If you got all your information from this article you would be surprised that, for example, 82% of Americans have a favorable view of Google. It's like the old school media is trying to manufacture negative opinions of the new school.
That is extremely far from the case. These biases are in the eye of the beholder. People with opposite feelings about Google (or whatever the corp of the moment is) see exactly the opposite bias.
It's interesting to note that the data Google stored was more alarming, though was taken up at the bottom of the article and with less detail. It also didn't make the headline. This is because bashing Facebook gets more views currently. This is a good example of how media bias can distort opinion, while maintaining that all data stated is accurate.
In other words, it's not enough that media is accurate. Bias is just as important.
I'm referring to my college friends. I work for Google, and my Googler friends are understandably biased; I don't include them in this sample. But I also went to a liberal arts college, and my friends there are fairly representative of educated young people in non-technical fields, and the same 2:1 ratio in favor of Google seemed to show up.
There is no pro-Google bias. What is observable is passionate people who downvote any comment they disagree with, sometimes downvoting comments from the same author.
Even media can be described in a similar fashion, a lot of them promote content that generates the most clicks - which is often biased and polarising. There are sides to every discussion. I am no fan of google's data collection policies, but at the same time cannot refute the value they have created as a company.
It's unfortunate that a major newspaper has a well-known bias (in this case, against Google). Makes it hard to trust anything they say on the subject; although a known bias is certainly better than a surreptitious one.
You determined a product was superior to another via advertisements? Not using third party structurally unbiased reviews? Wow. Yes, that is squarely googles demographic.
Because the bias isn't as obvious. If one of the media majors is pushing for something political that is known and sorta expected. Anyone who cares knows that your choice of media source is potentially politically motivated.
When I browse through a blog post that speaks positively of a product, I know there is a pretty decent (double-digit percentages) chance that it is a well disguised paid ad. I can at least try to factor that in to my decision making.
Now with Google there is very much an assumption that they have an algorithm that applies some linear or non-linear math and comes up with a rating, sans some by-hand filtering for pornography and some other stuff that should be non-controversial to 80% of the population. If that assumption is wrong, government absolutely has a role to step in and expose that.
Eh, half honest. The training dataset at Google likely has a lot of bias towards leftist ideology given that is what Google’s leadership pushes. For example I’m sure left leaning news is in the training dataset whereas say the daily wire is not included. this leads to a model which surfaces those biases with ridiculousness of black Vikings.
1) "Google shows users what other users like, most of Google's current users favour a small number of major outlets"
This is only partly true, and we have no evidence of it. Google can do whatever they want their results and there are surely other factors. What are they? Why do they exist? etc.. There's room for all sorts of bias in there.
Also, I suggest it's actually not really true either: 'What people want' is BuzzFeed, HuffPo, Breitbart and TMZ. Unfortunately, that's the reality of the world. 'Most people' read that stuff. They want to know what Kim Kardashian thinks about it.
2) "But it shouldn't surprise you that most gas stations mostly stock Coke and Pepsi products."
This is a physical inventory and shelf space problem, google really doesn't have this so much: results can be tailored, represented in different ways, possibly randomized etc..
This situation is a great case for how systematic biases etc. are reinforced.
https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-approval-ratings-best-appl...
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