Big Tech Tyrants by Floyd Brown

Author:Floyd Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N/A
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2019-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

The Algorithmic Art of Skewing Political Searches

Google is responsible for about 75 percent of search engine traffic in the US, and nearly 90 percent on mobile devices.65 So it matters that in July 2016, with the presidential campaign in full swing, anybody who went to the Google search function and typed in “presidential candidates” would have seen the top feature bar populated with just three names:

Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Jill Stein (Green Party).

No mention of Donald Trump or Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party).66

This was in July 2016, and the top candidates were too well-known for this to have been an honest error. When alerted to the omission, Google claimed it was a result of a “technical bug” and they soon “fixed it.” But when we’ve seen so many similar bugs, it’s hard not to question whether, in Google’s eyes, this was a random bug or a well-thought-out feature.

A month earlier, MarketWatch had called attention to Google’s autocomplete tool.67 That’s the dropdown menu you see when doing a search, and it’s Google’s AI figuring out what you are most likely searching for with each added letter, based on the billions of searches others have made before you. It’s a work of genius and thought to be a completely autonomous tool. But is it, always?

MarketWatch went on to show how Google’s autocomplete “tilted in favor of Hillary Clinton” though the company loudly protested to the contrary. The respected financial (and nonpolitical) journal showed a video from SourceFed of someone typing “Hillary Clinton cri” into Yahoo and Bing and their autocomplete tool suggesting phrases that linked her to “crime.” Similarly, typing “Hillary Clinton ind” on Yahoo and Bing linked her to a possible indictment from mishandling her email records.

But when those identical searches were then performed on Google, the autocomplete gave very different results. Typing “Hillary Clinton cri” gave suggestions for Hillary Clinton crime reform and Hillary Clinton crisis. Similarly, typing “Hillary Clinton ind” brought up suggestions on Hillary Clinton and Indiana, independents, and India, and not indictment.

The MarketWatch reporter duplicated the search strings shown in the SourceFed video—in the name of good journalism—and obtained the identical results on all three search sites.

Of course, Google denied tampering with the search results, despite a long history of doing just that (which we’ll get to). In this instance, they insisted that the autocomplete tool could be influenced by many factors, including the latest queries from the user base, the individual user’s own previous searches, and filtering for certain kinds of inappropriate content. And certainly, the past searching habits of individuals on Google, Yahoo, and Bing are going to be somewhat different. But not that markedly different, since search has become a known utility and people don’t actively say, why, I think I’ll use Bing today instead of Google; they use whatever is in front of them.

So, the Google search results that shined favorably on the Democratic nominee for president were not likely an anomaly. They were more likely an extension of policy and a reflection

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