1 and 2 of experiment 2, the rankings bias was masked slightly by swapping results that had originally appeared in positions 4 and 27. Thus, on the first page of search results, five of the six results—all but the one in the fourth position—favored one candidate. (E) For subjects in groups 1 and 2 of experiment 3, a more aggressive mask was used by swapping results that had originally appeared in positions 3 and 28.
You are. The title of the article reads, "How Google COULD Rig the 2016 Election." The keyword is "could" not that they currently are doing anything of such sort. The article is pointing out the voters can be swayed by the algorithms used in search engines namely Google. If Google for whatever reason was to manipulate those algorithms to favor one candidate over another they could in turn control who is elected because of the sway that search rankings have over people.
We seem to be having a communication misfire. Not shouting you down, or saying you're wrong, merely trying to figure out where we're missing each other. What I don't understand is: this phenomenon has already been tested, countless times, and proven. The scientific community knows about this phenomenon. I can understand why they might do a very specific test about recent election data, run hypotheticals, this is a valid scientific thing to do. What I do not understand is why a specific brand name was dragged into it. Usually, a scientific paper is about a certain hypothesis, we did this, these were the groups, these were the results, our hypothesis was right or incorrect. A scientific paper that focuses more on hypotheticals and conjecture rather than hard data seems to be more philosophy than science. My high school science teachers would've heavily marked me down for writing up and presenting an experiment like this.
Playing devils advocate, Google is the search engine. Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo together don't have the market share to pull this off. Baidu is the only other provider I can think of that could do something like this, but I don't think they have the same global reach that Google does. If you think someone can do something this important, it makes sense to me to name them. That said, from your other post, it sure sounds like the author has an axe to grind.
Man. That was a damn good read. The three scenarios they layed out are all compelling in their own way. Maybe they could use this to help put politicians in office to fix the mess they're in in Europe.