[grandalf]

This is the right thing to be concerned about.

It takes an incredible amount of chauvinism and arrogance to believe that the American people are too stupid to realize that perhaps a news source called "Russia Today" might publish articles that would reflect unflattering aspects of American society and unflattering stories about American politicians. If our domestic news outlets reported on these things there would have been no market share left to be grabbed by RT in the first place.

Schmidt seems to want to suppress such ideas, helping to suppress these unflattering stories so that the Al Frankens, Donald Trumps, and George HW Bushes of the world can stay in power.

As an aside, Schmidt is the ultimate establishment opportunist, so of course he would do this sort of thing. He cares only about making Eric Schmidt powerful.

> Wouldn't a better solution be to identify the claims in the article and automatically alert the reader that one or more claims have been debunked? Then let the user decide?

Of course that would be better. It would also be what a capable tech firm should do to help create an informed populace. But Schmidt doesn't want that, he simply wants to be viewed as one of the "good guys" by the partisans who are promoting the Russia story and trying to make political headway with it.

I have zero respect for Trump, but the Russia story is total bunk and RT has published more important stories about America's disadvantaged citizens and failing infrastructure than all of the major news outlets combined.

This also probably reveals that Google rankings can no longer be trusted simply to reveal pagerank results with corrections for spam and pagerank exploits.

Note to Google: We do not want you to be an information censor or a moderator of the ideas that we are exposed to. Please stop.

[rdtsc]

> Schmidt is the ultimate establishment opportunist,

It can also be seen as a business move. The perceived failure of the news media to convince people to vote for one candidate has left a void in the market. So now Google, Facebook, Twitter and others are racing to fill that void. They are signaling that they are willing and able to better target and manipulate public opinion than anyone else.

Does Google and others believe that lizard people stories and pictures of Hillary boxing with Jesus made a difference in the election? https://assets.pcmag.com/media/images/561223-an-example-of-r... Probably not. But the adherence to the story and the faithful reiteration is a good backdrop to signal a more important message to those willing to read between the lines.

[grandalf]

Sad but probably true. We are the product, so of course Google wants to sell to the powerful interests who are up in arms about Russia.

[wutbrodo]

> Schmidt seems to want to suppress such ideas, helping to suppress these unflattering stories so that the Al Frankens, Donald Trumps, and George HW Bushes of the world can stay in power. As an aside, Schmidt is the ultimate establishment opportunist, so of course he would do this sort of thing. He cares only about making Eric Schmidt powerful.

If you think that Schmidt and Google are the forces motivating viewpoint moderation and it's something they're foisting on the rest of the world, you clearly haven't paid even a second of attention to what's been going on.

Liberalism (in the classical sense) is _incredibly_ unpopular right now. There's been a constant drumbeat of articles (including all the ones that make it to HN's frontpage) about how modern-day content platform giants like FB and Google are being and make sure that legal but "bad" things like "fake news" need to be controlled and removed on their platforms. It hasn't been coming from inside these companies: it's been coming from journalists, politicians, and a host of other random (though sadly often influential) empty-headed loudmouths on Twitter.

> Note to Google: We do not want you to be an information censor or a moderator of the ideas that we are exposed to. Please stop.

Dude. Seriously. Read the news every once in a while. Half the country has been screaming at Google for not fulfilling _exactly_ this "responsibility". _You_ may not want them to be a viewpoint moderator/censor (and neither do I), but you're grossly misunderstanding the situation if you think this is a path that they're motivated to do by anything other than intense public and political pressure.

[grandalf]

My take on it is that once a few non-techie people realized that Donald Trump's provocative statements were actually a strategy for controlling the news cycle via social media outrage, the focus turned to social media companies in the form of "how could you build a system that let this happen?"

So Facebook had to figure out a way to seem relatively innocent. It had been the major vector by which 10 minute wordpress articles with Times New Roman font face hosted on $10 fake news domains got thousands of shares. So it tabulated the amount of ad spend that had occurred in Russian currency and admitted that $160K of ads had been purchased by Russian actors.

Twitter realized that rather than reveal that a massive percentage of its accounts are bots, it ought to follow Facebook's lead, so it did a similar thing, canceling a small percentage of the fake accounts.

Yes, Google may have felt some pressure, but Google has a much better alibi. Pagerank is based on linking behavior which is much slower than social media, and is not designed simply to promote virality.

Imagine if pagerank worked like Facebook's algorithm, search would be useless but people would stay highly engaged while trying to search amid distracting and emotionally potent items turning up that they weren't actually looking for.

You are making the defense of Schmidt that some people make about IBM's selling equipment to the German government pre WW2.

[tambienben]

Are articles that pull cheap punches & empty-headed loudmouths on Twitter a good metric for what's actually popular, though?

[wutbrodo]

Having been inside places like Google: yes, in the ways that are relevant. These people may not have as much effect on (e.g.) national elections, because they don't have nearly as much influence. But for places like Google, their press coverage and employees/candidate pools are disproportionately affected by said loudmouths. Again, anyone who's paying attention can't but have noticed that corporations have had to bow to demands from these lunatics.

[tambienben]

I guess you have observed the reasons for this firsthand, then. I was left guessing at incentives for those at the helm of said companies.

[wutbrodo]

You don't need much inside knowledge to see this in action: the ability of a trending topic to change corporate behavior has been established for years at this point. And as I said, for tech, this problem is particularly bad.

For a very recent example, consider the Damore memo as a recent example. Leaving aside what action you think should have been taken (_really_ not interested in that discussion right now), there was a marked shift in Google's reaction to the memo once it hit the idiots of the twitterati and blew up. PR matters to companies.

[CobrastanJorji]

> It takes an incredible amount of chauvinism and arrogance to believe that the American people are too stupid to realize that perhaps a news source called "Russia Today" might publish articles that would reflect unflattering aspects of American society and unflattering stories about American politicians.

Does it, though?

[linkregister]

Why did you link Schmidt with Al Franken?

[grandalf]

The men I listed are examples of powerful Americans who are abusers of power. Franken is among them. The US media pretends that senators, presidents, etc., deserve some sort of bizarre deference. They do not, and we'd all be better off if they were assumed to be scoundrels.

[linkregister]

When in the last 20 years have the U.S. media treated politicians with kid gloves? I've been reading about sex scandals and unduly harsh accusations of "hating women," "being secretly Muslim," "dumbest president" (Bush Jr.), etc.

[grandalf]

I've been warned that HN mods do not like it when I comment to a lot of different replies all at once, so I'm going to attempt to respond to your various comments in one place.

I think your general approach is reasonable and thoughtful, and so I want to be careful to reply in a way that comes across as respectful of your views. This may get a bit long, but I'm curious about your thoughts.

On the subject of the US media treating politicians with kid gloves, with a special case of NPR. We have a number of highly partisan "entertainment news" companies that constantly amplify the smallest and silliest aspects of the other party, because it entertains their readers/viewers/listeners.

But the question to ask is whether any of these "entertainment news" companies threaten the status quo in any way. In other words, does Fox news existence make it any less likely whatsoever that the Democratic party will hold power roughly half the time over the next century? The answer is, absolutely not. Correspondingly, does the existence of MSNBC or CNN make it any less likely that the GOP will not hold power for roughly half of the next century, or that there will be a significant redistribution of wealth and power in the US? Absolutely not.

The metaphor I'd use is that the status quo moves like a rapid train along an unwavering trajectory. The status quo means powerful people stay powerful. The vast majority of the partisan fray that we observe is absurd (sex scandals, secret muslimness, etc.) and distracts people from issues of substance. By distracting people from issues of substance it strengthens the interests that benefit from the status quo. A lot of people watch one or the other partisan "news entertainment" networks and consider themselves well-informed, and outraged (appropriately) about the right things.

NPR plays an interesting role. It offers a lot of serious, high quality content. I t even reports calmly about many of the scandals and situations that make other news outlets reveal their partisan stripes, but one thing remains constant. NPR does not question the legitimacy of US institutions whatsoever. During the time of the financial crisis it had extensive coverage of what the banks did, how greed and negligence contributed to the crisis, etc., but did not shine a critical eye on the role of regulators and poorly designed (and poorly enforced) regulation on the crisis. NPR can deliver in-depth coverage, but it always pulls back before questioning certain sacred cows.

When you think about it, NPR's behavior is functionally similar to the highly partisan "entertainment news" fray. It helps to focus attention on things other than fundamental problems with the status quo and its institutions.

To dig a bit deeper into this example, the proper response to the financial crisis would have been to fix the broken regulatory system that allowed the dangerous combination of inadequate underwriting requirements and regulatory capture that created the impression of some firms being "too big to fail". Either would have been easy to fix, but instead the "fix" was to simply socialize some of that risk by having Taxpayers buy some of the risky assets, artificially inflating prices and preventing market forces from correcting enough to cause more widespread firm failure.

Even if asset support was warranted as a stability measure, the core incentives enjoyed by banks, insurance companies, and iBanks have remained generally unchanged, and attention was focused on compensation plans rather than on broader firm and industry incentives to socialize risk, which is ultimately what had been going on. Further, accounting irregularities in the GSEs were largely ignored. This process reveals the extent of regulatory capture and looks a lot like corruption. At the very least, transparency is lacking, and news organizations have been silent about it, preferring to focus on sensational stories about executive pay, etc.

On the subject of RT's coverage of Ukraine, my point is just that one could not expect "Russia Today" to report in an unbiased way on the Ukraine, so I'd be skeptical of any of its coverage of Ukraine, no matter what it said. Russia has an incentive to convey misinformation about Ukraine that does not exist for other topics. On US stories, RT has an incentive to write true stories about unflattering things, since overplaying its hand would result in widespread skepticism.

On the subject of the Crowdstrike data, etc: I referenced the homeland security report because it is considered the official roll-up of all available information that leads many to believe a specific narrative about Russian meddling. The Homeland security report referenced the crowdstrike report as a significant basis for its finding, and alluded to additional evidence but did not provide any in the unclassified document (or in the classified one, as far as any of us know).

The linking to GRU seems tenuous at best, and while your statement that even experts make mistakes is true, and while Kaspersky uncovered bits of the Equation group, I think we need a model that reveals the probabilistic reasoning and assumed incentives of each of the parties involved in the narrative in order to get an accurate perspective on what happened. Without that, the narrative implies various intentions that may only be accidental, with the actors instead having much more selfish/local motivations.

In my opinion, the likely scenario is that there are a lot of unsophisticated people doing phishing all the time toward any address that will bite. I receive phishing messages periodically, and several years ago received notice from Google that my account is being attacked by a state actor (whereupon I turned on 2FA).

Chances are if you are phishing for Gmail accounts and you find one that has links to .gov addresses, there is someone in the Russia you can sell it to. Surely if some American teenager hacked a Russian citizen's email and found information relevant to intelligence work he/she would be able to find a buyer for it in the US.

When we read about "links" between entities, what does that mean? I know of cases where the FBI has made deals with "former" hackers, allowing them to avoid prison by helping with various investigations, etc. So does that mean that a hacking org that one of these hackers used to work for is "linked" with the FBI? Context matters. We are hearing one side of the story, but more importantly hearing only one side of a highly politicized story.

As for the Russia story in general, relating to the alleged intention of Russia to meddle in the US election, there are a lot of people who are hand waving and pointing to "links" that don't check out. Suppose Wikileaks received emails from some third party who was not Russia and who WL did not know to be Russia. And suppose Russia gave the emails to that third party. WL claiming not to have received emails from Russia is true, so WL's credibility is not on the line even if there is hard intel making Russia the source of the emails. But for some reason due to the political nature of this issue, partisans are making all sorts of claims about WL's motivations. There are similar claims about RT's motivations being thrown around, but very little actual data. Of course RT will publish stories that are broadly favorable to Russia and Russia's interest. I don't think anyone would expect otherwise. Of course WL would publish juicy information, no matter where it came from and no matter if it came from an adversary of the US or a partisan within the US. Nobody would expect otherwise.

All of the above is perhaps an aside. I guess what really matters is whether one thinks Google should be in the truth business. I guess with advertising as the main source of revenue, Google is ultimately in the influence business, since what advertiser would buy ads if they did not create influence. Since not all ads are conversion-oriented, much of Google's revenue must come from broader, branding campaigns which are meant to create mindshare for certain ideas over others among a target population.

So maybe all this amounts to is Google giving US Government some free brand marketing for it's American Exceptionalism campaign, which is itself much older than Google.

[mathperson]

eh.....I think the dust hasn't really settled yet on franken. also you are just wrong. the russian story is very real and very serious...