Hacker News Reader

Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

> First, there's a popular belief amongst their readership (for whatever reason) that this is not the case and that Google actively works against sites like these.

Breitbart in particular has run a long series of articles featuring leaked discussions from within Google where there are calls internally to remove or penalize Breitbart from organic listings, and deactivate their AdWords.

They also discussed censorship on Facebook and Twitter amoung others.

They run these under the umbrella “Masters of the Universe”:

https://www.breitbart.com/masters-of-the-universe/

View on HN

They should do so. Breitbart isn't really a news site; if you wanted to dignify it, you'd compare it to Salon, which also doesn't belong in news summaries on Google.

That wasn’t meant as an endorsement of Breitbart, to be sure. But parent raised the question of why people think this, and trust in media is a crucial point these days.

Breitbart articles discussing Google censorship aren’t radical alt-right preaching. You can strongly believe that Google is making informed and conscientious decisions about censorship and rankings on their platform, and then read a different perspective on Breitbart to understand the other viewpoint.

For example, in response to a question as to why when doing an image search on Google for “idiot” that Trump is the result (Currently he is 3 of the top 10 results. I mean, that is pretty funny actually) Sundar Pichai swore to Congress that Google does not manually intervene on any search result. Is that really credible?

Maybe it’s a little hard to quantify what is a “real” news site anymore. Some people assume this is self-evident, but I am skeptical of everything I read.

I sometimes find it entertaining to see what slant opinionated news sites will put on a story and compare it against the MSM.

Real news sites post reported news. Breitbart digests news from real news sites. It's essentially a glamorized group blog, like Daily Kos. In fact, Breitbart is basically the right-wing version of Talking Points Memo, another group blog dressed up to look like a news site.

Fox News is a sharply right-wing news site with a very strong editorial bias. I don't like Fox News, but I can't argue that it doesn't belong in the same bracket as CNN. Breitbart does not.

This is mostly true. But, for example, they’ve interviewed Trump in the Oval Office. So not entirely un-credentialed.

You’ll say; This says more about Trump than it does about Breitbart.

No, I'll say that group blogs are a legitimate thing, and sometimes they get big-ticket interviews, and every once in awhile they even break a story. But that doesn't make them news organizations.

I'm not saying that sites like Breitbart should be buried (boycotts, though, seem fair game). I actually like Talking Points Memo every once in awhile. But I don't use blogs as my primary news source and Google shouldn't promote blogs as if they are.

>For example, in response to a question as to why when doing an image search on Google for “idiot” that Trump is the result

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=idiot

Is Sundar and Microsoft working together now? But wait, are they also paying off Duck Duck Go??

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=idiot&ia=images

These conspiratorial arguments that search engines are politically biased stems from technical illiteracy and/or a lack of critical thinking. The arguments are used as a distraction by certain people who want Americans to disregard any new information that may paint them in a negative light - and it is working on a subset of Americans.

That example was meant to be funny. That’s not to say there is not evidence of direct intervention in search rankings when the algorithm results were undesireable.

It’s beyond question that Google manually intervenes in Search results in some cases. That could be entirely innocuous or concerningly dubious. The question is exactly how, how often, and should they be accountable for it?

Why is it beyond questioning?

>It’s beyond question that Google manually intervenes in Search results in some cases.

If it's "beyond question" then it should be easy for you to provide evidence, right?

As with most conspiratorial arguments, you're trying to protect your opinion by using a false premise (and prevent people from questioning it).

> Breitbart articles discussing Google censorship aren’t radical alt-right preaching.

That may be narrowly true of a particular article but it isn't true of the newspaper as a whole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bannon

Bannon himself called Breitbart "the platform for the alt- right".

CNN, MSNBC, WSJ, WaPo, and the Washington Times are not news sites either. They are mouthpieces in journalist clothing.

Interesting contention - who are they mouthpieces for?

One easy example is WaPo and the time they posted 16 negative Bernie Sanders stories in less than a day during the Democratic primaries:

https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-storie...

Ever since Bernie has made Amazon a target, considering Bezos owns both. For example he was able to berate them into increase their minimum wage. Some sources:

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/09/05/bernie-sanders-introduce...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-11/bernie-sa...

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/05/05/bernie_sa...

Just like most big tech, the leadership is in bed with the corporate democrats, who are in turn in bed with the military industrial complex, big pharma, and Wall Street.

Do you have any examples of what you would consider to be legit journalism?

theintercept.com, therealnews.com, Max Blumenthal, Dan Cohen, Aaron Mate, Abby Martin, Caitlin Johnstone, Rania Khalek, and Kyle Kulinski are just a few.

Which they should

While it isn't quite as bad I'd compare Breitbart more to Der strummer the Nazi Propaganda rag then to partisan newspapers or blogs.

Racist and bigoted propaganda is what you'll see over and over in it's pages. Stuff like claims islamists burnt down Germany oldest church.

I'd say it's Google's societal duty to censor them

Reply on news.ycombinator.com