<story><title>The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence</title><url>https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>md224</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m just saying I wish we could have only organic results. Why should people with more money have more of a presence online? Money shouldn&amp;#x27;t be able to buy speech.&lt;p&gt;The Internet should not be a place where those with more money get to cut the line in front of those with less. Let PageRank sort it out.&lt;p&gt;Also, what&amp;#x27;s this about my example not holding weight because &amp;quot;information purity&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#x27;t exist? It&amp;#x27;s not about the information itself being pure, it&amp;#x27;s about purity of ranking. Let&amp;#x27;s just spell this out:&lt;p&gt;money !== relevance, therefore any influence of money on search engine rankings is, by definition, noise.</text></item><item><author>pcmaffey</author><text>The library is a catalog of books produced by publishers for the sake of making money. Your example doesn&amp;#x27;t hold weight, as there is no &amp;quot;purity of information&amp;quot;. Even your own insights are filtered through the perspective of your personal influence, your wants, your desires, your history, etc.&lt;p&gt;Google is no different. The organic search results are largely from commercial, or at a minimum, self-interested sources.&lt;p&gt;That doesn&amp;#x27;t make it wrong. There&amp;#x27;s huge value there. Just the same, money is not evil. It&amp;#x27;s a mechanism for storing value. It&amp;#x27;s imperfect, and abused, and certainly not the only measurement of value. Keeping those value systems in balance is the key.</text></item><item><author>md224</author><text>I have made this case before, but I will make it again.&lt;p&gt;The Internet is the largest information system in the world, and Google is the primary portal into that information system. Google&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;organic&amp;quot; results are accompanied by AdWords results, which are based on a mixture of bid price and relevance. These ads are marked with a small &amp;quot;Ad&amp;quot; label that many people miss, and even those who know they&amp;#x27;re ads can&amp;#x27;t really &amp;quot;unsee&amp;quot; those results.&lt;p&gt;So, searching the world&amp;#x27;s largest information system provides results which have been biased by money. How does anyone consider this ethical? Why are we letting money influence the salience of information?&lt;p&gt;What if your local library (you know, those old things) had a card catalog with &amp;quot;sponsored&amp;quot; results? If this already exists, then maybe we&amp;#x27;re already lost. But it seems to me that as a basic rule of information ethics, the salience of information in a given information system should not be biased by monetary influence. Full stop, the end, no exceptions. If anyone has a counterargument, I would honestly love to hear it, because this has nagged at me for a long time. I simply can&amp;#x27;t understand how AdWords is ethical.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nickff</author><text>Money always buys speech; whether it is by allowing a columnist to write full time, affording the puchase of a computer to post on the internet, or giving someone the ability to travel to a public square.&lt;p&gt;Using money to purchase a magazine, newspaper, television, radio, or online advertisement is just another way that money helps people express their views.&lt;p&gt;In any case, I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be too worried about money changing people&amp;#x27;s minds, as it rarely does that.[1]  Advertisements and the like usually serve to give voice to the views people already hold, and inform them of things they were not aware of.  An advertisement will never convince people to buy things they don&amp;#x27;t want and don&amp;#x27;t need; if you disagree, please go and try to sell a bad product, and we will see how well your &amp;#x27;mind control&amp;#x27; works.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;The_Righteous_Mind&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;The_Righteous_Mind&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence</title><url>https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>md224</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m just saying I wish we could have only organic results. Why should people with more money have more of a presence online? Money shouldn&amp;#x27;t be able to buy speech.&lt;p&gt;The Internet should not be a place where those with more money get to cut the line in front of those with less. Let PageRank sort it out.&lt;p&gt;Also, what&amp;#x27;s this about my example not holding weight because &amp;quot;information purity&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#x27;t exist? It&amp;#x27;s not about the information itself being pure, it&amp;#x27;s about purity of ranking. Let&amp;#x27;s just spell this out:&lt;p&gt;money !== relevance, therefore any influence of money on search engine rankings is, by definition, noise.</text></item><item><author>pcmaffey</author><text>The library is a catalog of books produced by publishers for the sake of making money. Your example doesn&amp;#x27;t hold weight, as there is no &amp;quot;purity of information&amp;quot;. Even your own insights are filtered through the perspective of your personal influence, your wants, your desires, your history, etc.&lt;p&gt;Google is no different. The organic search results are largely from commercial, or at a minimum, self-interested sources.&lt;p&gt;That doesn&amp;#x27;t make it wrong. There&amp;#x27;s huge value there. Just the same, money is not evil. It&amp;#x27;s a mechanism for storing value. It&amp;#x27;s imperfect, and abused, and certainly not the only measurement of value. Keeping those value systems in balance is the key.</text></item><item><author>md224</author><text>I have made this case before, but I will make it again.&lt;p&gt;The Internet is the largest information system in the world, and Google is the primary portal into that information system. Google&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;organic&amp;quot; results are accompanied by AdWords results, which are based on a mixture of bid price and relevance. These ads are marked with a small &amp;quot;Ad&amp;quot; label that many people miss, and even those who know they&amp;#x27;re ads can&amp;#x27;t really &amp;quot;unsee&amp;quot; those results.&lt;p&gt;So, searching the world&amp;#x27;s largest information system provides results which have been biased by money. How does anyone consider this ethical? Why are we letting money influence the salience of information?&lt;p&gt;What if your local library (you know, those old things) had a card catalog with &amp;quot;sponsored&amp;quot; results? If this already exists, then maybe we&amp;#x27;re already lost. But it seems to me that as a basic rule of information ethics, the salience of information in a given information system should not be biased by monetary influence. Full stop, the end, no exceptions. If anyone has a counterargument, I would honestly love to hear it, because this has nagged at me for a long time. I simply can&amp;#x27;t understand how AdWords is ethical.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pcmaffey</author><text>Money is absolutely part of the formulation of relevance. It&amp;#x27;s just not the whole equation. Nor is word-matching (altavista), nor is popularity (google). But each is relevant.&lt;p&gt;Someone (advertiser) is paying money because they believe they have information relevant to you. How is that categorically different than the blogger&amp;#x2F;webmaster who&amp;#x27;s paying money (time&amp;#x2F;hosting) because they believe they have information relevant to you?&lt;p&gt;All information has a cost associated with it. And that cost bears some significance on the value of the information. Measuring and weighing that significance relative to other inputs is the beauty of an effective system.</text></comment>