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Do you think Google's attempts at ideological sculpting are effective, neutral, or counter-productive? Why are they doing this?
Search for any social topic or event that a conservative cares about, and Google will list progressive news sources and fact checkers denying its validity or, if this is impossible, condemning political weaponization of the facts. Google's information sculpting seemed to reached its apex mid-2022, when PM of Hungary Viktor Orban made a speech with inflammatory takes on European history and EU policy, and Google would not give a link to the speech. Trying all sorts of keywords, one could find page after page of thinkpieces with two-word scare quotes about what a horrible Nazi speech Orban had made, but it was impossible to read what he actually said. (Yandex gave an English transcript as the second result.)
Putting aside the morality or fairness of this: Do you think Google's efforts prevent people from being radicalized? Do they increase political capital for the establishment left? The recent Gemini AI debacle shows a hilarious tin ear for the company; no one could fail to see the tight ideological corset around the image generation squeezing the AI's intestines out its throat. And personally — though I am not normal — the information sculpting I get from search results doesn't make me accept the sources as presented; it just makes me angry.
The three broad explanations I see for Google's approach are:
Is there a way to tell which of these is true?
Like with most things of this nature, most of the politically centric who would lament this development would otherwise celebrate its birth. I.e. The end of holocaust denial being the top result relating to the holocaust.
There was a big media storm surrounding the topic in 2016. I'm pretty sure Google had already been working on something before this. (Though that might have just been a concentrated effort of extremist jews trying to skew the results through very radical 'manual click farms', wish I could find those forum posts again.) As this matter had the added controversy of the site in question being Stormfront, a well known media boogey monster. The matter was closed in the same year as Google expunged holocaust skepticism from its top results.
It's hard to say what exactly a gray/centrist would change about the past to make the present a better place. I'm sure most of them on this website are far outside the norm when it comes to tolerating 'unsanctioned' holocaust revision and would just not press the censorship button. Or at least that's what they would say when faced with a hypothetical. However, when they actually have the button... well, then things can get messy.
I'd expect the typical reasoning of 'Only do it to the smallest of outgroups', but given how demonstrable it is now that such reasoning does not hold when we are trying to uphold broad principles for big populations... Where to? Can we at least stop using that argument?
I remember controversy and hilarity about Google's search predictions (not the results, the predictions when you typed in the search bar) from some years before 2016 (e.g. if you started typing "why are Asians..."). I feel like the Grey Tribe response to this problem should have been to just patch the specific issue instead of reengineering the search upstream as an overcorrection.
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