Why Google Poses a Serious Threat to Democracy, and How to End That Threat [pdf] (opens in new tab)

>Does Dr. Epstein stake any of his claims on his personal credibility in his article?

Yes, he clearly does. Why else would he spend most of the first three paragraphs detailing his credentials if he didn't think they would lend himself credibility? Which do you think is more relevant to the current discussion, the degree he earned from Harvard nearly 40 years ago or the event that seemingly got him interested in Google's "censorship" in 2012 and kicked off his research?

>Why not attack the substance of the article instead of going with the the classic "slander the opposition" play that all kinds of disingenuous actors regularly employ?

A large part of the substance rests on the idea that Google is biased. Not that they are falsifying the facts, that they are displaying facts in such a way as to intentionally manipulate the behavior of the people reading those facts. How is it off the table to mirror the same question back to Epstein and ask whether maybe he has biases that have caused him (perhaps even subconsciously) to gather and present the facts in such a way as to show his intended result?

This testimony isn't an apolitical peer reviewed scientific paper. It is a plea in front of the US Senate for political action. I think it is fair to ask the motivation behind that political action and whether Epstein put the cart before the horse in his research. However, I will be the first to admit that doesn't necessarily invalidate his arguments. I pointed that out in the first sentence of my first comment.

>For all I know you're part of a FUD campaign from Google.

I hope the irony in this accusation was intentional.

The entire basis of his testimony is his personal credibility. He literally only references his own research and the core evidence he relies on is his research findings. Some of which looks questionable to my not-very-knowledgeable eyes, so it's very useful to know about Epstein's past relationship with Google.

Lines that stand out are:

- "Google has likely been determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the national elections worldwide since at least 2015"

- "In the weeks leading up to the 2018 election, bias in Google’s search results may have shifted upwards of 78.2 million votes" (that would be 70% of the 113 million people who voted in the election)

- "Google’s “Go Vote” prompt was not a public service; it was a vote manipulation"

- "To let Big Tech companies get away with invisible manipulation on this scale would be to abandon the free-and-fair election. It would make democracy meaningless, even if your chosen candidate prevailed."

In general, yes. For warning the public about your hacked site feeding malware to visitors, no, we can evaluate that directly and see that it is not a valid basis for a grudge.

Caveat lector. His empirical findings include the claim that because Google knows its users trend liberal (simple demographics would tell you that, without any intrusive analytics), it is unfair of Google to run universal "go vote" PSAs on its site, because doing so will favor the Democrats.

Here's an article he wrote on The Epoch Times, which I believe is cited in the section about how Google is running GOTV for the Democrats:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/another-way-google-manipulates...

Amen. When the first counter-argument is an assassination of the author's character-- we have a problem! The statements in the PDF are in the public interest. Debate them, don't simply make an ad homenim attack against the speaker.

Some random dude on hackernews claims that Epstein's motivation is based on a 7 year grudge, and you just believe it.

> would not hold a grudge for seven years ...

Why not?

He had a poor experience with them some time ago, and Googles behaviour in the last 7 years has been abysmal and seems to be getting far worse. eg likely re-inforcing his opinion.

Not really seeing why he'd "forgive" an entity with those circumstances.

If Google had instead changed for the better, maybe you'd have a point. :)

The first line of his testimony mentions working at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. Knowing how congressional testimonies tend to work, I Googled that to see if was one of those politically motivated think tanks with an intentionally neutral sounding name. Robert Epstein's Wikipedia page was one of the top results. I clicked through and noticed that roughly half of the content of that page was under the header "Criticism of Google". The links I included all came from either the Wikipedia sources, Epstein's testimony, or a link from one of those. The whole thing took maybe 5 minutes and didn't require any research skills beyond simply being curious.

It's been prominently featured (and a subject of editor attention) on his Wikipedia page for over a year. It's not a secret.

Even assuming Google is theoretically capable of showing the voting reminder only to users who would vote for a Democratic candidate doesn’t mean that they did that. Dr. Epstein doesn’t present any evidence (even anecdotal) that the reminders were not shown to Republicans.

Exactly! This is the interesting question to ask!

And you should expect this to take a much less straight forwards form than outright malicious intend.

Machine learning stuff, to us mere mortals, is a black box that seems to output that what we desire. However, we don't need a single black box to completely hide the effect from everyone involved. It can be simply spread out over many processes without anyone noticing the sum of countless, by themselves very sensible, pro-google decisions made by google and its employees.

Say on a fuzzy edge some human or automation has to decide if a website gets banned from the index or not. Since they use adsense or google analytics it becomes possible to contact someone running the site or even, long before the offense, present them with a machine generated report suggesting decline of quality.

The google hating webmaster doesn't want all that tracking crap on his site and therefore he might be punished by not having the warning in advance. It doesn't seem harmful, it seems perfectly reasonable, if however you create 1000 such effects the meaningless 0.1% adds up to 100%.

Say, we take a user profile that use to frequent sites now banned from the search index. If that profile moves to a new website. Does that merit close monitoring? If the AI is a black box you don't even get to ask the question.

It all seems to be fair and logical but the sum of those 2 would boil down to close monitoring websites not using analytics. We would praise the AI for noticing it so soon and so efficiently.

And so things further escalate without anyone connecting the dots.

To make it more sinister:

We have a system of pro-consumerism entities that collectively indoctrinates us to enjoy consumerism. We don't know how efficient or effective that system is. But all we need to know is that we can improve it.

How hard is it really to plant a seed, water it and eat the tomatoes? How hard is it to mix flour, yeast and water then shove it in the oven? It sure seems like an infinitely complex task to me, infinite as in: ill never do it. That apathy is great news for consumerism. Its behavior that deserves to be praised and rewarded by the entities benefiting from it. There is no evil man pulling levers behind a curtain. Its just the way things are.

Companies sponsor campaigns and publicly support politicians all the time. Personally I think campaign contributions should be way more limited, but I'm not sure what is special about Google here.

What if reddit did this? Or Amazon? Or literally any popular web site. Is this reason to break up all of them?

Imagine if a newspaper endorsed a candidate?

It's more than a big what-if: it's also not something Epstein claims has happened.

So, I was the person who created the "where do i vote" for Google originally and ran it for years.

My motive was "Where do i vote" is basically the top query on Google on election day, and people would get crappy answers. In fact, it was actually Ginny's idea (she's very civic minded), and she needed an engineer to help, and I was the only engineer in the DC office.

So i said "how hard it could it be" (famous last words) and did it. 2 swe's in geo got dragged in along the way because they thought it was cool (eventually we just staffed a team on our own).

Michael geary, who is on HN somewhere, did all the JS.

Along the way, i spent my time and energy creating the voting information project (with pew charitable trusts), and open standards for sharing the data necessary to answer this question, after discovering what a proprietary crap hole basic civic data like this is.

So there you go, now you know the motives.

In fact, if you ask some of the early data partners (until i could get critical mass in opening the data), you will discover we were in fact the only ones they pretty much ever had who asked to have all personally identifying info, etc. stripped from data sources before they were given to us.

They found it quite funny, because this kind of data is actually a big business owned by large political operative companies that have tentacles in various states. The notion that someone didn't want to know the people associated with the address records was hilarious to them.

These databases are large lists of who lives where, their political affiliation, voting history, and various political districts they belong to.

We want addresses and districts only.

To devil's advocate your devil's advocacy: let's just assume Google is encouraging people to vote because they know that more democrats will see that message, that they want democrats to win, and that's the only reason for them doing so.

What is wrong with that, and how would you propose to fix it via a mechanism that didn't also e.g. outlaw FOX News?

They same role they have in offering free email, or a free calendar app. People wanted a vote-reminder application, so Google made one to increase engagement in its platform.

If for profit companies are Constitutionally allowed to make political donations, why would reminding people to vote be any different?

It's like changing a company's logo to a rainbow flag during pride month. It has basically zero cost and gains a minor increase in public perception as being a company that stands with "the people." (Telling people to vote has always been pretty popular, and I remember my friends sharing posts of their favourite celebrities telling people to vote.)

I dont think there is anything problematic in simply encouraging people to vote, even if you tend to reach certain groups better. A higher voter turnout should be something to strive for, its a sign for a healthier democracy. The current approach to discourage more voters of the opposite party to not go voting then your own get discouraged seems more then just a bit problematic.

Differently put, what harm is done by getting people to go vote when you are not influencing them to vote in a certain fashion? I would argue that only the opposite is problematic, to discourage people to vote.

Googles motivation shouldnt matter as long as they are not influencing who you are going to vote for.

But thats another topic on its own, I find it hard to argue why google should be singled out in a country where even news organizations endorse candidates. If they are to powerful dismember them instead of making a lex google.

It's a good business practice because it's good branding.

Companies intentionally try to associate their brand with other things seen as positive -- pride month, the Olympics, the environment, promoting diversity, etc.

Google does this with their home-page doodles. Encouraging people to vote is another feel-good brand association.

There's nothing nefarious here like Google promoting a specific political agenda, that's overthinking it. It simply improves their brand image which makes people more likely to trust and use and promote their products. It's the profit motive at work... which, to answer your question, is why a for-profit advertising company does it.

It's a marketing opportunity to encourage people to use their services to find polling stations and other related info.

I agree. It's a Pandora's box I don't want to open.

The accusation is that only private companies with platforms for speech are being targeted.

I see FAR more of that from Democrats than from Republicans these days. Far leftists call Tim Pool and Joe Rogan (both left-leaning centrists with some socialist views) supporters of the "alt right".

It is quite conspiratorial. It’s really hard for Google to prove they didn’t do this as it’s proving a negative.

I think the argument boils down to since they are capable of doing so, and no one would be able to tell if they did; therefore search must be open to prevent such potential actions.

Google has been caught doing things like favoring inferior shopping searches to point to their own products. So maybe it is possible to detect and not as much of a risk.

He is essentially claiming that encouraging voter turnout is a partisan act biased towards the Democratic Party (rather than something which makes elections fairer) and hence Google engaged in a partisan act by simply encouraging higher turnout.

so he's complaining that this is a kind of digital gerrymandering?

they should just do what we do in Australia and make voting mandatory for everyone.

Fixes this issue immediately :-P and arguably is MORE democratic. (But I suspect that's going to make him unhappy as well)

Can I have an example where quotes are not honored?

To force a certain spelling even for a single word, enclose it in quotes.

I don't think they are exercising their power like they should be. Google and YouTube should delist Foxnews.com for promoting hate content, same with Facebook.

You have to be able to name things... what names would you use?