Did anything in that article talk about actual facts, rather than hypothetical conjectures and mock scenarios? This article reminded me very much of a basic way to sway public opinion: merely suggest something, even if it's not true, and it becomes true in people's minds. Not saying it's true or untrue, but I found very little of actual academic value in this read. I may be missing something, however, as I'm far from perfect.
They literally put the paper of their experiment in the article.
Yes, I saw that. I don't see anywhere they actually found evidence of Google manipulating election related results. The most relevant aspect of their paper talked about a hypothetical test they ran, where they deliberately presented three different types of search results (that they created themselves) to three different groups, and showing that whatever their fake search results showed to the test group, said test group was biased in its favor. That's the extent of the evidence based data I could find. Everything else was a bunch of "could", "might" and so forth. If the entire point of this was to show that people can be swayed by how information is presented to them, that is a basic psychological fact that has been scientifically tested and proven time and time again, in a variety of experiments and studies. So what's the real point of the paper, and why was the name "Google" dragged into it? Again, I might be missing something.Search rankings for the three experiments in study 1. (A) For subjects in group 1 of experiment 1, 30 search results that linked to 30 corresponding Web pages were ranked in a fixed order that favored candidate Julia Gillard, as follows: those favoring Gillard (from highest to lowest rated pages), then those favoring neither candidate, then those favoring Abbott (from lowest to highest rated pages). (B) For subjects in group 2 of experiment 1, the search results were displayed in precisely the opposite order so that they favored the opposing candidate, Tony Abbott. (C) For subjects in group 3 of experiment 1 (the control group), the ranking favored neither candidate. (D) For subjects in groups 1 and 2 of experiment 2, the rankings bias was masked slightly by swapping results that had originally appeared in positions 4 and 27. Thus, on the first page of search results, five of the six results—all but the one in the fourth position—favored one candidate. (E) For subjects in groups 1 and 2 of experiment 3, a more aggressive mask was used by swapping results that had originally appeared in positions 3 and 28.
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.
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.
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.