sorry for my mis-inference!

i think she didn't want to talk about anything outside of a small, preapproved range. the theory of the campaign was being sane, vibrant, joyful, not being a literally insane old man talking about eating cats, meant the election was hers, unless she gaffed in the sense of saying something dangerous

to be clear, my "conspiratorial dander up" isn't an accusation of conspiracy. obviously i have no evidence of that. 1/

it's an expression of concern, that (1) there is a plausible political motivation to encourage Google to privilege forms of media most susceptible to state pressure, which very much includes TV; and (2) Google has shown itself susceptible to even obviously illegitiate forms of state pressure. 2/

of course, for any set of editorial choices, there will be innocent explanations and nefarious, and it will be difficult for outsiders to rebut claims that the explanations are purely innocent. 3/

but Google is not and has never been a "price taker" on what to surface. Google shapes the internet as much as it is shaped by it. it was Facebook that most ostentatiously, very publicly, provoked a pivot to video, for example. Google is not less powerful than Facebook. 4/

i don't at all buy these woe-is-me-its-all-slop apologies from Googlers. it's all slop because Google rewards slop, shifted from treating SEO as an adversarial practice to overcome to a source of influence by which to shape publisher behavior. 5/

Google has shaped. Google has participated actively in the destruction of the open internet, foisting trends like AMP, killing Reader, privileging more "professional" (financially motivated), sources of content. 6/

now, alas, these claims that the open internet is dead (news to those of us who still publish long-tail sites), and, so sorry, we've no choice but to replace it with massive influence agents that we construct and control. 7/

i suspect that Google's less-than-public-spirited decisionmaking about the internet in the past had nothing to do with anything like political conspiracy. Google+ succeeding would be awesome, RSS often skips ads why would we build infrastructure for it? "Business decisions" that make sense. 8/

but some of us really trusted Google in its early days, made apologies for it as it achieved dangerous scale on the theory that they were us, they shared our view of the kind of network we wanted to live on. that trust was betrayed, one business decision at a time. 9/

and now we do have a state interested in exercising active control over the internet, and a leadership at Google that very publicly and pathetically signals its willingness to play ball, so I don't think Google can expect much benefit of the doubt even in a Hanlon's razor sense. /fin

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

Google's job is not to serve revenue. It's to serve relevance. What a bizarre way to put it, if Google does not corrupt its product — vis a vis its own stated ideals when it introduced its product! — that would be a "conspiracy" against those who best pay them off? 1/

Maybe Google's motivation here is purely financial, not political. But that is not exonerative at all. The political can exert extraordinary control over the financial incentives of large firms. Would CBS not paying off Trump then be a conspiracy against him? Not a great way of putting things. /fin

i guess i don’t see us very close to anything like that, and even in theory only we humans know our own values and interests, a well designed information system can help us but not replace our role. 1/

that doesn’t mean there are no alternatives to status quo representative democracy ( see eg www.interfluidity.com/v2/9069.html ), but it does mean some kind of system in which we have an active role. /fin