Google Employees Considered Adjusting Search Engine Algorithm to Hide Islamophobic Results

"Actively counter islamophobic, algorithmically biased results from search terms 'Islam', 'Muslim', 'Iran', etc."

IVAN ALVARADO/REUTERS/Newscom

In response to the Muslim travel ban announced by President Trump in January 2017, some Google employees discussed making changes to their search engine so that Islamophobic and anti-immigrant results would be less prominent.

That's according to emails obtained by The Wall Street Journal, which reports:

The list of ideas included:

"Actively counter islamophobic, algorithmically biased results from search terms 'Islam', 'Muslim', 'Iran', etc."

"Actively counter prejudiced, algorithmically biased search results from search terms 'Mexico', 'Hispanic', 'Latino', etc."

"Can we launch an ephemeral experience that includes Highlights, up-to-date info from the US State Dept, DHS, links to donate to ACLU, etc?" the email added.

Several officials responded favorably to the overall idea. "We're absolutely in…Anything you need," one wrote.

But a public-affairs executive wrote: "Very much in favor of Google stepping up, but just have a few questions on this," including "how partisan we want to be on this."

Nothing came of these ideas, a Google spokesperson said.

Nevertheless, the existence of the emails has prompted furious denunciation from many conservatives who already believe giant tech corporations are working against them. Fox News' Tucker Carlson discussed the story on his program Thursday, "Here, Google employees are plotting to subvert our entire public conversation secretly." Canadian psychologist and Intellectual Dark Web superstar Jordan Peterson tweeted, "If this is true it is treasonous and should be treated as such."

Treason is an absurd allegation here, especially coming from someone like Peterson, who purports to defend free speech. Google is a private company, and its algorithm is not required by law to humor conservative talking points about immigration and Islam. Unfortunately, many on the right increasingly sound like they want the government to regulate tech companies, which is a serious betrayal of principle.

It's perfectly understandable to think Google ought not to stack its search results in a politically biased way. But pretending that these emails betray criminal intent or treasonous behavior is silly. Conservatives peddling this line sound just as unhinged as the #Resistance partisans who blindly insist that every Trump utterance is evidence of some grand conspiracy to hand the country over to Russia.

Comments

[Sevo]

It's their company, but don't bother claiming impartiality, hypocrites.

[LeaveTrumpAloneLiberal-tarian]

No, it's a private company so they should be regulated as a public utility.

[Just Say'n]

A private company that created a surveillance state for the Chinese.

[Stephen Lathrop]

At the cost of giving up the right to a free press? No thanks.

[Sevo]

LeaveTrumpAloneLiberal-tarian|9.21.18 @ 2:01PM|#
"No, it's a private company so they should be regulated as a public utility."
Fuck off, commie-kid

[loveconstitution1789]

A private company that takes taxpayer money for US gov contracts and thereby agrees to not discriminate.

[buybuydandavis]

A "private" company that Congress exempted from the usual legal liabilities of publishing

[perlchpr]

They should be allowed to do it, but they should be forced to disclose it, too.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Once again, a call for enforced speech. Better, they should be allowed to do it without restriction, but not to be so big they preclude thousands of others from getting into the market and doing it otherwise.

[NotAnotherSkippy]

You mean like campaign finance laws.

And while you may (and that is debatable) be in favor of free speech, you sure don't like free association.

[Sevo]

Stephen Lathrop|9.21.18 @ 10:50PM|#
"Once again, a call for enforced speech. Better, they should be allowed to do it without restriction, but not to be so big they preclude thousands of others from getting into the market and doing it otherwise."

Once again, an amazingly stupid comment from our newest imbecile.
Lemme guess: You're all for 'free speech', "except..."
Which means your not, in case that needs explanation.
Fuck off, slaver.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Unfortunately, many on the right increasingly sound like they want the government to regulate tech companies, which is a serious betrayal of principle.

It's the Trump era. Everyone is betraying their principles.

It's good to call Google out over this. It's good to call everyone out on their below board shenanigans, even if some go overboard doing it. It keeps us honest.

[Scarecrow Repair & Chippering]

The first fiddling I remember which rang alarm bells was banning firearms from shopping results. Never mind that no one actually sold firearms directly through the mail like anything else; everyone was following FFL procedures. They were just being politically correct. I knew then it wouldn't be long before they got worse.

It's such a simple principle: once you stray from the algorithmic non-partisan oath, you are off in the woods and your credibility will take years to recover, if ever.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Leaving aside your underlying impulse to regulate private speech, you are also proposing an unobtainable, static, perpetual perfection in the design of search algorithms. You are barking up the wrong tree. The problem is an old fashioned one, which needs no miracle technology to manage. The problem is monopoly, and its resulting loss of diversity.

[A Thinking Mind]

The government shouldn't intervene to stop them. But doing stuff like this without alerting anyone to the fact that you're doing it is dishonest and people should call them on it.

I don't want it regulated, but I want them condemned.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Nothing wrong with the condemnation bit. That's your free speech. But try to note that you are throwing in your lot with many others here who aren't so scrupulous. Supporting the notion of private publishing with private editing is a better route to supporting free speech generally.

[Sevo]

Stephen Lathrop|9.21.18 @ 10:55PM|#
"...The problem is monopoly, and its resulting loss of diversity."

The problem is your stupidity; there is no monopoly.
Fuck off, slaver.

[Cy]

Actual stories and facts are not Islamaphobic, they're ISLAM.

[OpenBordersLiberal-tarian]

Oh look, it's conservatives once again pouncing on a complete non-story. They'll just have to accept the fact that many multi-billionaires and multi-billion-dollar corporations are on the right side of history with respect to immigration, especially immigration from Muslim-majority countries.

Plus, I learned in college that Islamophobia is a form of racism. So if Google ever implements this policy, they'll be protecting black and brown bodies from the brutal oppression and violence they face every day in this country, especially with Drumpf's presidency emboldening violent white nationalists.

#AbolishICE
#NoBanNoWall
#OpenBorders
#LibertariansAgainstIslamophobia

[Vincent Milburn]

https://youtu.be/ORmQd5Gk4-w

[LeaveTrumpAloneLiberal-tarian]

Fuck off, you douche. Google is too important a media and should be regulated as a utility. Any private company that regulates the content of what is on its platform is a vital threat to the 1st Amendment and any officer of said company proposing such a recourse should be prosecuted for treason.

[Don't look at me.]

No, grasshoppers, it is not.
But you are not compelled to give them your businesses. Use another service.

[perlchpr]

Dude. You were getting better and that was good, but you have been so completely overrun by this new Mark Question guy that I don't even know how to break it to you that you just dropped from the 7/10 you had finally worked your way up to down to a 3 out of the new 10.

[Mark Question]

At last.

Google is an American company, which means their first loyalty, their first objective, should be what helps AMERICA. Libertarians whine about "private enterprise and profit", but that's just a cover for a shameful lack of morality.

By morality I mean admitting you owe your existence, your soul, and your mind to the culture that spawned you and gave you the tools to make your business succeed.

Google is part of a plot designed to erase American culture, because they hate prosperity. They hate that people can decide not to use their services, to disagree with them, or vote Republican. So they want to import millions of brown people over to vote Democrat. They get away with it because our classical liberal values makes this country too chickenshit to outlaw the Democratic Party, punish people for the thoughtcrime of hating America, the country that does so much for them every day (well the police and military do, anyway, but that's the only part of the country that really matters when we talk about loving America), and institute the police state we need to create to protect freedom.

This is the weakness of libertarians laid bare. You think people deserve freedom for existing. The only people who deserve freedom are white patriots. Brown people might earn a little bit if they can convincingly prove they believe white people should always call the shots (because the instant we lose are ability to do that, they're going to put is in camps. I would if I were them).

[perlchpr]

10/10

Bravo.

[buybuydandavis]

Nice

[J'onn J'onzz]

Too bad that you didn't learn in college that Islamophobia can't be a form of racism because Isam isn't a race.

[Kirk Solo]

The "right side of history" was a something the Nazi's once believe too.

[Microaggressor]

DuckDuckGo is looking more attractive every day. At least it (probably) won't deliberately lie to me to promote woke search results.

[FreeRadical]

I've been using DuckDuckGo for a while now on the opera browser. It gets the job done. I sometimes compare search results and they are usually similar.

[WhatAboutBob]

I use DuckDuckGo. Google is evil. Like most tech companies, instead of hiring workers directly, they hire contractors thru third parties so they don't have to worry about offering benefits. Throw in H1B visas and the managers can make a lot of money, live in their left-wing echo chamber, and keep the pay and benefits down for everyone that works for them.

[jasno]

Google keeps pay and benefits low? They're one of the top paying companies in the valley. A friend of mine was hired for $400k annually with a $400k signing bonus.

Sure, they also hire contractors. So what? Are we against the free market now? Oh sorry, I forgot we turned against the free market when the great mercantilist was elected.

[NotAnotherSkippy]

Strange, I don't see him actually calling for any government intervention at all. In fact he is only advocating using a (sorta) competitor to Google. So apparently you're against the free market now...

[Sevo]

Uh, check that whine about hiring contractors to avoid paying (mandated) "benefits"; smells of SEIU

[Sevo]

"Like most tech companies, instead of hiring workers directly, they hire contractors thru third parties so they don't have to worry about offering benefits. Throw in H1B visas and the managers can make a lot of money, live in their left-wing echo chamber, and keep the pay and benefits down for everyone that works for them."

Slaver here thinks s/he has a better idea of how to run a company.
I'm calling fucking ignoramus who is, at best. cluically-challenged.

[Ride 'Em]

I updated my Mac to Sierra 12 and received a notice that Safari no longer supported DuckDuckGo. So, now I don't use Safari for searches.

[Widhalm19]

MeToo .... but in a good way.

[drilldrive]

I have been using DuckDuckGo for a couple years now. My only complaint is that the website is below the blurb and not above it. It is somewhat disorienting. Still hardly enough of a complaint for me to switch to bot-net Google.

[PeteRR]

"The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever."

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

Google is a private company, and its algorithm is not required by law to humor conservative talking points about immigration and Islam.

They're a private company who's been told to start abiding by certain diktats by powerful politicians or said politicians will "do it for them."

It's perfectly understandable to think Google ought not to stack its search results in a politically biased way. But pretending that these emails betray criminal intent, or treasonous behavior, is silly.

I agree. In a previous thread I read just the surface tweet provided in the article, and I understood it to mean they were trying to nudge election results. Having said that...

Because we know that Gavin Belson and Hooli... erh, I mean Google shows interest in tweaking search results to push a narrative, there's no reason this couldn't spill over into violations of black letter law during an election season. Again, see "in kind contribution".

[Stephen Lathrop]

The notion of regulating press freedom as "in kind contribution," is just as tiresome and unconstitutional in this context as it has been everywhere else it comes up.

[NotAnotherSkippy]

Nearly as tiresome as the notion that the "press" somehow has special speech privileges that the rest of us don't (cf. Citizens United).

[Anti-Fasciitis]

Google isn't the press, at least as far as their search results are concerned. The press consists of people and organizations disseminating information presented as fact or sincere opinion; whereas Google takes no responsibility for the content of their search results. The closest analogy from the time of the First Amendment would be a clipping service, which absolutely was not considered to be "press".

If they are the press, wouldn't that make them liable to be sued for returning libellous search results?

[Stephen Lathrop]

Google doesn't present alleged facts, or sincere opinions? Of course it does.

Your comment seems to rely tacitly on a notion that a legacy publisher would not be responsible for defamatory facts it published if they were the remarks of a contributor, and not the publisher itself. That is mistaken.

Of course Google is not liable for defamatory content from its contributors, because congress unwisely exempted online publishers from obligations which continue to be applied to customary publishers. But that congressional exemption can't pass muster as a matter of fact, and thus transform one of the world's largest publishers into a non-publisher. Google is a publisher because it does the things which define publishing. The congressional exemption was sought and passed precisely because that was so?for Google, and for many other online publishers. If everyone did not already understand that they were publishers, there would have been no need for Section 230, or their special exemption.

[Sevo]

Stephen Lathrop|9.21.18 @ 11:01PM|#
"The notion of regulating press freedom as "in kind contribution," is just as tiresome and unconstitutional in this context as it has been everywhere else it comes up"

Bullshit.

[Just Say'n]

Do you think Google would do the same thing for searches that say "Christian" or "Jew" or "Israel"?

Never mind, I think I already know the answer

[mad.casual]

Treason is an absurd allegation here, especially coming from someone like Peterson, who purports to defend free speech.

Treasonous seems a bit far but it screams antitrust. At the very least the FBI should investigate Google's management for ties to Russia.

[Longtorso, Johnny]

You side with powerful people in the government, you are the government.

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

And when you openly do their bidding...

[Just Say'n]

I thought that was going to be a link to Google doing the bidding of the Chinese.

[Ride 'Em]

The hypocritical part of his testimony is that his company harvests the personal information of the users of FB to increase add revenues.

[JP88]

I recommend people begin using DuckDuckGo for web searches and Brave as their internet browser. They have the highest privacy settings in their industries and, as far as I know, are not manipulating search results or algorithms.

Government regulation, like nearly all regulation, will make this problem much, much worse. Imagine in 2020 a President Warren and a Democratic Congress with the the power to regulate Google, Facebook, etc... That is terrifying.

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

Imagine in 2020 a President Warren and a Democratic Congress with the the power to regulate Google, Facebook, etc... That is terrifying.

It's what they're openly expressing and Zuckerberg (to name just one) is fully on board.

[Cathy L]

as far as I know, are not manipulating search results or algorithms

How exactly do you create a search algorithm without manipulating it?

[Just Say'n]

If you used it, you'd understand. It's not as good at finding what you are looking for, because it doesn't account for your search history, location, etc.

[JWatts]

I'm pretty sure he meant manipulating it in a consciously biased fashion. .... But you probably knew that and were just being pedantic.

[Anti-Fasciitis]

What about the other billion or so people in the world that you want to reach?

[Ken Shultz]

"Google Employees Considered Adjusting Search Engine Algorithm to Hide Islamophobic Results"

I call bullshit.

Here's what the WSJ has to say:

"WASHINGTON?Days after the Trump administration instituted a controversial travel ban in January 2017, Google employees discussed ways they might be able to tweak the company's search-related functions to show users how to contribute to pro-immigration organizations and contact lawmakers and government agencies, according to internal company emails."

The email traffic, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, shows that employees proposed ways to "leverage" search functions and take steps to counter what they considered to be "islamophobic, algorithmically biased results from search terms 'Islam', 'Muslim', 'Iran', etc." and "prejudiced, algorithmically biased search results from search terms 'Mexico', 'Hispanic', 'Latino', etc."

http://www.wsj.com/articles/go.....1537488472

Some of you may recall that I've criticized Google in the past and that I've been working to rid myself of their products. My criticism of Google doesn't need any . . . um . . . editorializing of the facts. Just the unvarnished truth will suffice.

[Ken Shultz]

Question 1) Is what's being described in the WSJ article "hiding Islamophobic results" precisely?

I think that's highly questionable. At worst, they seem to be talking about ranking things differently or including information about how to contact pro-immigration causes in various ways.

Question 2) Was the travel ban necessarily Islamophobic?

I believe the correct answer is no. The latest form of the travel ban, as I recall, neither gave extra support to non-Muslims nor did it specify anything about Islam at all. There were non-Muslim countries on the list. There were Muslim countries not on the list. Meanwhile, didn't the Supreme Court uphold the travel ban?

[Just Say'n]

"Google is a private company, and its algorithm is not required by law to humor conservative talking points about immigration and Islam."

Are they showing the same lack of principles as a magazine who bills itself as being in favor of "free minds" carrying water for a company that created a surveillance state for the Chinese or is that different?

[jasno]

So the China thing is now a magic wand we can use to dismiss the fact that we're arguing against the free market?

News flash - China is already a police state and lots of companies helped them get there. Making money off that fact is amoral. Next thing you're going to say is that gun manufacturers are responsible for Columbine.

For fuck's sake, it is downright sad to see how the comment section here has lost its collective mind since Trump was elected. I thought we were libertarians?

[Sevo]

+1^

[NotAnotherSkippy]

Please, Robby isn't interested in the free market or free speech. In fact he outright called for twitter to punish Rubio for posting the public address and phone number of a business. But that's different, because reasons. Robby loves him some censorship as long as the right people are getting shut up. And on that particular point, the Chinese angle is extremely relevant.

[Anti-Fasciitis]

There will not be a free market in any case. Whether Google gets away with this or not. So neither side can be said to "argue against a free market".

The market is already fucked up and unfree. Forcing Google to choose between splitting up or behaving in a viewpoint-neutral way does not change that.

In any case, Google's work on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party is good evidence that they are evil. Not a magic wand at all.

[Sevo]

"The market is already fucked up and unfree. Forcing Google to choose between splitting up or behaving in a viewpoint-neutral way does not change that."

Fail.
Any increase in coercion DOES change that, regardless of your fave winner.

[Anti-Fasciitis]

No, it doesn't. The market will not be free regardless.

[Sevo]

Anti-Fasciitis|9.22.18 @ 12:53AM|#
"No, it doesn't. The market will not be free regardless."

Yes, it does. ANY increase in coercion reduces the freedom of the market.
Stupidity or sarc?

[Cloudbuster]

"Algorithmically biased" == not the results our political biases demand.

[No Yards Penalty]

Switch to another browser and stop fucking whining.
Switch from Gmail to another mail server and stop fucking whining.

[mad.casual]

And your phone. Maybe your internet service as well. Also, the school district's stuff is all done through gmail and g-suite so I'll have to petition them to let my kids use a different service... Once all that's done, where to go? Apple? Amazon?

I don't disagree that 'just switch' is the right answer but 'just switch and quit whining' ignores the fact that in some places the choice has been forced and switching isn't an option and, even if it were, the alternatives are just as bad.

[perlchpr]

The phone market is especially bad. Your options are Apple and Google, basically.

[Anti-Fasciitis]

None of those solve the problem of how someone can spread a message that Google doesn't like. They would need the entire world to switch their browser, email, etc.

Herein lies the difference between the Internet monopoly and the real-life monopolies. The former tend naturally to consolidation, while the latter usually require government intervention to survive.

[Sevo]

Anti-Fasciitis|9.21.18 @ 11:44PM|#
"None of those bullshit, bullshit, bullshit"
Fuck off, slaver.

[earthandweather]

"Google employees considered adjusting algorithms to hide Robbie Suave" ...Intersting idea.

[Rob Misek]

You probably don't want to regulate the internet.

Unregulated it is like the Wild West and corruption is uncontrolled.

You don't know what you don't have access to knowing.

Samuel Landman was the Solicitor for the British Zionist organization when Britain crafted the Balfour Declaration, the official promise of Palestine to Jews in 1917.

When Britain was dragging its feet in 1936, Landman published a paper clearly reminding everyone that Britain promised Palestine to Zionists in 1917 if they would succeed in bringing the US into WW1, after electing Wilson on an anti war platform.

That is a significant global event. It extended WW1 by two years, inspired the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, is the cause of the last 70 years of the Middle East conflict, cost millions of lives and far more in destruction.

Funny thing, Samuel Landman can't be found in Wikipedia.