No, Google Search Is Not Thought-Policing Socialism
So the New York Times had a big story last week about Google down-rating “fringe” sites in informational queries.
The premise of the story is that pages with less popular viewpoints (for example, support of socialism or overt white supremacy) are being punished by the new Google algorithm, creating a sort of centrist thought bubble. Of course, this could be a horrible thing: imagine if important, well-researched pages on issues couldn’t reach users simply because they went against a centrist consensus. On the other hand, if this phenomenon is less about viewpoints being unpopular and more about sources not being authoritative or related to the intent of the query it could also be a good thing: people searching for “What happened to the dinosaurs?” should be able to expect getting a page that deals with the scientific controversy, not a Bible lesson or a page on the little-known 1980s band that forced Dinosaur Jr. to add the “Jr.” to its name.
So which is it? The article strongly implies it is about suppression of unpopular ideas, not lack of authority or pertinence. The specific example given in the article of a down-ranking is a “Socialism vs. Capitalism” search that used to turn up a Worldwide Socialist Web Site page last fall, but no longer ranks it highly. See the article:
In mid-April, a Google search for “socialism vs. capitalism” brought back one of the site’s links on the first results page but, by August, that same search didn’t feature any of its links.
So what is the page that that search used to turn up? Using a site specific search through Google, my guess is it was this one, a page called “Socialism vs. Capitalism and War.”
This is where I bang my head against my desk repeatedly. Hold on a second.
**vague thudding noises**
OK. I’m back.
The page in question is a 2016 announcement about a conference called “Socialism vs. Capitalism and War”.
It was an invite to a conference that ran last November. And so the complaint is that Google is no longer highly ranking a non-informational post inviting you to attend a conference that is over and that you can therefore no longer attend.
In fact, it is not even a conference about capitalism vs. socialism as such, but actually a conference about capitalism and war. No substantial non-war comparison between capitalism and socialism is made in the description of the conference theme. The conference is also a Socialist Equality Party event, not an academic conference and is meant to strategize messaging and party tactics while mobilizing people.
And so the “blacklisting” that is at the center of a major New York Times story is apparently that this announcement for an antiwar political event that is over no longer comes up when people ask for a comparison of capitalism and socialism. This is the evidence, the peg on which this NYT article is hung.
Now you could say — but maybe there are other examples that are true! Maybe the change did impact more substantial pages on the site. Well, yes, maybe. But the owner of the website chose this example, and his choice of it shows he doesn’t know what he is talking about. And the fact that the reporter didn’t plug the search that is the entire basis of his story into Google and reflect on it shows us how badly reporters need serious digital literacy training.
If this article was a digital literacy assignment, I would flunk it. This is just ludicrously bad.
A discussion needs to happen around these issues. More transparency needs to happen, and these algorithms need oversight. Just this morning Google put a 4chan thread in the “In the news” section of its results, a thread that falsely identified last night’s Las Vegas shooter. We know that mass murderer Dylann Roof claims that the erroneous results of Google search on “black and white crime” triggered his descent into racist conspiracy thinking. Algorithmic mistakes can be serious, with serious consequences, and what Google returns as results is an important issue for a democracy to discuss.
But the fact that endless ink has been spent on the complaints of an owner of a socialist website and yet no reporter has bothered to do a simple search to check those complaints is a much bigger problem than Google’s new guidelines. A much bigger problem. We can’t solve the important problems if we don’t hold ourselves to a higher standard of evidence. And we can’t address the “fake news” problem if we’re spewing more misinfo in the process.
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P. S. A reporter that actually executed the search queries they were covering would have sussed out the real issue, which is Google is not aggressive enough against junk results. Here is the Google snippet for the “socialism vs. capitalism” search, from a site that advertises itself as being about the “Atheist-Christian Culture War”:
So the New York Times story is, in fact, completely backwards. Keep in mind that this is the junk that 4th graders are getting back when they do book reports. As snippets!
