Thread · 7 tweets · 11 Mar 2022

This needs to be repeated until we are rid of the delusion that search results could be neutral even if they tried to be. Every search engine ranks content based on subjective editorial decisions. To pretend otherwise is to lie.

Often, I find that people confuse truth and relevance. If you search for "cats" you could equally well get the names of my cats or a link to the Wikipedia entry on cats. Both are *true* facts, but relevance varies (all the time). There is no true relevance: it's editorial.

You can accumulate a lot of invasive data about people to try to tailor relevance to them, but that's not scientific. You're just (editorially) picking a KPI to optimise for — there's not proof that it's the right one, nor can there be one.

is correct and transparent in pointing that out. Being transparent about editorial decisions is what it means to be accountable versus keeping the secret sauce as secret as possible.

Contrast that with Google who, when asked to stop helping teens die of suicide, responded that “Google Search holds a mirror up to what is on the internet.”

As someone who struggled for years with suicide, I have no words for that kind of self-serving cynicism. (Source below, CW: suicide. nytimes.com/interactive/20…)

The sooner we reckon with the unavoidably editorial nature of search, the sooner we can understand the risk that search monoculture poses to society: it's like an Internet-age Pravda. And then we can get to work fixing it. berjon.com/capture-resist…