shmavalanche

Oh I'm sorry, I thought what I meant was obvious. Let me clarify. Half of the country's votes. But thanks for correcting me! I'll be sure to spell things out more carefully next time for people who can't connect the dots using context.

I believe platforms should be completely, unequivocally unbiased to either side, or they should lose their 230 protections.

Ok, I agree with that, of course. But you're not really answering the question. My concern is platform bias (in Google's case algorithmic bias) to one agenda, which is what Jen is clearly advocating in these quotes.

In your article yesterday "A social network banned support for Trump, will others follow" you link to a previous article with the quote "there is no systemic evidence of bias on social networks towards anything but the extremes"

And yet we have a Google Executive Jen Gennai on camera saying:

"We all got screwed over in 2016, again it wasn’t just us, it was — the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like, everybody got screwed over — so we’re rapidly been like, what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again,"

"We’re also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?"

"The reason we launched our A.I. principles is because people were not putting that line in the sand, that they were not saying what’s fair and what’s equitable so we’re like, well we are a big company, we’re going to say it"

"The people who voted for the current president do not agree with our definition of fairness,"

Nearly half the country voted for Trump (I did not).

Is this attitude from Google concerning to you, and does it portray a bias that goes well beyond the "extreme"?

Dude, totally agree, and I don't love it as a solution. As long as it falls under constitutionally protected free speech, I think we have to let communities police themselves. Otherwise, who determines what is "horrible"? It's a slippery slope, is all I'm saying, and while I want to believe no platform would ever abuse that power, I'm not naive enough to think it's not happening, or would never happen. If you control content, you become a media company... And you shouldn't get the 230 protections.

Just my two cents, thanks for the thoughtful replies.