So my bona-fides as one of HN's loud mostly-left-leaning people are pretty good, and--seriously, guys? Truthout? Like, at times they've historically had some alright commentary--I originally wanted to say "mostly by mistake"--but it is one of the more obvious crank magnets I know of on the left. It's like a poor man's Alternet (and that's saying something).
If Google's dinging stuff like Truthout at the same time they're getting the right wing all aflutter at their epistemic closures being pushed down Google's SERPs, I don't really have a problem with that. The amount of information warfare directed at average citizens from all sides is titanic and Truthout/WorldNetDaily etc. have no inherent right to credibility among people literally unable (through many factors, not all of which are ignorance or stupidity--this stuff also just requires an investment of time to really understand and be able to critically evaluate, and time is at a premium when you are getting paid fifteen bucks an hour or less) to ascertain the prudence of that credibility for themselves.
> If Google's dinging stuff like Truthout at the same time they're getting the right wing all aflutter at their epistemic closures being pushed down Google's SERPs, I don't really have a problem with that.
I do, and I'm pretty left leaning as well. What bothers me is that Google is using human judgment rather than their supposedly infallible algorithms to punish certain sites to the advantage of others. There is a good chance that what they're doing to one side of the spectrum today will be done to the other at some point in the future.
Algorithms are human judgment put into code; there's no meaningful difference. I am all in favor of a neutral arbiter for search engines; one doesn't exist, though, so, there you go. It all comes back to people eventually.
There is a hierarchy of threats to deal with. The information war being directed at everyday citizens to empower real scary dudes is being carried on the back of willful and knowing disinformation campaigns from both non-state and (external) state actors, in the U.S. and elsewhere. The defenses we have are limited, and while I agree with you that it very well may be problematic down the line: if that means I'm in a foxhole with Google, I can live with that for now and work to fight that threat later.
Furthermore, those algorithms are designed to reflect the prevailing winds of the market, if you will. So an unintended (?) bias, plus changes in backlinks, searches, etc. will be reflected in SERP. This happens all the time.
That said, nothing surprises me any more. I'm sure there are plenty of intelligence community "double agents" embedded in the tech Giants with any kind of influence.
If you have proof that humans at Google are actually choosing which sites to reduce the visibility of in search results, that would be big news, and I'd like to know about it. :)
If Google's dinging stuff like Truthout at the same time they're getting the right wing all aflutter at their epistemic closures being pushed down Google's SERPs, I don't really have a problem with that. The amount of information warfare directed at average citizens from all sides is titanic and Truthout/WorldNetDaily etc. have no inherent right to credibility among people literally unable (through many factors, not all of which are ignorance or stupidity--this stuff also just requires an investment of time to really understand and be able to critically evaluate, and time is at a premium when you are getting paid fifteen bucks an hour or less) to ascertain the prudence of that credibility for themselves.