NYT - Goldberg - "Trump's Assault on Google"

[NRaleighLiberal]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/opinion/trump-assault-google-facebook.html?imp_id=643362861

On Tuesday, in the course of his morning rage-tweeting, Donald Trump denounced Google for having news results “RIGGED” against him, “so that almost all stories & news is BAD.” It was part of an escalating right-wing assault on various technology platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, which conservatives are accusing, in timeworn fashion, of liberal bias.

Trump appears to have gotten his information from the Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs, who in turn was relying on a blog post from PJ Media titled, “96 Percent of Google Search Results for ‘Trump’ News Are From Liberal Media Outlets.” The rub, here, is how the post defines “liberal.” It includes a chart in which almost every mainstream, credible news organization is on the left — not just The New York Times and The Washington Post, but Bloomberg, USA Today and The Associated Press. The chart puts Infowars, Alex Jones’s conspiracy website, closer to the center than Time magazine.

Essentially, conservatives want to create a world where objective information and right-wing disinformation are treated equally. They’re running the same playbook on tech that they ran, for decades, on media, caterwauling about bias so that defensive editors would treat them with kid gloves. Only now, these howls about viewpoint discrimination have the force of the United States government behind them.

I’m not just talking about presidential tweets. Social media executives have had to testify before Congress and answer for spurious instances of anti-conservative censorship. In April, for example, members of Congress browbeat Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg for ostensibly silencing Diamond and Silk, sisters who produce pro-Trump videos. The women had received a notice from Facebook saying that content on their page was “unsafe to the community,” which the company said was sent in error. This morphed into claims that Facebook had deliberately engineered a decline in their traffic, even though it had not, in fact, declined.

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Sure enough, on Thursday, Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, wrote a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking it to look into Google’s “anticompetitive conduct.” Among other complaints, he cited reports that Google has “decided to remove from its platform legal businesses that the company apparently does not agree with.” This is far from the only threat of government action against tech companies. Next week, Facebook and Twitter executives are set to testify before Congress, and Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana, tweeted that he was going to demand an explanation for why “supporters of @realDonaldTrump are consistently suppressed by Twitter.”

Scalise’s claim, which was born out of a glitch in Twitter’s drop-down search bar, is false. But the platforms are constantly tweaking their algorithms and content moderation policies, and even false claims can create an incentive to err on the side of promoting the right. “There’s absolutely a risk that the political pressure will be effective and that the media platforms will try to overcorrect,” said Benkler. Trump is likely counting on it.

[uppityperson]

1. K&R, checking in to see what you posted.

[Maven]

2. ...

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100211065310