A nonprofit that investigates Genetically Modified Organisms and the origins of Covid-19 is the latest to see its traffic plunge after a search engine update
Anyone who cannot acknowledge that shutting down public discourse damages us all has my pity. You are correct, this isn't a left-right issue, it's an authoritarian-liberty issue. And probably the most significant issue of the past hundred years.
I used to work at Google, albeit not on web search. I wish people wouldn't use the word censored to talk about search rankings, it dilutes the term and makes it less useful for actual censorship.
Firstly, there is no real investigation or fact checking going on in this piece, Matt is just repeating the non-profit's claims. As noted by others the screenshot doesn't seem to actually show search traffic (you can't know impressions for that) but rather an ad campaign which could be affected by many things, most obviously budget reductions or competitor budget increases. The story is just not credible and could have used some double-checking.
Second, rankings whether for ads or organic results are a zero sum game. Someone's loss is someone else's gain. To show this is "censorship" by Google you'd have to find the queries where they lost traffic and go look at what's being returned for them now. For all you know there is an even bigger, better left wing charity making exactly the same claims but more effectively and they are now out-ranking RTK, which would cause the same effects on RTK but render claims of censorship totally meaningless.
Thirdly, yes the ranking algorithms are opaque. They have to be, because there's a whole planet of people trying to game them to get to the top. This is not nefarious or evil behaviour by Google. Literally no search engine publishes their ranking algorithms in full. Google DID do this in the very early days because it came out of a PhD project so the PageRank algorithm was described in a published paper. It resulted in SEO spammers gaming the algorithm as hard as possible in all kinds of creative and destructive ways. There are way more factors now and they aren't widely known even inside the company to stop this happening again.
Now all that said, there IS a real story here, but it's a more general one and much harder to write than just finding some old-school left-wingers who think they're being censored by a search engine ranking update. The firm's ever increasing emphasis on E-A-T content (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) assumes a dystopian and highly hierarchical society in which only "experts" should be allowed to receive attention about any given topic. This is inherently a dead end because academia produces an infinite stream of institutionally approved "experts" who have no actual expertise in their area. The decay inside academia, Google's inability to see it (due partly to their heavy reliance on hiring from top universities), and the leftist focus on rule-by-publicly-funded-expert will inevitably lead to endless situations in which Google genuinely *does* censor people who are correct but arguing with academics. However, this situation is most easily observed today at the periphery of the company in places like YouTube or the Play Store, not core web search which at least for now appears to be the least corrupted part (I'm not saying it's uncorrupted, just that it's not as open and obvious as in those other sites).
Finally, I really skeptical this left/right balance is going to work out. The reality is the left is the group doing the censoring today and trying to paint it as a bipartisan "people against the corporations" issue probably won't work as a consequence. To the extent corporations are censoring, it seems to invariably be with the goal of boosting social justice theory and academic pronouncements. The right will be the victim 9 times out of 10 and trying to present it differently will lead to a succession of weak stories like this one.
Thank you once again, Matt. Why do the people who define themselves as liberals not get what's going on? They're in a cult that tells them that anything giving them a different perspective is evil and must be exterminated. The only thing I can understand about this is from experience growing up among young people who acted out as liberals and leftists in CA in the 60s and 70s, and often they then joined cults that were totalitarian. They couldn't handle the freedom. It was weird for me. Suddenly, people I knew who considered themselves free were in cults where they completely obeyed some demented leader. I mean really obeyed. Cut off family, censored people who disagreed. I couldn't talk sense to them. In the 70s my brother went with a woman who joined a cult and she hid under a sheet the entire time of their relationship. Because her leader told her to. I ran into her five years later and she'd turned into a suburban mom, no memory of having been taken over by a cult mentality. So that gives me hope. Maybe this will turn. With a lot of amnesia. But I never thought the mainstream media would be the cult leaders. I find this scarier. Can democracy survive this?
"computers don’t easily distinguish between conspiracy theory and legitimate reporting that runs counter to present accepted narratives"
All google did was plug-in "lab-leak hypothesis" into the no-no bin as soon as it became a Trumpian factoid, and voila problem solved. Except for the annoying fact that it's still extremely likely Covid came from the Wuhan Virology Lab. Combine the politization of that fact along with China extremely interested in keeping it out of bounds, and we have a recipe for some very very shady shit going down on the google
why don't you urge people to switch to a different search engine? It takes 1 minute to switch from google search to duckduckgo search and break the googles search 'monopoly' power.
Thank you so much for profiling US Right To Know: real journalists doing real work reporting the real issues, true American heroes! Just checked out their latest news and HOO BOY are they not in the friend making business. Their latest series is revealing how Gates and his buddies are trying to colonize Africa's food economy, possibly as a test run for doing the same thing in the US since he's the US's biggest owner of farmland :
"the UN appears to be organizing a corporate agribusiness power play led by the Gates and Rockefeller foundations and the World Economic Forum (WEF). Over 500 civil society groups are protesting the Summit’s direction and the appointment of Agnes Kailibata, president of Gates-funded Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), as Special Envoy in charge of strategic direction. These groups want the UN to withdraw from the UN-WEF partnership they say is “helping to establishing ‘stakeholder capitalism’ as a governance model for the entire planet.” "
Google's search algorithm (lumping all of them into one insofar as the user sees it) is a fucking joke. The first full page of hits on any search string containing terms that may have commercial relevance is ALWAYS openly stated (sponsored) advertisements followed by advertisements written and delivered in a tricky manner to fool you into clicking on some product or service being sold. So even WITHOUT directing searches away from people or organizations, there's a lot of crap to filter through.
Duckduckgo is not as bad, and it maintains your privacy, but it's also got problems. It's my default search engine now, but their search function just doesn't work as accurately as Google's. I think I need to dig into the "bangs" feature and some of the other filtering code/flags because I may not be taking full advantage of it. But I recall several times having to try three or four different combinations of search terms, then going to Google and doing the same with much more accurate results. Maybe someone with more expertise on the matter could help me.
Also, I've switched to the Brave browser and away from Chrome. I still use Firefox occasionally, but it's slower and more of a resource hog. That has been getting better I think with many of the open source improvements over the years. Fuck Google.
There is a side of this censorship issue that I simply don't understand: why is assumed to be automatic that readership or viewership of any given website MUST go through Google or Facebook or Twitter?
I am a TK subscriber (you're welcome) because I have been an admirer of Taibbi's writing for a long time. I have been aware of Matt through various sources, including his prior television appearances and his work for Rolling Stone. I was unaware that he had left RS until I saw one of his pieces here linked to on the site Naked Capitalism. That's what brought me to TK News. No search engine or social media involved. I've been an NC reader for years, after finding that site through seeing/hearing its founder, Yves Smith, interviewed on television and radio. I subscribe to NC's daily newsletter, which takes me directly to their site. Again, no search engine or social media involved.
We seem to be losing track of a fundamental truth about how the internet works: one site links to another. You see something that interests you, that has a link to its source, you click the link and go to that particular site. If you like what you see there, you can visit that site again in the future. You can bookmark it for quick and easy access; you don't even have to type the address. If the site lets you sign up for email alerts--I can't imagine a news site that is serious about covering topics and cultivating a readership that doesn't have that--then you can get your pipeline to that site directly delivered to your inbox. Yet again, no involvement from Facebook or Google or Twitter is necessary.
So how, then, is a lack of participation by those companies censorship?
If we're talking about a site getting shut down by government decree, so that its content is no longer available at all to internet users, that is certainly censorship.
But that does not seem to be the nature of the argument here. The sites cited above indicate that they had traffic, people who visited their sites at one point, but then there was a falloff, presumably because of changes to search engine algorithms. But why did those previous visitors not continue to exercise the (fairly minimal) effort required to visit those sites directly themselves, of their own volition, if those visitors found the content valuable to them?
There's only so much that we can do, or expect that others can do, to lead members of a society to actively engage themselves in the process of educating themselves in what they need to know. If there is only ever to be a perpetual expectation that the public can never be bothered to act in their own interest, that they can only ever expect information to be found and prechewed for them by internet giants before being vomited directly into their mewling mouths like so much pap, then it is foolish to expect there to be any difference made in society at large by the transmission of information, no matter how that information is made available to a populace that is so stupid and lazy that they can't be bothered to find anything worth knowing through their own efforts. That's the core problem--not the vagaries of Silicon Valley's devotion to the First Amendment.
There is a real use case out there for a search engine that filters out entities that advance corporate and government narratives regularly. I'd so use that.
You go to the Olympics, win a gold medal at gymnastics, getting a 10 from every judge. Next Olympics you do same routine, with two new feats, all of which you perform perfectly. Every judge gives you 6.
You lick your wounds and resolve to do better next time. You ask the judges what was the problem.
"We're not really sure why we all gave you 6. But trust us, there's nothing underhanded going on."
"Don't be evil" was removed from Google's Corporate Code of Conduct sometime during late April 2018, so half way through Trump's first term the powers that be at Google must have changed gears and decided it's now OK to be evil.
Two years ago I switched to Brave and Duck Duck Go and am better off for it. Good riddance!
Anyone who cannot acknowledge that shutting down public discourse damages us all has my pity. You are correct, this isn't a left-right issue, it's an authoritarian-liberty issue. And probably the most significant issue of the past hundred years.
I used to work at Google, albeit not on web search. I wish people wouldn't use the word censored to talk about search rankings, it dilutes the term and makes it less useful for actual censorship.
Firstly, there is no real investigation or fact checking going on in this piece, Matt is just repeating the non-profit's claims. As noted by others the screenshot doesn't seem to actually show search traffic (you can't know impressions for that) but rather an ad campaign which could be affected by many things, most obviously budget reductions or competitor budget increases. The story is just not credible and could have used some double-checking.
Second, rankings whether for ads or organic results are a zero sum game. Someone's loss is someone else's gain. To show this is "censorship" by Google you'd have to find the queries where they lost traffic and go look at what's being returned for them now. For all you know there is an even bigger, better left wing charity making exactly the same claims but more effectively and they are now out-ranking RTK, which would cause the same effects on RTK but render claims of censorship totally meaningless.
Thirdly, yes the ranking algorithms are opaque. They have to be, because there's a whole planet of people trying to game them to get to the top. This is not nefarious or evil behaviour by Google. Literally no search engine publishes their ranking algorithms in full. Google DID do this in the very early days because it came out of a PhD project so the PageRank algorithm was described in a published paper. It resulted in SEO spammers gaming the algorithm as hard as possible in all kinds of creative and destructive ways. There are way more factors now and they aren't widely known even inside the company to stop this happening again.
Now all that said, there IS a real story here, but it's a more general one and much harder to write than just finding some old-school left-wingers who think they're being censored by a search engine ranking update. The firm's ever increasing emphasis on E-A-T content (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) assumes a dystopian and highly hierarchical society in which only "experts" should be allowed to receive attention about any given topic. This is inherently a dead end because academia produces an infinite stream of institutionally approved "experts" who have no actual expertise in their area. The decay inside academia, Google's inability to see it (due partly to their heavy reliance on hiring from top universities), and the leftist focus on rule-by-publicly-funded-expert will inevitably lead to endless situations in which Google genuinely *does* censor people who are correct but arguing with academics. However, this situation is most easily observed today at the periphery of the company in places like YouTube or the Play Store, not core web search which at least for now appears to be the least corrupted part (I'm not saying it's uncorrupted, just that it's not as open and obvious as in those other sites).
Finally, I really skeptical this left/right balance is going to work out. The reality is the left is the group doing the censoring today and trying to paint it as a bipartisan "people against the corporations" issue probably won't work as a consequence. To the extent corporations are censoring, it seems to invariably be with the goal of boosting social justice theory and academic pronouncements. The right will be the victim 9 times out of 10 and trying to present it differently will lead to a succession of weak stories like this one.
"Does the content have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?"
Based on my experience, Google must award a lot of bonus points for excessive, distracting ads.
It makes you wonder what other things are being brushed under the rug in this country.
This country has not been a democracy for 30 years, if we are being honest. It a pageant of bullshit.
Thank you once again, Matt. Why do the people who define themselves as liberals not get what's going on? They're in a cult that tells them that anything giving them a different perspective is evil and must be exterminated. The only thing I can understand about this is from experience growing up among young people who acted out as liberals and leftists in CA in the 60s and 70s, and often they then joined cults that were totalitarian. They couldn't handle the freedom. It was weird for me. Suddenly, people I knew who considered themselves free were in cults where they completely obeyed some demented leader. I mean really obeyed. Cut off family, censored people who disagreed. I couldn't talk sense to them. In the 70s my brother went with a woman who joined a cult and she hid under a sheet the entire time of their relationship. Because her leader told her to. I ran into her five years later and she'd turned into a suburban mom, no memory of having been taken over by a cult mentality. So that gives me hope. Maybe this will turn. With a lot of amnesia. But I never thought the mainstream media would be the cult leaders. I find this scarier. Can democracy survive this?
"computers don’t easily distinguish between conspiracy theory and legitimate reporting that runs counter to present accepted narratives"
All google did was plug-in "lab-leak hypothesis" into the no-no bin as soon as it became a Trumpian factoid, and voila problem solved. Except for the annoying fact that it's still extremely likely Covid came from the Wuhan Virology Lab. Combine the politization of that fact along with China extremely interested in keeping it out of bounds, and we have a recipe for some very very shady shit going down on the google
why don't you urge people to switch to a different search engine? It takes 1 minute to switch from google search to duckduckgo search and break the googles search 'monopoly' power.
I think support for breaking up the tech monopolies is growing rapidly.
Thank you so much for profiling US Right To Know: real journalists doing real work reporting the real issues, true American heroes! Just checked out their latest news and HOO BOY are they not in the friend making business. Their latest series is revealing how Gates and his buddies are trying to colonize Africa's food economy, possibly as a test run for doing the same thing in the US since he's the US's biggest owner of farmland :
"the UN appears to be organizing a corporate agribusiness power play led by the Gates and Rockefeller foundations and the World Economic Forum (WEF). Over 500 civil society groups are protesting the Summit’s direction and the appointment of Agnes Kailibata, president of Gates-funded Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), as Special Envoy in charge of strategic direction. These groups want the UN to withdraw from the UN-WEF partnership they say is “helping to establishing ‘stakeholder capitalism’ as a governance model for the entire planet.” "
Google's search algorithm (lumping all of them into one insofar as the user sees it) is a fucking joke. The first full page of hits on any search string containing terms that may have commercial relevance is ALWAYS openly stated (sponsored) advertisements followed by advertisements written and delivered in a tricky manner to fool you into clicking on some product or service being sold. So even WITHOUT directing searches away from people or organizations, there's a lot of crap to filter through.
Duckduckgo is not as bad, and it maintains your privacy, but it's also got problems. It's my default search engine now, but their search function just doesn't work as accurately as Google's. I think I need to dig into the "bangs" feature and some of the other filtering code/flags because I may not be taking full advantage of it. But I recall several times having to try three or four different combinations of search terms, then going to Google and doing the same with much more accurate results. Maybe someone with more expertise on the matter could help me.
Also, I've switched to the Brave browser and away from Chrome. I still use Firefox occasionally, but it's slower and more of a resource hog. That has been getting better I think with many of the open source improvements over the years. Fuck Google.
There is a side of this censorship issue that I simply don't understand: why is assumed to be automatic that readership or viewership of any given website MUST go through Google or Facebook or Twitter?
I am a TK subscriber (you're welcome) because I have been an admirer of Taibbi's writing for a long time. I have been aware of Matt through various sources, including his prior television appearances and his work for Rolling Stone. I was unaware that he had left RS until I saw one of his pieces here linked to on the site Naked Capitalism. That's what brought me to TK News. No search engine or social media involved. I've been an NC reader for years, after finding that site through seeing/hearing its founder, Yves Smith, interviewed on television and radio. I subscribe to NC's daily newsletter, which takes me directly to their site. Again, no search engine or social media involved.
We seem to be losing track of a fundamental truth about how the internet works: one site links to another. You see something that interests you, that has a link to its source, you click the link and go to that particular site. If you like what you see there, you can visit that site again in the future. You can bookmark it for quick and easy access; you don't even have to type the address. If the site lets you sign up for email alerts--I can't imagine a news site that is serious about covering topics and cultivating a readership that doesn't have that--then you can get your pipeline to that site directly delivered to your inbox. Yet again, no involvement from Facebook or Google or Twitter is necessary.
So how, then, is a lack of participation by those companies censorship?
If we're talking about a site getting shut down by government decree, so that its content is no longer available at all to internet users, that is certainly censorship.
But that does not seem to be the nature of the argument here. The sites cited above indicate that they had traffic, people who visited their sites at one point, but then there was a falloff, presumably because of changes to search engine algorithms. But why did those previous visitors not continue to exercise the (fairly minimal) effort required to visit those sites directly themselves, of their own volition, if those visitors found the content valuable to them?
There's only so much that we can do, or expect that others can do, to lead members of a society to actively engage themselves in the process of educating themselves in what they need to know. If there is only ever to be a perpetual expectation that the public can never be bothered to act in their own interest, that they can only ever expect information to be found and prechewed for them by internet giants before being vomited directly into their mewling mouths like so much pap, then it is foolish to expect there to be any difference made in society at large by the transmission of information, no matter how that information is made available to a populace that is so stupid and lazy that they can't be bothered to find anything worth knowing through their own efforts. That's the core problem--not the vagaries of Silicon Valley's devotion to the First Amendment.
Powerful corporations in concert with a powerful Government and corrupt and deceitful MSM. Sounds like trouble.
There is a real use case out there for a search engine that filters out entities that advance corporate and government narratives regularly. I'd so use that.
You go to the Olympics, win a gold medal at gymnastics, getting a 10 from every judge. Next Olympics you do same routine, with two new feats, all of which you perform perfectly. Every judge gives you 6.
You lick your wounds and resolve to do better next time. You ask the judges what was the problem.
"We're not really sure why we all gave you 6. But trust us, there's nothing underhanded going on."
"Don't be evil" was removed from Google's Corporate Code of Conduct sometime during late April 2018, so half way through Trump's first term the powers that be at Google must have changed gears and decided it's now OK to be evil.
Two years ago I switched to Brave and Duck Duck Go and am better off for it. Good riddance!
Workers in the Wuhan lab were being attacked and/or peed on by wild research bats. It’s not The Island of Dr. Moreau, just a shitty zoo/pet store.