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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36939 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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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 hallucination LLMs 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?

"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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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.

And yet "Attempted assassination of" gives me Donald Trump as the first results.

Not me. I get Prince Alfred, then Ronald Reagan, Arthur Calwell, Robert Fico, Queen Victoria, the Pope, etc, etc. Trump nowhere on the list.

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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