[N] Trump falsely claims Google ‘manipulated’ millions of 2016 votes
https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/19/politics/trump-google-manipulated-votes-claim/index.html
The referenced article: https://aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN_et_al_2017-SUMMARY-A_Method_for_Detecting_Bias_in_Search_Rankings-EMBARGOED_until_March_14_2017.pdf
Key point from the article referenced by CNN’s story: Was the bias the same for all search engines? No. The level of pro-Clinton bias we found on Google (0.19) was more than twice as high as the level of pro-Clinton bias we found on Yahoo (0.09).
Among other issues, one thing that CNN did not mention is the presumption that Google is wrong, Yahoo correct, given that there is no ground truth to compare to. Perhaps there were more pro-Clinton articles and news appearing those days. And more generally, I might guess that Yahoo’s and Google’s engines are simply different algorithms showing different things.
Before someone complains: yes, pagerank was considered “machine learning”, though not deep learning of course. Though it feels more like graph theory to me.
submitted by /u/errorsignal
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