oh. i misunderstood you. i interpreted your tweet as suggesting that TV news buys ads from Google, so that Google gets revenue by sending traffic their way. you are saying that PageRank sees them as high quality because of ad clicks. i'm sorry for the misunderstanding. 1/

i think ad clicks are a very poor marker of quality, that Google should not weigh clicks through paid links highly. But it's a different claim than what I was rebutting. 2/

now i think you are making a different claim, that, perhaps as a result of all their advertising, or not, people go to TV sources, so they are "trusted", so Google should rank them highly. 3/

i don't think that's right. Google's job is fundamentally editing and curation. it can't — well it oughtn't — follow mere volume. volume can largely be bought, traditional mass media by its nature is a least-common-demoninator, there's little information in its high traffic. 4/

Google has gone through many different epochs. This behavior, putting TV stations first, seems new. Prior to COVID, Google did try to discern quality signals from the long tail, rather than rely mindlessly quantitatively on clicks. 5/

During COVID, Google and social media began to privilege "trustworthy" sources — traditional media but often print — over the web's long tail, defending themselves against misinformation concerns. That wasn't great, but was understandable under the circumstances. 6/

Prioritizing TV in particular is new, and mere clicks explain nothing, because Google's job is to do a good job, not to follow mere clicks. At a moment when TV news is being ostentatiously brought under political control, I find this a concerning new choice. /fin