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I am not a fan of overusing "Orwellian" but this is as close a case as I've seen to all those comments about everyone receiving a simultaneous "download" of their new talking points.
"Border czar" is not and never was an official title - so when everyone says "Harris was never appointed border czar" - yes, technically that is true. (Technically, the Vice President has precisely one official duty, which is breaking ties in the Senate. Other than that, the VP has only whatever duties and authority the President assigns, and there have been VPs who basically faffed around for four years with nothing to do.) But clearly Harris was referred to as "border czar" and everyone understood what that meant, even if it was a strictly informal title.
Frustratingly, mentioning this to my Harris-supporting friends just gets sighs and eye-rolls, like "Why does this even matter?" And how good a job she did as "border czar" probably doesn't matter all that much - what matters (to me) is watching the entire media apparatus turn on a dime to reinforce DNC talking points and everyone thinks that's fine and that people trying to point out the discrepancy are just bad-faith Harris-haters.
This point will likely be ceded once it's irrelevant, like the unfortunate implications of the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
So there is some good news on the horizon.
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The exasperated eye roll followed up with a comment like "why does this even matter?" or "are we still talking about this is 202X" etc. should be recognized as the liberal-PMC capitulation performance.
You see no one on the PMC every really loses. At least not all at once. It's more of a slow wandering into obscurity that ends in chairing an Alumni outreach committee at bard and a memoir that sells exactly negative seven copies. If they always think they can come back, they will stay on the team.
But the subtext is clear enough; "I don't want to talk about this because I am aware that the facts are quite inarguably not on my side. I will, therefore, socially pressure you into, at least, reducing the pointedness with which you address the issue"
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Go to Google.com and type "attempted assassination of Donald" or "of Trum" and look at the predictions.
The entire Dem system is orwellian, there is no other word for it. It's not possible to overuse it.
You've just gotten used to it, because that's what you have to do to feel like a Sensible Moderate rather than one of those witches you sneer at.
For what its worth, for me the autocomplete's also purged for Trump.
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Huh. I also cannot get any Google autocomplete for "trump shot", "trump assassina...", "trump secret s...", "trump inju..."... Google clearly knows of these topics, but they somehow haven't made their way into their search history model.
This is at least very fishy.
They're likely in the model, they're just in the autocomplete blacklist (a list of patterns which isn't allowed to autocomplete).
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Also, I did this just to indulge you (I assume "Trum" was a typo, or is that supposed to be some new meme I am not familiar with?), and the top results were the latest AP, CNN, ABC, and Fox News stories, followed by links from the FBI and Wikipedia. What new Dem Orwellian nefariousness am I supposed to be seeing, exactly?
Google's Twitter account claims the removal of autocompletes is intentional behavior, though it doesn't seem to be shared by a number of other (sometimes fairly recent) other assassinations or assassination attempts that would have fallen under the claimed policy's terms. Westerly's position seems the more charitable explanation, but that they're not using it doesn't encourage.
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Jesus fucking Christ, it was not a typo. Look at the auto-complete suggestions like I told you to do. The last suggestion it will make is "TRUMan", and when you add the P it goes blank.
This is exactly what I meant by how you pretend not to see what's right in front of you so you can sneer at people
Read my other comment and stop rage-stroking.
When I specify exactly what I input and what I see, I am not "pretending not to see" anything. I have carefully elucidated the scenarios in which I think it's plausible there is skullduggery going on, and those in which it is less plausible, and why. It's possible I miss something or am wrong in my analysis, but so far I haven't seen anything to convince me that "Google engineers are giggle-giggle-tee-heeing over erasing certain Trump-related search phrases" beats "Google search sucks." If I set out to prove Google is "against" a certain person or event or trend, I would need to do a bunch of searches with different keywords, and then compare with similar searches of equivalent things, and even then account for the unpredictability of LLMs.
None of this is pretending anything. I am easily able to believe that most Google employees hate Donald Trump and would absolutely reengineer the entire site to make him lose if (1) they thought it would work (2) they thought they could get away with it. But you reading tea leaves (or more likely, the latest thing circulating on Telegram about how Google is messing with Trump-related search terms) is not uncovering some plain conspiracy that only those in denial can't see.
FWIW, I tried doing other related searches and got similar results, e.g. "Reagan a" and it's already suggesting "Reagan assassination attempt". Whereas even "Trump assassinatio" still doesn't autocomplete.
I don't have a particularly conspiratorial mindset and I fail to see how fiddling with autocomplete results serves any particular purpose. But it does seem like they have been fiddled with.
"Trump poli" doesn't autocomplete either- you'd expect "Trump police"(he likes to tout police endorsements) and "Trump policy/ies". On the other hand "Trump for" autocompletes to "Trump foreign policy". "Trump Ame" autocompletes to "Trump American Dream TV show". "Trump law" autocompletes to "Trump lawyer" and "Trump lawn sign". "Trump pr" autocompletes as "Trump presidency" and "Trump presidential library". "Trump ag" autocompletes as "Trump age" and not "Trump agenda".
It looks like it's been fiddled with a little bit, I guess. But I'm surprised I don't see "Trump project 2025" in the suggestions.
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I’m on your side and it wasn’t immediately obvious without actually attempting the search as written. You should not assume bad faith here.
I'm so God damn tired of watching people like that smugly pretend "I don't know what you mean, that's so weird, why would you notice that?"
It's never honest, it's always tactical sneering. You can tell because he's still doing it even after people showed him in the gentlest way possible.
With sneers like "the latest thing circulating on telegram", he's literally just doing the same thing as Kalema voters he was criticizing above, and doesn't even realize it.
Even when he's got the nerve to grudgingly notice things, he still has to get an elbow in at the people who noticed before it was fashionable.
I do not pretend.
I am always honest. I answered each of the people who pointed out what they saw, with what I saw with my own search results.
I notice things whether or not they are fashionable. I also notice when people have partisan blind spots.
I think it was the "bad faith trolls accusing me of lying" part that he's complaining about in the last bit. SteveKirk was the only one AFAIK who accused you of lying (a lot of people asked for evidence, but that's legitimate to check why you got different results than they did), and while he definitely didn't AGF and that's his error I'm reasonably confident he's acting in good faith himself (the only plausible way he could be a troll IMO would be if he were a full-blown agent provocateur trying to get us to attempt terrorism and get arrested).
There were a couple of other people demanding "post screenshots," with the obvious implication that I was making up what I saw. Though my opinion is somewhat informed by checking user histories (so I know when someone has a history of being antagonistic and trollish), which non-mods don't have available.
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As you can see, the only Trump related suggestion was "attempted assassination of donald wiki" meaning that "donald" isn't a filtered keyword in suggestions, but that someone at Google manually removed the most obvious suggestions.
/images/17221839899043539.webp
"assassination biden", "assassination kamala" etc don't autocomplete either, which might imply they've simply removed a bunch of obvious phrases to avoid some other guy taking a pop at one of the candidates and the news stories being written about how the (potential) assassin had Googled this phrase before grabbing his rifle. (Yes, no-one's attempted to assassinate the Dem candidates, but you'd still expect them to autocomplete for people to find, for instance, reactions by Biden or Harris to Trump assassination or so on.)
Considering that nobody has tried to assassinate them, this seems to be expected behaviour?
If Boris Johnson flashed parliament, would the fact that google has no suggestions for 'blair flashing' have any relevance to the results you might get for 'Boris flashing'?
Again, do you think the expected behavior would be autocomplete not delivering any results?
Both "tony blair flashing" and "boris johnson flashing" do indeed not deliver autocomplete results, as expected. (well I wasn't sure about Boris)
Whereas if either of them had been flashing anyone lately, I would certainly expect Google to autocomplete accordingly -- what else would you expect?
Once they manage to integrate advanced
hallucinationLLMs into their search, I guess the engine might make something up -- but otherwise once you get down to a level of specificity that will return very few to zero results, "nothing" is exactly what autocomplete should do.If you do the actual google search on Boris you will find that he opposes 'cyber-flashing' (whatever that is), and that somebody in Parliament claims that Angela Rayner was flashing him during Question Period to put him off his game -- there doesn't seem to be an obvious autocompletion there, given that it's supposed to work by suggesting 'hot searches'. (as it were)
I'm afraid you've lost me there. People tend to generally write and speculate more about the possibilities of politicians (particularly US ones) being assassinated than them flashing anyone. I can't say I'm so well-versed in the mechanics of autocomplete to say for sure, of course, but my general feeling is that I'd expect "biden assassination" to bring up some results, and it not bringing up any would indicate similar manual cleaning of results to what's been done to Trump, ostensibly for similar motives.
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"bush as" prompts "bush assassination attempt"
Is Bush (George W., presumably) currently in a position where he'd be expected to be undergoing a high risk for a monumental, history-changing assassination?
No, but he was the subject of one.
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And yet "Attempted assassination of" gives me Donald Trump as the first results.
I think people try to do too much Kremlinology on Google results. I believe Google engineers might sometimes try to manipulate results for political ends, but most claims I see are like this: dumb, inconsistent, and more plausibly the result of the same phenomenon that causes Dall-E to draw a house with a chimney no matter how many ways I try to specify "No chimney."
I would have to believe some low level engineer is just arbitrarily hacking specific query phrases. Which is not... impossible, but seems unlikely in a number of ways.
Are you pretending not to notice again? Dall-E does that because CNNs are bad at decomposition and nobody invented any better. What Google does is intentional, go to Yandex or any search engine which is outside of america's culture war and you immediately get suggested prompts for attack on Trump
You don't get your house without chimney or headless horseman or car without wheels just by going to another's brand of AI gen.
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I get Ronald Reagan, Bob Marley, and Theodore Roosevelt.
"Attempted assassination of d" gives "de gaulle" and "franklin d roosevelt" and nobody else.
Anything more specific gives nothing whatsoever.
Note that Google is known to blacklist words and phrases from autocomplete, at least on a crude level, so it wouldn't be surprising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#Search_suggestions
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Same here as the other commenter: Ronald Reagan, Robert Fico, Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, the Pope, Bob Marley, Truman, Seward, Reagan, President Reagan.
Do you still get Trump if you try it now?
See my eta above.
The top results now seem to be news stories about Trump being omitted from search results.
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Not me. I get Prince Alfred, then Ronald Reagan, Arthur Calwell, Robert Fico, Queen Victoria, the Pope, etc, etc. Trump nowhere on the list.
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How is this Kremonology? You saw what they did to their AI image generation. At this point the default assumption is Google has their finger on the scale
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I was skeptical but here's what happened when I tried it in a private tab:
https://i.imgur.com/A6o3XVZ.png
https://i.imgur.com/l6wS075.png
https://i.imgur.com/OSixrIk.png
Autocomplete for anything after Donald didn't show up at all, "tru" let alone "trump."
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Isn't he talking about autocomplete (hence "Trum" instead of "Trump")?
Okay. "Attempted Assassination of Donald" - autocompletes were "wiki," "first attempted assassination of US President," and references to various presidential assassinations. Is the Google wickedness here that it doesn't autocomplete to "Donald Trump" first? I suppose it's possible that Google engineers intentionally removed "Trump" from the predictions, but the reason for doing this eludes me - people would then be diverted from finding out about an attempted assassination of Donald Trump? Working with LLMs and other token predictors quite a lot, I find more prosaic technical explanations more likely than whatever opaque partisan SEO scheme this is supposed to imply.
When I try "Attempted Assassination of Trum", the first autocomplete is "Trump" (guess those Google engineers weren't vigilant enough!) and the second is "Truman."
ETA: While generally I don't feel obligated to prove anything to bad faith trolls accusing me of lying, I did find myself puzzled that I was getting different results than what other people claimed. I redid them and realized I'd missed the top results were earlier searches in my own search history (with a different icon). So when I used a private tab I got mostly the same Trump-less results as others did. (Still don't see Prince Alfred or Queen Victoria, though - @AshLael. Maybe regional differences?) Still not convinced someone deliberately went in and removed all Trump-related assassination queries, but I will be interested in trying again in a few days and seeing what happens.
Loathe as I am to do it I have to defend Google here. A more thorough examination suggests they are blocking nearly all autocomplete suggestions good and bad related to Trump and Harris. My guess: an attempt to be seen as NOT trying to influence the election. A list of searches that seem to be blacklisted by autocomplete: “trump felon/felony” “trump sexual assault” “trump january 6” “trump lies” “trump crimes” “kamala/harris border” “kamala/harris border czar” “kamala/harris voting record”
Honestly almost nothing autocompletes for either outside of age, nationality, net worth, height, news.
One of the few exceptions I found was “trump stormy daniels”
Assuming my results reflect what others get, on the whole Google actually seems pretty neutral here and is genuinely pursuing a policy of “never autocomplete anything related to either candidate but the bare minimum biographical details”
Oh yeah, I noticed that for 'Trump felony'. If so, well..
It suggests 'Trump felonies' when I start typing 'Trump felony'. Yandex doesn't suggest 'Trump felony' at all so I don't think even Google doesn't suggest 'trump felony' for you that it's intentional.
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Yeah I think you might have solved the mystery here.
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Highly likely. I got Arthur Calwell too, and that's a name I doubt many non-Australians would know (opposition leader back in the 1960s).
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I get only Truman.
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Show a screenshot, I get the exact same result as everyone but you apparently
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I put it in the same category as Google Gemini refusing to show white people. It's a hamfisted way of manipulating the prevalence and salience of a topic.
That query gives me Truman only: https://imgur.com/2ElIZQy
No hint that a person by the name of Donald Trump was ever the target of an assassination attempt. "Donald Trump Assassi" doesn't autocomplete either, and "Donald Trump shot" corrects my apparent typo to "...shoe".
To check, did it autocorrect in the "showing results for X, click here to get what you actually typed" sense (which I often get searching for weird shit)? When I did it, it came up with red underline on "shot" indicating a spelling error, and suggested "donald trump shoe", but pressing Enter did in fact take me to "donald trump shot" i.e. reports on the assassination attempt. I just want to check the exact details.
I think you got the same as me. An apparent typo on the autocomplete, that goes to the real results when entered: https://imgur.com/a/eNXCArL
Thanks for the clarification.
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You make a number of conflict theory mistakes.
First, you assume I have never noticed this before just because I only occasionally comment on it. This is not correct. I've been around and politically aware longer than you. I am more informed and have more historical perspective than you. This isn't new, it's not limited to one faction, but it is also usually exaggerated. ("Orwellian" is like "Fascist" or "Nazi" - most people who use it Literally Literally don't understand what Literally Fascist, Nazi, or Orwellian is.)
Second, you think this is a "Dem" system. Again, not having been around as long and seeing things only through your partisan lens, you notice when your enemies do it (and it's the Worst Thing Ever) and not when your side does it (which is, alternately, not the same thing at all or it is but only fighting fire with fire).
Third, you assume that I "have to feel like a Sensible Moderate" - i.e., it's a guise I adopt to be a Right Thinking Person, and not what I actually believe, and not sincere beliefs arrived at through analysis of history and the political landscape. I realize this is a comforting and satisfying thing to believe. It's always more pleasant to imagine your enemies are bots, NPCs, "low information," etc.
But it's incorrect. I am a sensible moderate person (this doesn't mean I am right about everything or that I deliberately triangulate to find a "moderate" position - it means I am not generally given to catastrophizing, villifying, or presentist despair or accelerationism), and to the degree I "sneer" at witches, it's because their malice-driven conflict theories are wrong more often than not. That they are occasionally right about some things does not change this.
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It's used beyond that, though; Amadan only said he's not a fan of overusing it, and it does clearly get overused (I've seen people refer to dystopias as "Orwellian" when they were much closer to Brave New World, for instance).
Yeah but messing with the dominant search index of the country to censor certain topics is pretty much as close to "he who controls the present controls the past" as a company can get. So does the Dalle diversity scandal for that matter.
I wasn't objecting to that; I was objecting to SteveKirk's assertion that it's not overused. It fits this (as Amadan noted), but it doesn't fit certain other things and people use it for those other things anyway.
That's true, but it generally fits the whole pattern of behavior and general strategy of a leftist post-totalitarian regime, in the sense Havel used the term.
Deniable coercion, manipulation, and vague concern-trolling threats of what might (deservedly) happen to you if you ask too many questions. Much neater than cracking skulls all the time.
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So far as the "Read Another Book" meme goes, Harry Potter is to millenials as 1984 is to boomers.
It takes too much typing to compare things to I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, which would be nearly as accurate.
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If there is powerful entity that tries to overwrite the people perception of reality - no matter if centralized communist heavy handed propaganda or the democratic borg (or the republican borg 20 years ago for that matter - Iraq war) orwellian is quite fitting.
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