Google is doing a really bad job hiding its anti-conservative bias.
During the 2016 election, Google was caught prioritizing positive information about Hillary Clinton and prioritizing negative information about Donald Trump in search results.
Last week, the company fired engineer Mike Wacker after he spoke with Fox News about the harsh work environment he endured as a Republican working at Google: “If left unchecked, [Google’s] outrage mobs will hunt down any conservative, any Christian, and any independent free thinker at Google who does not bow down to their agenda.”
This week, The Daily Caller exposed a “blacklist” designed to block opinionated content from appearing in special search features. The list does not affect organic search results (the blue headlines Google provides in response to a search).
The blacklist includes:
- Conservative websites Breitbart, American Spectator, The Gateway Pundit, Tea Party Economist, and Conservative Tribune
- Religious websites St. Philip the Deacon Lutheran Church and Bring Your Bible to School Day
- Investigative website Consortium News
- Discussion platform Free Thought Project
The blacklist blocks content from those sites (and more) from appearing in Google’s “featured snippets” (showcased content most likely to contain the information a user seeks).
“Featured snippets are generated automatically to help people easily find pages that our systems determine may have the most relevant information,” explains a Google spokesperson.
Until Breitbart’s inquiry on Wednesday, Google’s “featured snippets” for the word “hebephilia” included a photo of teenage Ivanka Trump sitting on her father’s lap.
Hebephilia is a term referring to an adult’s sexual interest in children between the ages of 11 and 14.
Google claimed the photo came “from another source” and removed it from the snippet (but it still appears in Google Image results).
In December, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked in court why a search for “idiot” returned an image of Donald Trump. Pichai said: “This is working at scale, we don’t manually intervene on any particular search result.”
The blacklist also applies to Google’s “web answers,” a service that responds to simple questions with a box of information. For example, the question “What is the capital of Syria” yields a search box containing information about Damascus.
Internal memos show that a Washington Post op-ed was blocked from appearing in response to the question “Who is the dictator of Russia?”
As noted by a Google employee: “We are going to be removing opinion docs from all of newsey/political/sensitive webanswers.” Notes like this suggest Google’s blacklists are edited manually by employees (an accusation Google has repeatedly denied).
In a separate effort to police Google, regulators in Europe hit the company with a $1.7 billion fine over its decision to force customers of its ad sales platform (AdSense) to sign contracts preventing them from featuring any other search engine on their sites.
This misconduct, which lasted more than a decade, stifled competition and innovation.
The European Commission fined Google a record $4.8 billion last year for abusing market dominance in mobile and $2.7 billion the year before that for manipulating shopping search results. Google is appealing all three cases.
Editor’s note: Subtle propaganda is the worst kind of propaganda. Google has become trustworthy in the eyes of most Americans, but their actions clearly show they are not.
Hey, Google, do you know what the inside of a prison cell looks like? You are going to find out if you continue with your lowlife cockroach ways!
Hey, Google. Do you know what the inside of a prison cell looks like? You are about to find out if you continue to blacklist and it is against the Constitution, guess you are too stupid to know that because you are a cockroach!
I’m disgusted with Google!!!! Blacklisting conservatives is totally unfair!
This is evidence of Google’s fascist, socialistic style of communism. Just like Stalin, Hitler and other dictatorships; Google is guilty of leaning towards Nazism through the performance of this act. By performing this act of Nazism, Google is violating every Problem Solver’s (Conservative’s) Constitutional, First Amendment, freedom of speech Rights. Google should be adjudicated and punished for this violation, and publically. Every American citizen has the Right to have his/ her opinions and ideas heard; whether agreed with or not, according to our Constitution; and this freedom should never be silenced. The only reason to censor anyone’s free speech, is when the language is profane, period. Profane speech should never be used, especially in the presence of children, ladies, and Christians.
lately I have been trying to do a search on certain people (Democrat Politicians) about what thy said that are lies and I have been to those sites before..
trying to use them to back up a claim of how they lied
the search engines Google, Yahoo and others give me a go around I have to keep clicking into more results for about 10 minutes or more to find them..
Black list is not the only problem its burying of false statements and lies by the Democrats
What’s worse is that my Yahoo email is apparently being censored also. I frequently am unable to open attachments to emails that involve conservative articles, especially when they involve a conservative response to something that disputes left wing news or statements. Is this still America??
My comments were blocked by Yahoo. They ended up shutting down my account and I cannot create a new one since they recognize my IP address. No bad language was ever used so this is obviously a block for a conservative view.
I feel the FCC licensing of individuals involved should be reinstated as used to be the case in the 1970’s and before, where-by one would have to pass a test to receive a license which was good for 5 years. There were also moral standards – voluntary to avoid the passing of laws – but there never the less which now would need to be made laws. These same practices should then be extended to the public “wire ways” as well as the public air ways as they once were for just the air ways. If done then Google, Facebook, etc owners AND employees would need to be licensed and held to account by federal law and these sort of actions could result in their licenses being revoked long before civil and criminal charges would be filed and pursued. I would suggest a 5 year license term for citizens, 2 year for minors 16-18, and 1 year for foreigners with sponsorship by an American license holder.