What they fail to understand is that there was never a conspiracy to censor their content, it was the greater Digg community that did that because their articles are usually unprofessional, fact-challenged fantasies that nobody wants to read.
They should probably have asked a conservative. It's hard to tell whether these folks were submitting quality stories with a different slant, or were actively submitting crap. Obviously it's hard to trust the views of a site that says:
There are a few differences of opinion within DP, although for the most part, they are extremely similar in perspective. They hate Obama. They hate progressives. They hate the UN, diplomacy, and peace/disarmament efforts. They hate reforms of health care, Wall St., and immigration. They hate science, in fact many are creationists, and some even blog about it. They hate the secular nature of our nation. They hate environmental protection, requiring polluters to be responsible for their own cleanup, and especially hate climate efforts. They hate unions and any attempt to level the playing field to give all Americans economic opportunities. They hate the government, except the military-industrial complex. They hate abortion rights. They hate public schools and really hate higher education. They hate anyone in the media except far right personalities like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Michelle Malkin. They hate anyone who doesn’t think Obama is a secret islamist and/or marxist who was born in Kenya.
And follows that up with the unironic:
They just love to hate.
Fortunately, this article makes it easier for voting sites to detect cabals and manipulators by seeing which accounts vote in tandem. That might lead to false positives, but that may not be so bad--if only a tiny minority cares very strongly about a single story, I don't have to care whether or not they're coordinating their votes. Either way, it's likely to be of less interest to the average reader.
> It's hard to tell whether these folks were submitting quality stories with a different slant, or were actively submitting crap.
If I may quote from the article quoting the conspiracy's users about the submissions of 'these folks'
> "If any of the usual suspects subbed a story claiming “sky blue/water wet,” I’d BURY IT without question. I’ve been on digg for almost 4 years…
> -JeremiahLaments (account says Joined Digg on 21Aug2009)"
> "I personally vote for a complete blackout on lib subs: Bury every comment (including the conservatives “helping” to pop the story). No up-votes (no matter how much you agree).
> -asami21"
> "Whether I agree with Bjornski, Anamaly100, PhilPerspective, Novenator, JanineWallace, UncaJoe, & a couple others I can’t think of right now, I bury `em anyway. ACTUALLY each of them has been “dead-on, balls-accurate” (an industry term) at least once in the past week or so, and it sort-of pains me to be dishonest by burying them anyway, but then I remember . . . I’m not up for re-election!
> -BentheDog"
Right, that's the content they're getting rid of. But that says nothing about the content they're posting. If it's freep threads, that's unfortunate; if it's links to GNXP.com or Paul Romer, or touting Angelo Codevilla's new essay (http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-cla... -- read it!), that's something completely different.
To someone who disagrees with all of it, Codevilla is just Glenn Beck at greater length. Which is why the author should have asked a conservative if the content that crew posted was high-quality or not.
If they're exercising such intellectually dishonest and, to me at least, morally deficient behavior with suppressing other stories ("even if you agree with it"), then any content they post is probably of similar character.
Regarding "someone should have asked a conservative", that just goes to show how deeply the "we'll just believe our own facts, thank you" is embedded in the conservative movement. http://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page. Not that liberals are always right or anything, but you can ask 10 liberals and get 20 answers, or you can ask 10 conservatives and get 1 answer.
I'm not sure you understand my criticism. I'm not arguing that they are doing something good or useful. But I'm not sure you can deduce that they're posting low-quality content because of the tactics they use to subvert other people's content.
I don't think the writer of the original story is a good source for judging the quality of content written from a conservative perspective, due to his/her existing views.
I would bet that most conservatives disagree with most of what is written in the two examples I gave, so I doubt that conservatism is an intellectual monolith. Within the conservative movement, there's plenty of lively debate; when a traditionalist Souther Agrarian can claim to share the same party as a hedonistic libertarian psychonaut, it's unlikely for there to be "1 answer."
Unfortunately there's no way this site or Slashdot or any of the tech sites will be free of similar problems. There may be far less seen with conservative/liberal issues, but there will be others biasing the rankings for stories/comments about OSes, phones, and other things.
Politics isn't just about elections. It's the science of influencing people. That definition doesn't exclude unethical means.
There are a lot of lies and distortion thrown around in political ads through regulated media outlets. Obviously the potential for abuse on the net is much greater, and cheaper too...
Anybody can bias what's out there. Sometimes it'll happen directly, sometime people are paid to do it. It reminds me of the propositions that get on the ballot in California. Some interests used paid signature gatherers (in some cases using criminals to do the work) to get something on the ballot, then follow up with a heavily funded misleading ad campaign.
Here's an example of even a relatively small company abusing what appeared to be posts from average people:
Maybe... At least I've got the impression that on HN reactions are way more professional, I see people here actually listening to the arguments of others and that's the least you need to keep things quiet.
Most people here keep extremism out here anyway. Emotional arguments don't succeed to gain traction, you have to be factual and nuanced to gain respect here, and as far as I see blind extremism doesn't get that far.
Is the point not valid? If you want to avoid mentioning... "it", you could simply say that without imposing some rules/order, random internet discussion of politics degrades fairly rapidly.
Yeah, it's not valid, because it's an appeal-to-reverse-authority. And to top it off, that authority is rooted in snootiness, which is my least favorite form of bogus authority.
If you have something to say, say it. Reddit's probably irrelevant, and for the record, for any population, there's a lot of people smarter than you and me. Particularly if you and I are engaging in lazy categorization.
It's not an appeal to anything: it's an observation of my years on the internet: politics discussions on the internet go downhill quickly. Where do you think "Godwin's Law" came from?
After all, this whole discussion is attached to a story about how a group of people took the time, because of their political motivations, to attempt to "attack" another group of people on a web site. Seems like pretty lame behavior to me.
Sorry, as a Flash supporter I've often encountered the opposite experience on HN. Logical arguments supporting Flash are pushed down into the neg, while profanity-laden anti-Flash rants score high.
I'd argue that HN's professionalism is due to the fact that most of us use our real names (or at least make it easy for people to identify us) and most of the other commenters here are potential future colleagues.
I'm just as guilty as the next person of saying something rude on HN every now and then, but for the most part I and I suspect most others do our best to make substantive contributions to the discussions here.
I agree. Reddit&Digg have their own (what I can only describe as troll sites) such as DailyKos.
IRL, that is generally what I like about Europeans (or at least my impression of them) - they have more mild beliefs. A lot of Americans seem to have very strong predetermined beliefs.
This. Others game social media sites to drive traffic to sites that profit them. This is the first I've heard of people doing it for political reasons though.
Happens here too. If you've ever wondered how a certain austrian entrepreneur always manages to garner enough votes to put him on the front page even when the material doesn't support it...
In this case, it's probably because I'm expressing a frustration that many people share. It's an unfortunate fact that the success of HN as a social news site has made the attention stream it can direct valuable enough to be a target of manipulation. That some people are engaging in this sort of manipulation is indubitable. That I vented my frustration with one of the more egregious examples is a breach of decorum for which I apologise.
It think that some of the articles with negative news about Apple (the ones making a fuss over fairly minor things), be be designed to cause ripples in the stock price. Things won't always be as obvious as MS-paid people trying to discredit Linux. Even rumors that aren't true may cause some reaction that can be exploited. I think there are many posts on many site for many topics that have ulterior motives. If you think of any situation where someone wishes to get or deny some kind of advantage, there's the potential for cyber-warfare.
It can happen at any level, it can be powerful even when not fully understood.
Look at kids driving other kids to suicide.
Influencing people is power. Why do you think the diversity in ownership of U.S. broadcasters has become so eroded? There's more to it than lack of competition.
I don't think they cancel each other out. Digg has an extremely conservative bias. Half the stories on the front page are basically "Global Warming Is A Hoax Because Jesus Wouldn't Let That Happen"
Yeah as a user since 2007, it went noticeably conservative in the last year or so (which is when many of us moved to Reddit). And it's not just conservative leaning but really pointed partisan stuff.
I hope they can figure out a way to solve this sort of thing going forward. And I'm curious if their choice of either digg/bury instead of upvote/downvote makes it easier to game. I believe it does, as these folks haven't been able to do the same with reddit. I'm not sure, but I believe a story is gone once it gets a certain number of "buries" whereas on reddit a story with a lot of downvotes can be easily resurrected by upvotes. (though I could be wrong about this?)
Well the main reddits have a sharp liberal bias. When people from other subreddits who don't conform to this view speak up they tend to get smacked down pretty hard and quick.
I think it's both Liberal and Libertarian. And Ron Paul is quite popular there.
Also, there's still a difference between something that happens there and what the Digg Patriots are doing in that they are conspiring to game the system. There's no such equivalent thing going on at Reddit.
Edit: I think we see the natural split of progressive v. libertarian on reddit, and both parties are represented very well. Perhaps there's not a neo-conservative/fox news voice, but I would not be quick to blame that on some sort of conspiracy as much as I would on the difficulty one has reasoning with these sorts of extremists. They are not there to engage in dialog as much as they are there to poison it.
Agreed, but I think this is a little beyond self-segration.
If they just wanted to self-segregate, they'd find stories they agree with and digg them up, but extending that to also ruin other people's discussion is another thing. They are gathering with the explicit goal of drowning out other voices outside of their self-segregated group.
Perhaps another reason reddit isn't as susceptible is that it allows for user-created subreddits where like-minded folks can form such hives.
Happens in real-life. Look at how many news stories you see about some speaker coming to a college and being shouted down (or food being thrown at them) so they can't speak.
A long time ago I read an interview with Charlton Heston. He said during the filming of Planet of the Apes, the costumes took so long to put on and take off that they left them on during lunch. One day he looked around and realized: all the humans were sitting together, all the gorillas were sitting together, all the orangutans...
See, that's what I get for not checking Digg in years. I remember when I first tried reading it--must have been 2006/2007--I was finding that every single comment that got downvoted to oblivion on a political discussion... was one putting forward a conservative opinion. I quickly gave it up as another instance of Internet Liberal Hivemind.
Too bad I couldn't have caught it sometime between the swing from Liberal Hivemind to Conservative Cabal, it might have been worth reading.
You may be certain, but so far a year long undercover investigation has yet to prove there is an elite cabal of liberals desperately manipulating information in an attempt to skew towards their viewpoint.
Or, perhaps, the feeling that conservative content is underrepresented is because of something more benign -- maybe more liberals visit Digg than conservatives?
A yearlong investigation to uncover a voting ring on Digg isn't impressive, it's bloody incompetence. It shouldn't have taken more than a week, if that. I left Digg, gosh, three, four years ago now, because it was pretty obvious even then that Digg was basically just a collection of voting cabals of various levels of interconnectedness. People were writing articles about it and stuff. People were writing how-to articles, which channels on IRC and how to set up your own IRC-based rings.
Talking about how a conservative group briefly has the upper hand is like observing which pig has briefly risen to the top of the muck pile. Don't worry, I'm sure counter-conservatives will be rallying behind this story to overpower them in another iteration of the endlessly-boring cycle and I look forward to reading about how it singlehandedly proves liberalism is a cabalistic conspiracy on a wide collection of right-leaning sites run by the sort of people who still think Digg votes matter.
So given that it was an obvious problem 3-4 years ago, do you think it might be possible that Digg, Inc. might have recognized the problem and done something about it?
And that this whole right-wing conspiracy might amount to a bunch of people pumping up their egos while basically spinning their wheels?
They did "stuff", but ultimately Digg's philosophy limits what they can actually do. They're all about "power to the people", and in an online voting context that leads directly to voting cliques, as inevitably as Duverger's law leads to two major parties. You can't fix the cliques without also destroying power-to-the-people. To Digg's credit, they've tried to be true to their philosophy. Unfortunately, it's not possible.
In fact Digg and a couple of other technologies taught me the foolishness of "power to the people". You don't want to democratize every site on the internet. You want to allow a million flowers to bloom, everyone to have their say but in their own space that they control. This produces a much healthier environment. It pisses off some people that their soapbox doesn't grow as large as they believe it should by virtue of their obvious innate greatness, but I've come to see this as a feature, not a bug.
No, power to the people as a philosophically-organizing principle was quite popular around the time Digg was created. The idea is that the big problem with the world is that the control is all in the hands of $WRONG_GROUP and the correct solution is just to democratically hand all the power out to your userbase and it'll all just magically work because you've solved the underlying problem.
The error of this thinking was the downfall of Digg, and for another example, Third Voice. Also, numerous blog owners initially fell for the idea that removing comments from their site is "censorship" on par with how evil it is when governments do it, and this idea is still current, even though it's nothing more than a recipe for getting destroyed by trolls after a certain critical mass is obtained. Like I said, the right answer is something else entirely. It's a recurring cycle on the Internet; somebody decides power-to-the-people is the way to go, the problems become manifest, the community takes action to contain the damage or simply flames out entirely, and some idealistic group of people get pissed off, declare that the people are now powerless and it's time for power to the people, starting the cycle over again. I've watched at least 3 iterations of this over the past 10 years. We're due for another "power to the people" explosion which right now is most likely to manifest in the distributed-Facebook community.
"but so far a year long undercover investigation has yet to prove there is an elite cabal of liberals desperately manipulating information in an attempt to skew towards their viewpoint."
That's just because their better at it than the Cons. Cue music from the Twilight Zone....
I'm having trouble parsing this statement. Are you saying that Liberals, suspicious of something fishy, launch an investigation and are therefor the same as the people who are actively engaging in extremely unscrupulous and dishonest behavior?
Also, I'm not sure what to make of: "Happens all of the time aka US Congress." Does AKA have a meaning other than "also known as" that I don't know about?
False equivalence. Because there happen to be two parties in the US does not mean there have to be two groups trying to censor Digg. Also leftists could never agree to this shit, we're not organized (pun intended).
You don't need organization to get leftist censorship, you just need a majority (which seems to be the case in most general forums or news sites). Then, a natural self-righteous knee-jerk on the part of every reader gets conservatively-oriented things voted/shouted down posthaste. Surely you've seen an instance on the Internet where somebody says something which may be purely sane and reasonable, only to be followed up by 30 posts of "GOD, WHAT AN IDIOT", "I hate rethuglicans!", and "See, this proves how stupid Americans are, go eat a cheeseburger and go to church!"
Actually... I just realized that both sides tend to "prove" their points with lots of ad hominem. It's just that the ad hominem coming from liberals tends to be a touch better spelled; I think the smart conservatives quickly learn to keep their heads down, so only the dumb ones try to step out into the shit-storm.
This is slightly off topic, but why do people do things like this? I don't understand why anyone would go to such lengths to do something like this. I just don't get it.
I see people around me fighting over parking spaces. I see people holding conferences on how to fight over parking spaces (that guy is muscling in!). I see people do the same for roughly every damn topic in this world, and sometimes it gets really messy. Why?
I once knew a guy who trolled a high quality policy discussion forum. His beef was that his wife made him go to a church that had a bunch of liberals, who would regularly say stuff that would enrage him, but which he couldn't respond to. The only thing that made him feel better was to piss on liberals online.
So one possible explanation is that some of these people feel frustrated and angry because for whatever reason, they're not able to voice their own political opinions in real life, so they get a rush from the power of denying random people on the internet that same freedom.
Fighting for parking spaces... you might be surprised how underhanded even that can get. The state of California has a rule in the vehicle code about abandoned cars. It's clearly intended to deal with cars people just walk away from (without intent of coming back), and perhaps some that are left in unsafe places (on the freeway etc.) The code mentions the court system addressing some aspects of it.
The city of San Luis Obispo (known as being the first for banning smoking in public places and one of the first to have curbside recycling) came up with 72 hour abandonment. There are no 72 hour parking signs. But go on vacation, away to visit family, carpool or use your bike instead of driving, bed in bed with the flu for days... and a car left is in violation. They mark a tire and the street with chalk and leave a little "courtesy notice" under a windshield wiper and then at three days tow. Beside the high towing fees, and a substantial impound release fee, there is also a citation for abandonment ($280).
Of course the towing contractors charge a hefty per day storage fee. They (the city police and parking agency) may reduce/rename the abandonment citation considering picking up the car from the towing yard to be "no intent to abandon". Of course some strapped for cash may not be able to get a car right away, and end up losing a vehicle due to the high ransom at the towing yard. The pirates may extract a lot of money for cargo ships, but on a personal level what the City of San Luis Obispo does to people hits harder as a percentage.
Note that this practice happens even in from of ones own home, even if there is no parking shortage. Neighbors that don't get along use it as a way to harass each other, and in some places people call in complaints to tr and get parking spaces. As a college town, there are many places were units have no off-road parking, or insufficient off road parking. The city makes money on this, as do the towing contractors. They see to meet the public notice requirements without people noticing... I know of an employee who has bought dozens of vehicles at auction for the minimum bid (towing/storage fees).
Wow. The city of somerville, ma has some what i consider draconian enforcement (street sweeping days so you must remember to move your car to the other side of the street or $100, unposted "snow emergency" rules with $100 and towing fines if you don't get your car off the street, regardless of whether snow actually falls).
They also have a 72h rule but it is not enforced (they state this) unless you don't clean the snow off your car after a big snow fall. Surprisingly reasonable of them...
while there is some validity to your argument, there is a reason for this strict code.
i went to school in San Luis. i know two people who left their cars parked on the street after finding out that fixing the car would cost more than the car itself.
the first two years i was in San Luis, i lived at a place that charged for parking. i would park my car on the street and leave it there for weeks until i needed to go visit my folks in the central valley. i did not have the problem you are describing even when i left the car unmoved for 3 weeks at a time.
The enforcement is primarily complaint driven. It does catch some legit cases of abandonment, but also sees abuse.
Although the state vehicle code section cited in their paperwork mentions the court, the actual process of dealing with SLOPD or the parking people DENIES access to the court. Appeals go to the same people that issued the towing order.
Except for a home, a car is the largest investment that great many Americans make. There's notice to ones' mailbox before towing. A person that's ill or otherwise not using a car for legitimate reasons may very well not see a notice on the car. The fine is more than that for parking in a handicapped zone or for any other parking violation.
They're unwilling to work with the community to solve problems. For instance I once had someone park across my driveway which is less obvious than most (especially at night) and I called the PD asking if they could help me by contacting the neighbor (I didn't know which apartment he was in) so he could move his car. It wasn't an immediate problem. They said sure. But when an officer showed up, he refused to go to the neighbor and instead had the car towed. They didn't make me happy, and I'm sure they didn't make the owner of the car happy. The solution was worse than the problem.
If they had 72 hour parking signs up and simply issued tickets with the right to go to court, it'd all be fair. But to put someone through some very expensive grief without due process is just wrong. Also, as you noted, the enforcement is spotty. It's often selective enforcement. It may not be bias on the part of an officer, but the complaint process is open to bias too. Someone of lower income with an older car is more likely to be targeted simply because a neighbor doesn't like seeing an older car, or some assume an older car isn't operational.
San Luis has many people that are very environmentally conscious. Many ride bikes, walk, take a bus or car pool. Some students rarely drive except to see family or buy food. Being parked for a period is not abandonment, and the state code used here has no time limit. The city is misapplying the law selectively. It is being applied to some people that have no intention of abandoning their vehicles. There is no opportunity to appeal towing/impound fees at all and only improper means are available (not to a court) to appeal the citation that follows.
Additionally, towing is overkill when in a residential zone. Extended parking downtown (in an area typically metered) reduces availability of parking in a saturated area. But in a residential area, a car that's parked continuously for a couple of weeks versus one that's used a few times during the day has no difference in impact because it's overnight (when essentially everyone is sleeping) that parking is closest to saturation.
Someone towed and subjected to that cost and the impound release fee when it is not an abandoned car will most likely bring it right back to the same area it was towed from. So what's the point of towing?
Beyond simply being parked, there should be some pretty good additional reason to believe a car is intentionally abandoned. Not currently registered, owner failed to give valid address, flat tires... Issue a ticket with right to appeal, send certified mail to registered address... if the car is by the registered address maybe even knock on a door.
The city employees and PD get huge salaries. Perhaps in the things they do they need policies modified to solve problems with the least possible harm. The refusal to knock on a neighbors door when he parked across my driveway by accident makes it clear just how unwilling to help they can be.
You never got cited. If you'd done something (could be trivial - rude when a party gets a noise complaint) they could throw the book at you for other things.
Just laws don't make ordinary citizens into criminals that can be harassed and emotionally / financially damaged with no appeal. (and I said, a neighbor upset with you could easily have caused the same grief, it is often arbitrary enforcement where there is no actual problem)
Gaming digg? It's a game, they've got time for distractions. Digg is like a sandbox, it doesn't matter much, you can't get punched over the internet yet.
Parking spaces? Because they want to park and people can be intimidated by violence into giving up a preferential space.
The quote at the top of this article, from one of the people involved is literally "I’ll continue to bury their submissions until they change their ways and become conservatives," which makes me think that maybe they just don't understand how the internet works?
Before Digg went to their new format, I made a bot that upvoted or downvoted stories in C# in just a couple hours. I haven't dug around their new format yet, but I imagine it is equally easy to game too...
Wait, you mean they didn't do a perl script to automate the downvoting ? With such a simple and regular downvoting scheme it shouldn't be very difficult.
I may be completely off-base, but after reading the article and poking around a bit I got the impression that most in the DP group are youngish (under 21) and just wanting to be part of a secret society that does something 'useful.'
Most of the conspiracy theory nuts I know (I know a couple) are just kids who something big to happen, and so they make up a conspiracy so that they can be part of it.
Well Slashdot posts never get removed, just modded down (below the thresholds some users may read at, but they have a choice). The meta-moderation process should help catch abusive moderation and reduce the frequency of bad moderators getting mod points.
Since the moderation system isn't for down-rating posts that one disagrees with, the system get still get flooded with well-tempered deliberate misinformation.
Would MS pay people to post "I tried for days to get my Linux install to work right, but the buggy drivers made my screen flicker so much my dog had a seizure and died. I'm sticking with Windows forever!"? Fun for moderators...
In what world does democracy include: voting with multiple identities, blocking others from participation, fabricating likes about others to to defame them, etc.
Instead of jumping with a canned-response, take the time to read the very interesting article.
Chicago? The antebellum South? And plenty of other elections, at every level, in every country?
Seriously, while it's not part of the democratic ideal, cheating is rampant in practice. You've got to stay vigilant any time you're trying to poll a group of specifically-enfrancised people.
Some amount of intentional coordination is to be expected and even celebrated, if you trust the 'wisdom of crowds', but not to the point of falsifying votes/identities or using falsehoods to deter/negate others' votes.
Naturally I read it. Part of the problem is that Digg is actively trying to prohibit political activity, and this drives groups like this underground and force them to use crazy tactics. My snide comment is that when you have a democracy, it's completely natural for people to band together to press their viewpoint, in fact that's the entire point, and the tone of the article is laughable.
Anyway I address multiple identities, but I don't understand how they're blocking other people from participation? Them mining enemies' old posts for TOS violations in order to get them banned, well, who's fault is that really.
They're abusing the 'bury' feature by incorrectly flagging as spam. As a solution, it should be fairly simple to detect abuse of the bury, and make those people's buries ineffective.
I think if you delve a little bit deeper, you'll find it might be a stretch to call these activities democratic. Falsely reporting and accusing users in an effort to squelch their viewpoints, for instance, may be normal for politicians but bears no resemblance to any honest democratic process.
Agree, that kind of specific behavior is really not cool. I think though the idea of trying to uplift or bury a story through organized voting is fine.
It's been a few years since I've really used Digg but how does burying something prevent other people from voting on it? My impression was that once something is submitted it goes on the upcoming page where all the stories are presented chronologically and buries only affect whether it gets on the front page or not. Do things get removed from the upcoming page after a certain number of down-votes?
I haven't used it for a while either, but I'm pretty sure that "bury" kills stories off completely. From their FAQ (http://about.digg.com/how):
Bury. If you find stories with bad links, off-topic content,
or duplicate entries, click “Bury.” That’s how we get the
spam out of the system and let the good stuff rise to the top.
Other than that, they're pretty sketchy on what exactly it does.
How much you want to bet this isn't just another part of the 'game', an example of the left-wing extremists attempting to combat the right-wing extremists?
That's nothing, you should see what Google does to conservative news. Google is a pretty big shill for the Democratic party, has a former exec in the West Wing, and has been caught repeatedly spiking stories in their news site that are critical of the left.
Also not sure I'd call this an extremist group. Ideological group perhaps, but extremist? Sure some of the members cited were bad apples (stalking, etc.), but yeah this is pure ideological polemics. When you have the the majority of mainstream media shilling for the left, one can't really blame the right for trying to regain some ground.
"The anti-Semitic web site “Jew Watch” appeared prominently in Google results for searches on the term “Jew,” prompting some Jewish groups to demand that Google remove the defamatory site from the top of its listings. Google refused."
Sorry, could you cite where Google has been caught "spiking stories in their news site that are critical of the left"? I'm deeply interested in censorship and feel that this would be a pretty big story.
How would it be a big story? Fox "spikes" stories that aren't even true, and are critical to the right every day. A lot of it ends up as fodder for the Daily Show.
Because Google's job is to help you find what you are looking for, not provide you with an editorialized curation of information. Fox News, or any other major network for that matter, is not obligated to provide you with unedited information. Their express role is curation.
As a Canadian living in the US I'm constantly amused at the left/right divide here. Left wing politics in this country would, in any other western nation, be considered centrist (if not a little to the right), and right-wing politics here would be fairly extreme right in most other places.
On the other hand, America is much more statist/socialistic in some regards than they like to admit.
E.g. the state gives lots of support for home ownership, including government sponsored mortgage guarantees. Or the power of all those crazy unions. Nominally more social-democratic Germany or Scandinavia look tame by comparison on those aspects.
"E.g. the state gives lots of support for home ownership, including government sponsored mortgage guarantees. Or the power of all those crazy unions. "
Both of which has bankrupted many states..and the auto industry (union power).
I was not talking about the membership numbers. The Economist recently ran some quotes contrasting a Swedish union boss with nominally centre-right Sarkozy.
Anyway, just retract my claim about Sweden. I don't know nearly enough about it.
But I know that in Germany unions are in general quite business friendly, and not nearly as inflexible and insisting on entitlement as, say, the UAW was portrayed in what I read.
When people in the US talk about liberal media bias, the frame of reference is the average US voter's leanings. By that standard, dominant news sources (the incumbents, the ones considered most credible) are inarguably left biased. Some ridiculously high percentage of newspaper reporters, like 90%, vote for the Democrat (or other third party left leaning candidate) in every election. While this particular point isn't proof of bias necessarily, if we were to establish that Fox News' reporting staff voted 90% for the Republican, I feel confident it would be shouted from the rooftops in the online circles I run in.
Neither a Democrat nor Republican, but find the ongoing pretense by many otherwise brilliant people that the dominant US media isn't left biased to be an incredibly silly rationalization.
How are dominant news sources liberal when they were notoriously non-critical of the Bush administration's war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan up until Iraq was in the midst of a civil war (Which the "liberal" media was so kind as to refer to it as "sectarian violence"). The New York Times and NPR even refused to use the word torture to describe water boarding - despite the fact that if you dug into their archives they certainly called it torture when it was done to Americans by the Japanese during WWII.
The only issues where I'd say the news media is genuinely more liberal than the average American is gun control, and I'd say that has more to do with the fact that just about every person in the news media lives and/or works in a major City where gun violence is a problem. Considering gun control hasn't been a major platform issue of the Democratic party since the mid 90's, and is of little interest to the modern progressive/liberal movement (they are far more concerned with social and economic matters), it's hardly fair to classify them as across-the-board liberals.
Unfortunately, our perception of bias is heavily influenced by our personal biases. My recollection of the Bush years was very different, the anti-Bush sentiment are much more prominent in my mind.
It would be an interesting technology project or site. Do a sentiment analysis of major media sources. Search for how often a particular phrase is used. e.g.
Immigration: "Illegal Alien" or "Undocumented Worker"
Abortion: "Pro-Life" or "Anti-Abortion"
Something that could update in real time. It is unavoidable that every news site will have some slant, but an objective number based on rational criteria would be a good tool ala the nutrition facts labels on food packages.
Personally I don't find these kind of statements that useful. I think it would be more accurate (and hopefully cause less instinctual defensiveness) to say that the politics in the US is extreme right vs center right, so one should expect most educated people to gravitate to the true middle, which puts them on the US "left".
Well said. Seems like I remember a while back (several election cycles) they did a poll not on how reporters voted but on who they donated money to. Where something like 90% of most media organizations reporters/staff/etc donated to liberal candidates, at Fox News only 75% donated to liberal candidates.
Do you have a cite for that? I couldn't find anything googling quickly and it sounds awfully suspicious.
In any event, I'm not sure it means much: most news organizations operate out of major cities, and major cities tend to have more liberal populations. If it was economically feasible to start a world-class news organization in a rural part of the Bible-belt, things might be different, but apparently it is not.
I don't generally downvote on HN - but you've made a grave claim against Google, and as the accuser you need to provide corroboration for your (very serious) accusations.
The article is coming true! Look, this comment was telling me new things that I didn't know about google and what's happened? It's been censored from me by people (no doubt some sort of google maffia) "burying" it.
I'm not going to say anything about how dubious your sources are, but I will address a couple things:
1) Blogs are not inherently "news". Ergo, they should not always be put into a news feed.
2) The blogs in question were removed because of objectionable content. Which, after reading a couple of articles on one of the sites mentioned, seems totally reasonable. The reason it's OK to remove these from the Google News feed is because it's not news. It's a few paranoid people talking about how dangerous RADICAL ISLAM is.
This is not a "liberal bias". This is an attempt to have a news feed that contains news. Not libel. Not hate speech.
"The blogs in question were removed because of objectionable content. Which, after reading a couple of articles on one of the sites mentioned, seems totally reasonable. The reason it's OK to remove these from the Google News feed is because it's not news. It's a few paranoid people talking about how dangerous RADICAL ISLAM is."
I find this article filled with just as much propaganda as an article about radical Islam, yet Google news still displays it (it's interesting how left-leaning opinion pieces are fine):
With everything that has happened in the world, I don't see how you can pass off "the dangers of radical islam" as something small in the minds of paranoid people.
"This is not a "liberal bias". This is an attempt to have a news feed that contains news. Not libel. Not hate speech."
What you call "hate speech" and "libel" are just opinions. I find that word thrown around with ease by the left to vilify and silence opposing opinions.
If the info in the above articles are all lies, why does it matter if people read them? Won't they eventually find out?
You're seriously comparing a movie review and a well articulated op-ed piece about where our debt comes from to sites like this (the ones listed in the article about Google censoring 'conservative e-zines')?
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/ "Jesse Norton aka Younes Abdullah, How Did Your Conference Go At RM? You Know, The One With Convicted Terrorist Omar The Goat Humping Bakri Muhammed?"
http://www.michnews.com/Alan_Caruba/ac080410.shtml "This is why a mosque within steps of Ground Zero is so inherently wrong. It says that the intended victims of Islamic domination are simply too blind to envision their fate, too fearful to confront evil, to ready to get on the next train to Auschwitz."
"well articulated op-ed piece about where our debt comes"
This was an okay article and an opinion on where our debt comes from. I was merely pointing out the blogs and opinion pieces do get into google news.
As for the links you just posted: I may not agree with any of the content, but they are also just opinions (and not much worse than the links I posted)
The reason you don't want them posted is because you don't agree with them politically, which goes against the freedom of speech.
I have no opinion of whether or not they should be excluded. In fact, one of the sites listed as "banned" (I have no way to substantiate this) was actually a decent news source with little to no understandably objectionable content: http://www.newmediajournal.us/
EDIT: I should say that I am interested in this inasmuch as it relates to Google censoring news. Having not found any evidence of censorship and having found evidence of actively selecting only quality content, my opinion is that they were right to exclude the blogs listed and it has nothing to do with whatever political beliefs I might hold.
No, the reason I think they were excluded from Google was because of examples like I posted. "Goat humping" has no place in a news feed. Likewise, comparing Islam to Nazi germany is not only in bad taste, it makes almost no sense. Framing this as an ideological debate when it is one of quality of information is nonsensical.
As to your last point, I think it's extremely important that both sides of this ridiculous debate get to talk to one another. Hopefully, if everyone is willing, we'll be able to work together and build a nation together that is tolerant of informed opinion and intolerant of those whose only goal is to inflame, incite and misinform.
