This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
The point with 'flashing' is that it's an example of a thing that never happened, and you would not expect autocomplete to bring anything up.
Turns out in the case of 'President X assassination attempt' it is in fact a thing that happened for some value of 'attempt' and all X > 'Coolidge'. (TBF nobody tried to assassinate Eisenhower while he was president, but apparently ze Germans took a poke at him as Supreme Commander)
Coolidge does autocomplete, suggesting links in association with other attempts around the time of his administration -- you need to go back to Harding to find somebody other than Biden) boring enough that "Harding assassination" does not autocomplete with "attempt".
So do you think Google is trying to keep Trump, Biden and Warren Harding from being assassinated by excluding them from the autocomplete?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not me. I get Prince Alfred, then Ronald Reagan, Arthur Calwell, Robert Fico, Queen Victoria, the Pope, etc, etc. Trump nowhere on the list.
More options
Context Copy link
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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."
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah I think you might have solved the mystery here.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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).
More options
Context Copy link
I get only Truman.
More options
Context Copy link
Show a screenshot, I get the exact same result as everyone but you apparently
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link