🐱 Trump administration 'taking a look' at regulating Google

  • 🔧 At about Midnight EST I am going to completely fuck up the site trying to fix something.
CatParty
http://thehill.com/policy/technolog...nistration-taking-a-look-at-regulating-google


White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow on Tuesday said that the administration is “taking a look” at potentially regulating Google, following President Trump’s tweets criticizing the search giant.

Trump tweeted on Tuesday morning that Google search results for “Trump News” showed results for “only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media," he wrote, referencing prominent news outlet CNN.



“Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out,” Trump’s tweet read.
Kudlow's comments were in response to being pressed by reporters on if, in light of the president's comments, the administration is considering imposing regulations on Google.

In his tweets, Trump went on to accuse Google and other tech companies of being biased against conservatives, an increasingly common attack from Republicans.

“Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!” Trump tweeted.

Google shot back at the president's claims, refuting charges that it is biased against conservatives or any other political groups.

"When users type queries into the Google Search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds," a Google spokesperson said in a statement.

"Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don't bias our results toward any political ideology," the statement continues. "Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users' queries. We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment."

Trump joins high-profile Republicans like House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in accusing technology companies of treating conservatives on their platforms unfairly.

With support from McCarthy, the House Energy and Commerce Committee is set to hold a hearing on the matter on Sept. 5, which Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is set to testify.

Dorsey will also testify during the Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing that day on how foreign governments have run misinformation campaigns on American tech platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google Plus.
 
Do you know how much business goes through Google? They're not a multi-billion company because they have a nice logo.

You're making some logic leaps that you need to elaborate upon. You initially said google could make a portion of the internet "vanish". Now you're saying it's a multi-billion dollar company. I'm failing to see the connection, since I am stating that google cannot make the internet "vanish".

If google has the power to shut down the internet, then they have reached a point where they are a monopoly and need to be broken up. So just elaborate on your thought process.
 
Android is the most popular OS period, with a bigger market share than Windows. Furthermore, more and more internet traffic goes through fewer sites.

The argument for regulating sites like Google (and Twitter, and FB) is that they tend to serve the purpose of "digital public squares" as alternative social media sites tend to never succeed and in some cases (like with Gab) they reek of controlled opposition. After Trump won the social media titans adopted a mindset of "never again", and blaming Russia and the "nazis" is an excuse to expand censorship.
Yeah yeah Make Google Great Again etc.

We'll see how much awooing comes from you lot when president Ocasio-Cortés is in charge of appointing the head of the department of Digital Media Enforcement in 2032.
 
"Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don't bias our results toward any political ideology," the statement continues. "Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users' queries. We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment."
Bullshit.

Back in the day if you google searched stupid or dumb, the first result would be the George W. Bush bio on the White House webpage. Don't work anymore, but I KNOW other people here will remember that.

If they were willing to do it then, there's no reason why they wouldn't be doing it now.
 
Bullshit.

Back in the day if you google searched stupid or dumb, the first result would be the George W. Bush bio on the White House webpage. Don't work anymore, but I KNOW other people here will remember that.

If they were willing to do it then, there's no reason why they wouldn't be doing it now.
I still remember the old /pol/ "search for 'european people art' on GIS" thing. Almost all the initial results were of black people in early modern outfits. Which is really weird. But I mean, how do you prove that's not just some weird anomalous artifact of their search algorithms?
 
Bullshit.

Back in the day if you google searched stupid or dumb, the first result would be the George W. Bush bio on the White House webpage. Don't work anymore, but I KNOW other people here will remember that.

If they were willing to do it then, there's no reason why they wouldn't be doing it now.
They didn't do that. That's just how the algorithm works.
 
All they'd gave to do is rhetorically ask: "Wouldn't it suck if a percentage of the internet just vanished'?
No, not really. I don't use Twitter. I don't use Facebook. I use Google search engine for mundane shit, I already know how biased the results can be. Most of the time I already know what websites to go to for updates on specific things of interest to me without having to search engine it.

YouTube's probably the only remotely important part and I don't see that being held hostage going well at all, if they even CAN hold it hostage.

I'm all for regulation of these trash sectors of the internet. Maybe they'll improve.
 
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:thinking:
 
Yep, they call it a "Google Bomb". And I'll just about guarantee you that with this latest move of Trump's, someone is going to try and create a new one for him.
Google's algorithms are pretty resistant to that sort of thing nowadays. A google result correlates pretty well with legitimate influence. See: kiwifarms dominating search results for cows.
 
Doesn't China do this kind of shit?




Yep, they call it a "Google Bomb". And I'll just about guarantee you that with this latest move of Trump's, someone is going to try and create a new one for him.
China's regulation of social media networks is about tracking people, often involving their national ID numbers. This ties into their social credit scoring system. It's absolutely terrifying.
 
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