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comment by War
War  ·  3167 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How Google could rig the 2016 election

You are. The title of the article reads, "How Google COULD Rig the 2016 Election." The keyword is "could" not that they currently are doing anything of such sort. The article is pointing out the voters can be swayed by the algorithms used in search engines namely Google. If Google for whatever reason was to manipulate those algorithms to favor one candidate over another they could in turn control who is elected because of the sway that search rankings have over people.





user-inactivated  ·  3167 days ago  ·  link  ·  

We seem to be having a communication misfire. Not shouting you down, or saying you're wrong, merely trying to figure out where we're missing each other. What I don't understand is: this phenomenon has already been tested, countless times, and proven. The scientific community knows about this phenomenon. I can understand why they might do a very specific test about recent election data, run hypotheticals, this is a valid scientific thing to do. What I do not understand is why a specific brand name was dragged into it. Usually, a scientific paper is about a certain hypothesis, we did this, these were the groups, these were the results, our hypothesis was right or incorrect.

A scientific paper that focuses more on hypotheticals and conjecture rather than hard data seems to be more philosophy than science. My high school science teachers would've heavily marked me down for writing up and presenting an experiment like this.

Dendrophobe  ·  3167 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Playing devils advocate, Google is the search engine. Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo together don't have the market share to pull this off. Baidu is the only other provider I can think of that could do something like this, but I don't think they have the same global reach that Google does. If you think someone can do something this important, it makes sense to me to name them.

That said, from your other post, it sure sounds like the author has an axe to grind.

War  ·  3167 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yea I misunderstood I thought you were referring the research. My bad.

user-inactivated  ·  3167 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thank you for being a good communicator.

user-inactivated  ·  3167 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Did anything in that article talk about actual facts, rather than hypothetical conjectures and mock scenarios?

In other words, no.