from Hacker News

Google Search Is Quietly Damaging Democracy

by jedwhite on 8/16/22, 2:55 PM with 5 comments

• by Grim-444 on 8/16/22, 8:36 PM

  This type of article is itself the death of democracy for me. I've been trying to put it into words in a way that won't get me utterly downvoted by the same ideologues that consume such content, and I'm not really sure how. Maybe one way to phrase it would be, if you wanted to make the article even more biased, how could you possibly do it? It's written entirely from one point of political view, by someone who has no interest in impartial journalism, and they just spend the entire article pointing out negative things about their political opponents. Of course they conveniently forget to ever mention a single negative thing done by their side, or to list similar ways Google search benefited them unfairly. I couldn't make it more biased if I tried.

  The fact that in modern times "democracy" has been made to equal whatever the blue end of the spectrum believes to be true, and if any different belief gets a voice or a vote it's the "end of democracy", "damaging democracy", etc., and needs to be censored and removed from society, is itself the death of democracy.

• by moritzwarhier on 8/16/22, 7:01 PM

  This was a good and succinct read.

  I noticed this phenomenon a lot when googling for non-political phrases. It's really all over Google search.

  Phrasing a search in a way that implies some information or judgement tends to confirm the presupposition, even it has been proven to be wrong.

  This would be expected to some degree even with plain keyword matching.

  But AI and knowledge graph enhancement seem to amplify the problem.

• by alexklarjr on 8/16/22, 10:17 PM

  Can it be stupid people damaging democracy? Nah, smart people do it too.