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 -
Minor fun on twitter where some people noticed google autocomplete has an allergy to 'Trump' and others called them liars because it's probably geographically selective.
Or google computes the autocomplete in search on a monthly basis?.
But if that's so, why is Trump himself suppressed? He's been here for quite some time.
I lean towards deliberately different autocomplete based on IP ranges, because I don't see why Snekotron would be lying about it.
EDIT:
I believe this is the right answer. by @Westerly .
There might even be a google press release on that but who could find it now in this deluge.
This is aimed not specifically at you, @No_one, but more about at the general discussion around this topic.
I wasn't sure at first how to express my general feelings on this, but it's something along the lines of Neema Parvini's (and guest's) comments (from about 51:40 to 57:30, though the broader context begins around 47:00).
This is a non-story on a number of levels. First, it seems like another example of ginned up outrage-bait slop from the usual right-wing containment outlets. Secondly, even to the extent it's real, Google autocomplete has to be the most trivial level of interference. It's not like they're outright preventing you from searching the terms in question, nor are they preventing these terms from providing relevant results.
And third, that Google is politically biased and Silicon Valley hates the right should not be news to anyone at this point. So what's the point of making a fuss about it, or any other similar little issue in the endless flood of them? And the more important question, the one I find myself asking more and more when people vent about this or that "outrage" by the other side, and the one I'd like to ask all the people griping on Twitter, is "so what are you going to do about it?"
Like Parvini says later in the video (on the topic of free speech), endless talking-head debates are a trap. They're containment — they go nowhere, and accomplish little except wasting time and energy. (Yes, not exactly a fitting attitude for participating in this space, but I've personally got plenty of time to waste, and haven't found better places to spend my energy — indeed, I had a Sunday question about a week ago relevant to this.)
It's more layered. There's autocomplete which like someone else here found doesn't work for presidential candidates.
But also: Google absolutely buries sites with the wrong political valence in search results. What Yandex will give you on the 1st page, Google will push down to 17, easily. IIRC, to the point of not even indexing certain sites.
So people don't use Google. Or DuckDuckGo which is almost as bad. Bing is usually better, Yandex doesn't do any outside of Russia suppression I'm aware of, but doesn't clean out bot results as well.
I agree it shouldn't be debated. Everyone should know that Google fucks with your search results and you have to use anyone else on anything political. Especially stuff that's not 'containment'.
More options
Context Copy link
...remind people that relevant truths remain relevant, duh?
This seems far more like an appeal to fatalism than an argument. You re-issue safety reminders regularly not because 'things be dangerous yo' should be news to anyone, but because there are a lot of reasons people may not be thinking of it at a specific context- whether they are districted, unfamiliar with a specific context, or they've just forgotten. You warn people that the stove is hot not because the idea that heat = pain is novel, but because they may not notice the stove is on / they are drifting dangerously close.
You also remind people that other people do not love them / hate them so that they are appropriately on guard, less likely to expose themselves to bad faith actors, and spare themselves the many harms and heartbreaks that can come with emotionally investing in the wrong people. And you do this regularly, because people are stupid / the heart wants what the heart wants / people always vulnerable to emotional appeals or deliberate manipulations which bad-faith actors know to use. If anyone has figured out a way to perfectly protect people via one pro forma briefing that people have to sit through, they're keeping the secret very closely, and everyone else has to regularly revisit topics and refresh awareness and retrain on already trained things.
Even setting aside that the human population is not eternal and static and not holding the sum total of human knowledge in their heads, and thus new people are learning new things every day, 'it is not novel' is not the same as 'it is not news-worthy.'
Daily life in our modern world isn't enough to do that?
And still, much like "raising awareness" in general, this isn't actually doing something about the issue.
Edit: I'd recommend watching the whole video. Hopping over and over from outrage to outrage — one day "I can't believe [X] did this!", the next "I can't believe [Y] did this!" — is not productive. It is, in Parvini's metaphor, just so much slop for the right wing proles to lap up like fat, dumb pigs at a trough. Focus on the whole, not the individual minor incidents. Fight the disease, not the symptoms. And, again, don't vent online — do something.
Given the routine failures of people on a daily basis in the modern world, obviously not, unless your daily life includes daily reminders as to why things are they way they are, which it generally does not.
Raising awareness is always a prerequisite for doing something about an issue, whether to advance an agenda when you have the power to, or to resist the imposition of an agenda when you don't.
Hence why the common anti-resistance tactics to undermine resistance often start at countering awareness. This can be by denying there is anything to resist (this doesn't happen), obfuscate coordinated or concurrent efforts (no one is trying to make this happen), and to denigrate even minor opposition as futile and pointless effort that should not be pursued (you can't change it and so shouldn't bother doing anything anyway).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's well known that Google engineers cull autocompletes they don't like. They also offer different suggestions based on ip geolocation and whatever data google has on you.
For a brief moment in 2012 we had "Google Gaydar" from Steve Sailer. He noticed that you could quantitively rank how gay the public thinks celebrities are by noticing how many characters you have to type after their name before google suggest "gay" as an autocomplete.
Sadly we aren't allowed to have that kind of fun, so Google only suggests "gay" for out of the closet celebrities.
Note for first link, it looks like a bad database migration messed up the character set encoding for the text and all of the "pretty quotation marks" have garbage around them. Anyone who was doing web dev in the 2000s will have horror stories of those awkward years where you never knew what encoding incoming text would be in.
https://www.takimag.com/article/google_gaydar_steve_sailer/
https://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/06/google-neuters-google-gaydar.html
More options
Context Copy link
Mild aside: whenever it's discussed if Google is censoring things, an old litmus test was to search for the documentary Demographic Winter.
It's a pretty banal HBD documentary all in all. They even stay out of discussing IQ! However, for a while there the entire thing had gone down the "we're definitely not censoring anything" memoryhole. It's only been un-search-holed in the last year or so.
I remember watching this like 10 years ago and it blackpilled me hard. It's fascinating how far I've come since then hah.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Maybe the more boring answer is that people don't actually use complete, formal phrases when searching? Though this might have ninja-changed in the last day or two, "assassination" autocompletes with "trump" as the second option ("attempted" sounds like newspaper speak more than what people actually google, which is often more of a "tags/keywords" approach). I literally don't know a single person who would ever type "US" before "President" and that's doubly true when you're doing a Google search for a clearly active politician.
More options
Context Copy link
The facebook suppression of the secret service scrum photo looks more interesting: https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-facebook-admits-censoring-iconic-photo-of-trump-surviving-assassination-attempt-this-was-an-error I wonder if anyone has any details about who was posting the original doctored photo. If you were suspicious of the fact checkers then you might be concerned they posted the misinformation photo themselves in order to try and get the original photograph censored as collateral damage.
I don't think that was necessarily malicious because we know that Facebook fact checkers are just way underpaid people working terrible jobs. And honestly that photo was almost too perfect, I saw it first on twitter and not national media, so I actually did wonder for a little if it was doctored! I was quickly corrected, so I'm curious how long it took Facebook to correct course. Was it minutes, hours, or over a day? The article doesn't say. Was it actually AI detection (which we know for a fact often can have bad accuracy), a malicious worker, corporate suppression, or a random mistake? Hard to know but that's a lot of plausible failure modes. I don't see anything in your link about fact checkers deliberately reposting the same image. Do you have a source for that?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't get autocomplete for Joe Biden either using the 'US President [name]' search. But do get autocomplete for 'President [name]' for both Donald and Joe.
More options
Context Copy link
I first noticed this in the 2018 midterms when Google autocomplete suppressed the JobsNotMobs hashtag. If there's something nefarious going on it's been flying under the radar for a long, long time. Took Elon et al to start complaining before it got generally noticed.
Quite a while ago, Google got in a bit of hot water for its auto complete suggestions. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a nontrivial human filter blocking all sorts of things. Many of those are probably not very political -- don't recommend adult topics at all, especially not around kids content; don't recommend anything suggesting committing a crime; don't recommend "torrent" searching for movie titles. Don't recommend anything that makes the company or it's search product look bad, generally.
I'm not convinced it isn't an intentional hand on the scales, but I think a higher burden of proof is probably necessary to declare it deliberate political bias, rather than the bias of their employees working on more general filters. Which also isn't to say it's unreasonable to ask them to improve the balance of the moderation there either.
ETA: I'm thinking of things like this list, which dates from 2010.
Based on the Google Gemini/Imagen fiasco I’m willing to bet it’s something very dumb and crude being pushed by upper leadership with limited understanding of how the technology works.
Anyone who thinks of Googlers as superhuman geniuses capable of plotting world domination has no idea how Google works and how bureaucratic and lifeless it is.
It's definitely something very dumb and crude, and almost certainly driven by some incredibly but dumbly risk averse mid-level exec who wants to make sure they don't get into trouble with their manager for bad press about bias during election season.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
See also previous discussion of this phenomenon from last week.
Wondering if you could keep some sort of LLM to show you related posts. I didn't notice that one as it was 2 levels deep into the 'border czar' stuff which to me is .. well, it is Orwellian to see these guys pretend black is white and skate around precise wording but it's something I'm used to.
I dimly remember some other brouhaha about search autocomplete.
Last week's thread, @AshLael wondered why:
Personally, I think they do it because of the 'it might help' because some normie typing something into autocomplete is less likely to see something problematic in the autocompletes and less likely to search for it. Low cost, might help, didn't consider the second order effect of people noticing and being pissed.
Trump assassination did happen -even the NYT said so- but it's a boring topic we can't get any points on , let's not remind people it actually exists.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link