Google News holds a special place in the world of journalism. When multiple media outlets report on the same topic in a short amount of time, the articles that make it to the main News page are seen by the most people.
Itâs no different than any other media industry. If youâre a musician, you want your song to show up on Spotifyâs main page. If youâre in a comedy movie, you want it to be listed first in the âcomedyâ section on Netflix.
Thatâs why one of my crowning achievements as a journalist was convincing the Google News algorithm I was the queerest artificial intelligence reporter in the world.
How it started
Back in June I published this article explaining how my TNW author profile was influencing the number of my articles that showed up in Google News if you did an in-app search for âartificial intelligence queer.â
At the time, it was relevant because it was Pride month and a lot of people were covering how AI technologies impact the queer community.
When I casually searched for âartificial intelligence queerâ to see what my peers were writing on the topic, I was astounded to find that a large portion â about 1/3 â of what Google News returned was my work. And most of those articles had nothing to do with LGBTQ+ issues at all.
As I wrote then, we couldnât have bought that kind of search domination. Had nobody else written about LGBTQ+ and AI all month? No, it was June so there were literally dozens of articles on the subject.
When I went to the Google Search site and performed the same query it produced different results. In fact, even if I clicked on the ânewsâ tab from the main Search page, it still didnât show the same ratio of one of my articles for every two from someone else.
The Google News interface, for whatever reason, seemingly draws information from my TNW author profile and uses it to influence query results.
Apparently there arenât a lot of journalists who use the word âqueerâ in their indexed author page.
How itâs going
Heavy is the head that wears the crown and, to be honest with you, it can be quite taxing to be queer. Iâd rather not be the queerest AI journo on the planet for more than a few weeks. So, a while back, I changed my author profile.
It used to say I covered âqueer stuff,â because I thought that was kind of funny. I changed it to say I covered âLGTBTQ+ issues.â It seems more professional.Â
And, voila! Like magic, my reign was over. I searched for âartificial intelligence queerâ on Google News and it returned a smaller number of my articles. And all of them were about being âqueerâ in STEM. Problem solved! Hooray?
No, of course not.
Admittedly, Iâm no longer the queerest AI journo in the world. But hear me out because, as far as Google News is concerned now, my work on the âartificial intelligence LGBTQ+ issuesâ beat is important enough to take up even more of the search results than my work as a âqueerâ AI journalist.
Here we go again:
By changing my TNW author profile to say I covered âLGBTQ+ issues,â it turns out I was using a term that even fewer journalists use in their profiles.
If you search for âartificial intelligence LGBTQ+ issuesâ in Google News, about two-thirds of the articles in the search results are mine as of the time of this articleâs publishing.
If I canât escape my destiny as an ambassador between the queer AI journalist community and the Google News algorithm, I must embrace it.
The LGBTQ+iest journalist on the planet
And with great power comes great responsibility. Which is why I changed my TNW author profile to say I cover âSpidermanâ today.
It could take a few days for the changes to reflect in Google indexes, but itâll be worth the wait in my opinion.
If Google News is going to associate my articles with whatever I put in my author profile, Iâm going to manifest a world where my name and Spiderman are synonymous. Why not?
The moral to this story is that algorithms are dumb. No human curator would have made the same mistakes.
And when algorithms deal with people, those mistakes can be harmful. Who knows how many journalists who wrote about technology for Pride this year lost page views because Google News decided to surface my articles about policy and physics instead of their relevant pieces?
Today, Iâm able to exploit the algorithm for kicks. I can get my stories to show up under specific search queries in the Google News interface just by changing my author profile. Itâs kind of funny.
But what if someone decides to silence queer journalism tomorrow by exploiting the algorithm in such a way that searching for news on LGBTQ+ issues, using any query string, would result in mostly Breitbart or Infowars articles surfacing? Thereâs nothing funny about that.
Update 6 January 2022: Iâm honored to reveal to all of you that I am quantum computing Spiderman! Okay, so I couldnât crack the algorithm and make it associate me with artificial intelligence and Spiderman. But, it did associate me with quantum computing and Spiderman, so Iâll count that as a win! As of the time of this update, if you search for âquantum computing spidermanâ in the Google News app search bar, the overwhelming majority of results returned are from yours truly.Â
Related: Why canât Googleâs algorithms find any good news for queer people?
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