Google Abused Its Power By Quashing a Report Critical Of Its Service, Reporter Says (gizmodo.com)

In the wake of claims that Google got a think-tank research team sacked for criticizing the company, a respected journalist is alleging other abuses by the search giant. Kashmir Hill, a reporter at Gizmodo, is claiming that when she worked for Forbes six years ago, Google told the the magazine's staff that if publishers didn't add the "+" Google Plus social network button at the bottom of stories, those articles would come up lower in search results. From her report: I published a story headlined, "Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers," that included bits of conversation from the meeting. (An internet marketing group scraped the story after it was published and a version can still be found here.) Google promptly flipped out. This was in 2011, around the same time that a congressional antitrust committee was looking into whether the company was abusing its powers. Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non-disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes. (I had signed no such agreement, hadn't been told the meeting was confidential, and had identified myself as a journalist.) It escalated quickly from there. I was told by my higher-ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down. The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News. [...] Given that I'd gone to the Google PR team before publishing, and it was already out in the world, I felt it made more sense to keep the story up. Ultimately, though, after continued pressure from my bosses, I took the piece down -- a decision I will always regret. Forbes declined comment about this. But the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next: Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. As I recall it -- and although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory -- a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results. That was unusual; websites captured by Google's crawler did not tend to vanish that quickly.

Comments

Classic Journalistic Twisting.

[TechyImmigrant]

A) Google to web site person: "By putting these +1 buttons on articles, we get to know what articles are liked better so the search algorithms work better".

B) Web site person to Google: "Surprise! I'm a journalist. Here's my headline: 'Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers' ".

The first is a natural consequence of how computers work. They are stupid and need data to help them.
The second is an accusation of abuse of power.

These are not the same things. The first is true, the second is a twisting of the truth by a journalist to create a false perception.

I have never once read an article on a topic which I have first hand experience in, where the journalist didn't twist the facts into a false narrative that they had pulled out of their arse. For example, I was involved in setting up IEEE 802.22. I chaired the study group that formed it. It defined mechanisms for communication between heterogeneous networks (E.G. Wifi and 3G) so sessions can hand over smoothly. A guy from Lucent and a guy from Nokia were the vice chair and secretary. I had to justify this activity to my employer (Intel) who were paying my wages and expenses. There was an article in an industry rag called Bluenote that published an article to the effect "OMG, Intel and Nokia and Lucent! They must be pouring millions into this standard" based on nothing. Nobody said this, it wasn't true and the journalist knew it wasn't true, but they wrote it anyway.

In TFA and TFS, the narrative is "Google abuses it's monopoly in search". It is the natural response of a tech journalist to twist the representation of any events concerning Google into that narrative and that it exactly what happened.

Re:The Left

[sycodon]

Reposting the AC's comment. If you want to disappear it, you'll need to work harder.

The Left will come to you telling stories of tolerance, inclusiveness and equality.

They will make you believe that's what they believe in and work for.

But as soon as they have weaseled their way into power, be it in an industry, government or other organization, they quickly reveal themselves as the totalitarian absolutists that they really are.

The world's greatest atrocities were all perpetrated by people who believed they were doing it for the greater good.