Search Neutrality

A businessman who has launched a legal bid to erase online articles about his criminal conviction in the first “right to be forgotten” case in the English courts should not be allowed to rewrite history, lawyers for Google have said.  The claimant, referred to only as NT1 for legal reasons, was convicted of conspiracy to account falsely in the late 1990s and wants the search engine to remove results that mention his case, including web pages published by a national newspaper.

Google has succeeded where Genghis Khan, communism and Esperanto all failed: It dominates the globe. Though estimates vary by region, the company now accounts for an estimated 87 percent of online searches worldwide.

Google says it will soon alter its Search tool to provide "diverse perspectives" where appropriate. The change will affect the boxed text that often appears at the top of results pages - known as a Snippet - which contains a response sourced from a third-party site.

At present, Google provides only a single box but it will sometimes show multiple Snippets in the future. The change could help Google tackle claims it sometimes spreads lies. But one expert warned the move introduced fresh risks of its own.

Google became the world’s go-to source of information by ranking billions of links from millions of sources. Now, for many queries, the company is presenting itself as the authority on truth by promoting a single search result as the answer. The promoted answers, called featured snippets, are outlined in boxes above other results and presented in larger type, often with images. Google’s voice assistant sometimes reads them aloud.

In 2010, when Google paid $700 million to acquire airline-data company ITA Software, the Department of Justice scrutinized the deal for antitrust issues. The deal was ultimately approved, but one condition of the approval required Google to allow others to access the data for five years. Now, seven years later, Google is cutting off access to ITA data for some companies that rely on it. This week Google announced it would cancel QPX Express, an airline-data service it has offered to small businesses and startups since 2014.

[Commentary] The ramifications of Russian exploitation of social media exceed its potential electoral impact. It even exceeds the involvement of the Russians. The broader ramifications are how social media algorithms divide us, how those divisions can be exploited, and whether there are solutions. By fracturing society into small groups, the internet has become the antithesis of the community necessary for democratic processes to succeed. This is bigger than the current discussion of political advertising rules for the internet.

[Commentary] By the time you finish reading this article, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter will have made billions of decisions about what you and hundreds of millions of others will see next. Each time you log into a social media platform, its algorithms — sophisticated mathematical models designed by a few thousand engineers in Northern California — decide what information you should consume.

Facebook, Google and Twitter arrived on Capitol Hill for two days of marathon hearings that started on Oct 31 with the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism. Top executives for the social media giants are being grilled by lawmakers investigating Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, including how the online platforms were used to spread misinformation and propaganda. Ahead of the hearings, all three companies announced on Oct 30 that the number of Russian-linked accounts on their sites were higher than previously disclosed.

Instant-messaging apps, video streaming and other new content platforms in China will face closer scrutiny under new rules issued by the country’s internet regulators. In a statement Oct 30, the Cyberspace Administration of China said messaging apps and other new forms of information dissemination can be used to engage in illegal behavior.

As more and more people get at least some of their news from social platforms, this study showcases perspectives on what the increasingly distributed environment looks like in day-to-day media lives. Drawing from thirteen focus groups conducted in four cities across the United States, we sample voices of residents who reflect on their news habits, the influence of algorithms, local news, brands, privacy concerns, and what all this means for journalistic business models.

While our overall study complicates any notion of a singular audience with singular wants, it offered insights from varied perspectives that may be of value for both publishers and platforms:

• Publishers and platforms interested in rebuilding and maintaining relationships of trust with audiences should invest in media literacy that includes a) skills for verifying brands, b) algorithm literacy, and c) privacy literacy. Effectively tackling these areas will require a shift in attitude and strategy for platform companies—reluctant companies should note the risk of losing users alienated by the opacity of their operations. However, it must be noted that algorithmic transparency is required before algorithmic literacy can be achieved.
• Platforms should note that strategies to prolong engagement by exposing users to perspectives only with which they agree may backfire as some people turn away from platforms due to perceived echo chambers.
• Additional research is needed to monitor existing efforts to increase the visibility of local news on social platforms, though there is likely a need for platform companies to do more in addressing this critical element of the news ecosystem.
• Platforms and other stakeholders committed to verification should take note of public skepticism regarding quick fixes to the challenge of fake news and the nuance required to not only address “imposter content” and “fabricated content,” but also the absence or presence of partisan content.
• Publishers should approach business models such as native advertising and sponsored links with caution given their potential to jeopardize relationships of trust with readers. However, additional research and a dedicated study of audience attitudes toward journalistic business models would be valuable.