Google Discussed Burying Conservative News in Searches

Wow!  The Daily Caller has an amazing scoop that should stop all of us in our tracks.  Peter Hasson reports that employees at Google discussed burying conservative news in the company’s search function after President Donald Trump was elected in 2016.  Specifically, they talked about pushing down the search results from The Daily Caller and Breitbart.

The Daily Caller reports:

“This was an election of false equivalencies, and Google, sadly, had a hand in it,” Google engineer Scott Byer wrote in a Nov. 9, 2016, post reviewed by TheDCNF.

He went on to describe these organizations as “opinion blogs.”

“How many times did you see the Election now card with items from opinion blogs (Breitbart, Daily Caller) elevated next to legitimate news organizations? That’s something that can and should be fixed,” Byer wrote.

“I think we have a responsibility to expose the quality and truthfulness of sources – because not doing so hides real information under loud noises,” he continued.

“Beyond that, let’s concentrate on teaching critical thinking. A little bit of that would go a long way. Let’s make sure that we reverse things in four years – demographics will be on our side.”

I’ll give you a moment to recover from laughing over the fact that Google believes the MSM is “legitimate,” before I tell you that one Google engineer, Uri Dekel, pushed back on this strategy.  He even suggested this type of close mindedness is what drove America to vote for President Donald Trump to begin with.

“Thinking that Breitbart, Drudge, etc. are not ‘legitimate news sources’ is contrary to the beliefs of a major portion of our user base is partially what got us to this mess. MSNBC is not more legit than Drudge just because Rachel Maddow may be more educated / less deplorable / closer to our views, than, say Sean Hannity,” Dekel wrote in a reply to Byer.

“I follow a lot of right wing folks on social networks you could tell something was brewing. We laughed off Drudge’s Instant Polls and all that stuff, but in the end, people go to those sources because they believe that the media doesn’t do it’s job. I’m a Hillary supporter and let’s admit it, the media avoided dealing with the hard questions and issues, which didn’t pay off. By ranking ‘legitimacy’ you’ll just introduce more conspiracy theories,” Dekel added.

Yes, in deed.

Manipulating search results is not a good look, Google.  If you are interested in a search engine that respects your privacy and does not hate half of America, many have switched over to DuckDuckGo.

Image Credit: Pexels

Hat Tip: Daily Caller