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It is undoubtedly some boring, stupid, arcane bug that would make every critic's eyes glaze over and convince no one. Decent chance it was on the imagery provider's end, serving up stale data which the batch ingestion pipeline saw as new and labeled it as such.
More fundamentally, I don't know what the actual execution and motivation of this scheme would look like. Some rogue individual undermining the logged and audited data controls? A conspiracy from top executives? And all to trick people looking at Google Maps into thinking the Palisades fires didn't happen and and so harm a candidate who will lose by 20% to one who will lose by 20.01%? (As far as conspiracies go, there are much higher impact levers Google has that could make it a loss by 20.1% instead; why Google Maps satellite view?)
No, to trick people into believing that the incumbent has done a good (or at least adequate) job of rebuilding.
Okay so make that "and all to trick people looking at Google Maps into thinking the Palisades fires have been fully recovered from and so harm a candidate who will lose by 20% to one who will lose by 20.01%?"
Do you think that's plausible?
Somewhat. We're talking about people whose idea of fact-checking is "grok, is this true?!?"
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To be fair, people are primed to be skeptical of this stuff because of all the incidents when definitions in online dictionaries and wikipedia would quietly change overnight to back up what had been said by some presidental candidate or politician.
If you're referring to Amy Coney Barrett and Merriam-Webster's usage note in the entry for 'sexual preference', please note that at least that particular lexicographic outfit considers their vocation to be describing how words are used, rather than prescribing how they ought to be used; thus they were not, like Willy the Word Decider, decreeing the term to be doubleplusungoodspeakful, but noting that many other people had taken offence at its use. (This is the same reason that certain four-letter words for below-the-waist bodily functions are listed as more taboo than four-letter words referring to the loss of eternal salvation: the man on the Clapham Omnibus will take more umbrage at "Fuck $NAME1" than he would at "God damn $NAME1".
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I agree that's the motivating factor. But I think it's important to improve people's mental models of how a big corporation actually works, as compared to the dynamics involved in e.g. Wikipedia mod types.
There's another angle I'm more sympathetic of, where stories like this are shit thrown against the wall to pressure corporations to act more in line with their goals. The Left has done a fantastic job of this ("A Google vision classifier identified black people as monkeys, and that's because Google wants us to throw black people into zoos!"). If so, I can't complain too much: Google should be more sensitive to the Right, so have at it. But it should be recognized as what it is: shit being flung, not an actual useful model of reality.
Certainly. I was under the impression a low/mid level true believer going rogue could change the data, maybe with another couple of people turning a blind eye, which is why I put the likelihood of it being true at say 10%, but I haven't worked somewhere like google and I'd be interested if you think that's wrong.
It's possible, though very unlikely. No one would have the permissions to change the prod geo data unilaterally. However, members of the team that owns that part of the system (so, probably a dozen people) can assume privileges that would give them that power. Part of that process to assume privilege is getting permission from another member of the team; you'd need a collaborator, or (more likely) lie about the reason you need the privilege. Also, critically, that escalation of privileges and the actions you take are all logged and auditable; if shit hits the fan with a PR disaster, there will be a very clear trail leading to you, and that would lead to an immediate firing.
It is vanishingly unlikely that anyone would be so motivated to put their career on the line for an obviously ineffectual action (the number of voters who switched their vote from Pratt to Bass based on a mislabeled satellite view of the Palisades is exactly zero). And the population of potential rogue employees who could do that is genuinely very small: it'd have to be someone very stupid and very passionately interested in Bass's electoral prospects who happens to be on the small team who can even assume those privileges.
Makes sense, thank you for explaining.
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