The Trump administration is frankly terrible when it comes to technology. They don’t understand basics of actual science. They have gutted cybersecurity and Internet policy via legislation and budgetary reasons. The president doesn’t understand how BleachBit works, thinks coal can be cleaned, and conservative voices are being censored. The Trump administration eliminated the cybersecurity coordinator’s position for the person who works with the DoD, DHS, FBI and CIA on cybersecurity issues. They won’t fund $380 million to secure our elections and voter technology/databases.
It’s appalling what they don’t understand.
And while they do get social media platforms like Twitter, it’s clear they don’t understand how search engines — specifically Google — work.
The Trump administration is considering regulating an algorithm. My friends in engineering are trying to figure out how they would work exactly.
The president seems so think skinned that not only does he decry mainstream media as fake news that he wants to taint an Internet search engine that delivers that news. Alphabhet, the parent company of Google, had to take an extraordinary step of issuing a statement.
“When users type queries into the Google Search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.
“Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology,” the statement continues. “Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries. We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”
In many ways, this can be viewed as a First Amendment violation.
Floyd Abrams is one of the nation’s leading experts on the First Amendment; He writes in the Chicago Tribune:
President Donald Trump‘s chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, announced Tuesday that the administration is “taking a look” at regulating Google’s conduct, given Trump’s complaints earlier in the day that the company’s search results suppress conservative views. Kudlow’s statement raises First Amendment concerns of the highest magnitude.
According to the president’s predawn tweets, Google’s supposed bias is revealed by the too “prominent” role it affords to “Fake CNN” while shutting out “Republican/Conservative & Fair Media.” Responding to the criticism, Google said: “When users type queries into the Google Search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds. Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology.”
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Think of it. Shall we really allow the government, any government, to pass judgment as a matter of law on the choices made by Google and Facebook and the like in providing information to people who seek news about a public official? The very search results objected to by Trump were in response to the words “Trump News.” Is it conceivable that we would allow a Trump administration-appointed official body of some sort to decide whether the president was accurate in his complaints that “bad” news about his administration was being exaggerated while “Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good”? Or that “96% of results on ‘Trump News’ are from National Left-Wing Media”? More broadly, how could any such governmental action be consistent with the First Amendment, which was adopted as a protection against government itself?
The Los Angeles Times editorial desk suggests the president stop ego-surfing.
Famously thin-skinned, Trump doesn’t like the barrage of criticism he’s getting online, much of delivered in the form of news and opinion pieces from the country’s mainstream media. So in addition to trying to discredit those outlets as “fake news,” he’s now trying to sow distrust in the search engine that leads people to them — and, worse yet, threatening to take action against them.
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It’s become an article of faith in some conservative circles that tech companies are warping their products and services to discriminate against conservatives. Among other pieces of evidence, these critics point to incidents on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter that, they argue, show companies disproportionately downgrading or blocking content from conservatives.
I don’t miss Alex Jones and InfoWars either (and I hope the parents of the children shot and killed at Sandy Hook take every dime he has).
There are tricks marketers use to manipulate web pages via search engine optimization tools’ it’s an entire business actually. But when it comes to news stories, SEO is about as pure as possible.
For example, social media feeds are awash with news from our conservative friends that China has all of Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 emails. They are posting articles to prove it. Every story comes from a conservative “news” outlet or Trump tweets. There are no stories in the mainstream media about this. And the IT security media has no reporting on the matter. Chinese hackers, North Korean hackers, Russian hackers, Israeli hackers, and American hackers are all very good at what they do.
Don’t trust Google? Fine. Yahoo has a good search function. So does Bing. There are a number of niche search engines out there. Type in “Trump News” and see what shows up.
Regulate one, you have to regulate them all. And if that happens, it will be a dark day for our Democracy.
“Donald Trump is an idiot. It’s pointless of trying to convince him of anything. He’s gone completely off the rails. We’re in Crazytown. I don’t know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”
— John Kelly