US President Donald Trump is attacking Google for not showing conservative leaning news enough in their results.
Google is once again finding itself on the defensive. This time, it is coming from US President Donald Trump. In a recent Twitter tirade, Trump accused Google of suppressing news organizations with conservative leanings and pushing forward news organizations with more liberal leanings. He suggested that the practice is illegal and dangerous.
In response, Google issued a statement denying the wild accusations:
Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology,” the company continued. “Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries. We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.
Some observers say that even if there was some sort of political conspiracy, the practice isn’t really illegal as Trump suggested. While American law can regulate some of the activities of private organizations, we aren’t aware of anyone citing specific laws that dictate that news search results should adhere to a specific political leaning.
Google’s search algorithms are already under fire over concerns about censorship. Recently, Google said that it would once again try to offer its services in China. The search giant said that it would offer a censored variation of its search results to the Chinese people to appease the Chinese government. Those plans are currently under fire by human rights organizations. They describe the move as an “alarming” capitulation of human rights on Google’s part.
Given the power Google has with its search engine, it’s no real wonder why major governments have eyed tinkering them in their favour. With so many people using the engine to find what they are looking for, censorship on such a median can easily prove to be a very powerful thing.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
