Written By: Steele Mercer
It’s not every day some of the most popular search engines in the world would tamper with their algorithms and create biased results. However, some of the most popular sites, Google for example, with over 40,000 search queries per second have found themselves questioned by many on how biased they really are.
A recent report came out around January 2018 that Google had been putting facts checks on about 3/10 popular conservative news sites seen here but not liberal sites. These claims were fact-checked by snopes.com or factcheck.org and showed up on the news organizations knowledge panels. However, when it came to liberal media organizations as seen in the table above there were no reviewed claims or fact checks put into their organizations' knowledge panels.
Interesting enough Google tended to target specific claims made by these individual organizations. Conservative outlets such as Daily Caller had Snopes fact checking on their panels that said their claims on climate change and immigration were false. The Daily Wire had headlines about climate change, confederate statues, and ISIS and they got the same treatment with reviewed claims saying what they said was “false”, “outdated”, and “mixture.” More liberal sites such as Alternet which made claims that the right targets nerd culture, had nothing from Snopes or factcheck.org put on their panels. Showing that Google had intentionally gone and put these facts checks onto these news organizations search descriptions.
Google has long had problems with what is being shown on their knowledge panels. A while back Google had listed “Nazism” as one of the ideologies of the California Republican party’s knowledge panel. This was quickly taken down after lots of backlashes. After this incident, Rep. Devin Nunes (R.-Calif) warned that the search giant and other tech companies could face hearings over alleged anti-conservative bias. Fox News reported that a Wikimedia spokesperson said, “the information pulled into the knowledge panel by Google was not visible to Wikipedia readers in the text of the article.”
This comes with a long line of Silicon Valley’s tech giants repeatedly facing allegations of a bias against conservative voices, which is constantly denied. Rep. Nunes commented, “Are these companies – Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, et cetera, are they monopolies and should they be reined in?” stating that these companies have a monopoly over American eyes, Google controls 90% of search-based markets, and should they be able to have a bias because people often take their search results as fact.
It leaves the question up for debate. There are many Silicon Valley Tech Giants that have vast control over the market; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google. They are all individually allowed by our constitution to have their own opinions and beliefs, but should they be allowed to use their companies to push their own personal political views? Do we need to step in and control them, so people are seeing a fair an equal internet or are companies just as allowed to have their own opinions as an individual American?
Want to watch Nunes’s interview on Fox look here:
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