Re: Indian censorship of porn now stupider

On 08/08/2015 08:31 PM, Ruchir T wrote:
> My view is that asking for some content controls would be desirable 
> for healthy internet growth in the long term.
>
In a world where honest concerns have been voiced about Google's ability 
to successfully influence elections, are you honestly advocating putting 
in place a mechanism a corrupt government body could use to throw an 
election? Is this your idea of healthy internet growth?

"Internet search rankings have a significant impact on consumer choices, 
mainly because users trust and choose higher-ranked results more than 
lower-ranked results. Given the apparent power of search rankings, we 
asked whether they could be manipulated to alter the preferences of 
undecided voters in democratic elections. Here we report the results of 
five relevant double-blind, randomized controlled experiments, using a 
total of 4,556 undecided voters representing diverse demographic 
characteristics of the voting populations of the United States and 
India. The fifth experiment is especially notable in that it was 
conducted with eligible voters throughout India in the midst of India’s 
2014 Lok Sabha elections just before the final votes were cast. The 
results of these experiments demonstrate that (/i/) biased search 
rankings can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or 
more, (/ii/) the shift can be much higher in some demographic groups, 
and (/iii/) search ranking bias can be masked so that people show no 
awareness of the manipulation. We call this type of influence, which 
might be applicable to a variety of attitudes and beliefs, the search 
engine manipulation effect. Given that many elections are won by small 
margins, our results suggest that a search engine company has the power 
to influence the results of a substantial number of elections with 
impunity. The impact of such manipulations would be especially large in 
countries dominated by a single search engine company."

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/08/03/1419828112

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