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Comment by tootahe45 | Hacker News Reader

To decide for yourself just watch the Google leadership meeting which happened after the election, where some of them even started sulking about the results. "Google after the election" renders no results on Youtube unsurprisingly, even though it was a fairly popular video.

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> "Google after the election" renders no results on Youtube unsurprisingly

If you search for "google leaked tgif" on YouTube or Google you will have plenty of articles and videos about that ;-) "Google after the election" is just not specific enough and can match a lot of different subjects.

The question is whether personal feelings were translated into algorithmic bias. The simple fact that that some employees were upset by a result doesn't necessarily mean they took some underhand action.

Don’t we talk here all the time about how algorithms can be biased (even racist) due to programmers being biased in ways they may not even be aware of?

Then we must consider the possibility of bias in this case too.

People talk about how your data’s perspective is biased, and how algorithms can lead to cyclic effects. Or in what manner does someone exercise racial bias in their data model?

Surely the same can happen for politics? Especially when sources of data are preemptively blacklisted?

Agreed, it's a possibility. But pictures of upset people aren't evidence that it happened.

>The question is whether personal feelings were translated into algorithmic bias.

Activists certainly claim that personal bias will influence algorithmic bias when it comes to gender and race. I take their point. Why should political bias be exempt from that, especially in light of the highly emotional and polarizing political climate.

"We lost" doesn't sound like some employees, sounds like org-wide political conformity.

I actually think the various independent creators on Youtube played a huge part in helping Trump win. The question is whether the de-platforming has anything to do with that. The algorithm itself just lets you binge on more of what you're looking for, and a large group of those that binge Youtube the most are drawn to right-wing views.

You are assuming - wrongly - that it is even possible for that not to happen. Companies like Google (and Amazon, and FB, and any company that has any kind of search), need to constantly watch and change their search results to avoid a lot of things popping up on them, avoid them getting gamed. Because a LOT of people on the internet are looking to game their results for commercial advantage. And a lot of governments are looking for certain things to pop up in those algorithms, it's not relevant so let's not go into what exactly.

So search results must be evaluated and changed - by people with personal feelings - and an internal process gets started to change the search results - by people with personal feelings, to correct things.

So there is no need whatsoever for there to be anything underhanded.

I hate how people reason about this. Just because there is no conspiracy things are assumed to be working well and non-politically, perfectly and neutrally enforcing the rules. Well, good luck with that.

"Google after the election" renders no results on Youtube unsurprisingly

I just tried and literally 9 of the top 10 videos are either the video you are referencing or videos talking about that video.

If this was a way to trick people to look up this video on Youtube, then well played.

Similarly, "sesame street geometry covers of popular songs" doesn't surface Eight Awesome Angles of YouTube, which shows that it, too, is being censored- why don't the media elites want you to know about Jack Black?

And "black man becoming president ceremony" doesn't give any news stories about Obama's election. Ah....the game is afoot.

Or, you know, YouTube search isn't nearly as "fuzzy" as Google Search proper. "Google after the election" and even "the Google leadership meeting which happened after the election" both show the video- even with a nice little embedded thumbnail, on mobile.

Just Googled that and the top results where news articles about it with direct links to the video. It was posted by Breitbart which doesn't use YouTube.

None the less, if you search directly on YouTube your suggested terms returns results for the more recent videos about the Indian election but if you search "Google after Trump election" or "Google after US election" the top results are videos discussing the subject you claim is being censored.

If anything you've discovered that YouTube's search algorithm prioritizes recent events over a user's location where as Google seems to take into account the locale the user is searching from to a greater degree over recency.

I'm sure this little trick pulls the wool over a lot of people's eyes who want to believe that there is a YouTube conspiracy against their political ideology.

A quick search for "google election reaction trump" yielded a "Leaked video shows Google's top brass 'upset' over Trump 2016 win" video by RT on the first page.

If there is a clandestine operation to remove those videos, it's not going very well.

And? The fact that I dislike a politician doesn’t mean I write code to attack him.

For example, if 97% of the worlds leading authorities on climate science have consensus, wouldn’t you agree it is better to rank such consensus higher? The right wing perceives this as an attack because they think their view on climate science deserves equal ranking.

But that’s so, how far do we take it? Is flat earther articles deserving of equal ranking?

Victim mentality breeds conspiracies around search tampering. The more fringe the beliefs, the more victimizAtion is roled out.

>For example, if 97% of the worlds leading authorities on climate science have consensus

Let me give you a tip. The people who don’t trust climate science aren’t going to give a shit if climate scientists agree on something. It’s like saying “97% of numerologists believe in numerology”.

That’s an appeal to authority. Even ignoring the fallacy, it has even less power when it’s that very authority that’s being distrusted.

Flat earthers don’t agree with NASA or ESA or SpaceX either. It’s not an appeal to authority when people are replicating experiments on a wide scale.

Anyone can measure Carbonic Acid concentrations in water to see ocean acidification for example.

What we have is people in denial of reality for ideological reasons, because they don’t like the unpleasant fact that it represents a market failure that may require collective action to fix.

When you refuse to accept reality because of ideology, you are essentially acting on faith, not reason.

No, the equivalent to your example would be "97% of climate scientists believe that climate exists"

It's also not an appeal to authority fallacy to say that the only people who bothered to check something have a certain opinion.

How do you know what's in the box? Well I looked in it and you still haven't.

> 97% of climate scientists believe that climate exists

Perhaps you meant “climate change”?

No. I'm specifically saying that "numerologists believe in numerology" is equivalent to "climate scientists believe climate exists"

I think there’s a fair number of numerologists who believe that numerology doesn’t work.

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