Google, Facebook and Twitter drew another round of criticism from President Trump yesterday, with claims looking giant is rigging its results and also a top White House aide saying the administration is “using a look” at Google searches.
“I do think Bing is really taking advantage of plenty of people. And this is a much more severe thing which is an extremely serious charge,” Trump said yesterday. “Google and Twitter and Facebook, they’re treading on very, very troubled territory and they’ve got being careful.”
Yesterday morning, Trump tweeted without evidence that Internet search results produced stories overwhelmingly from “Left-Wing Media.” The claim seemed to have stemmed from an unscientific study by way of a little-known website that claimed 96 percent of results for “Trump news” come from liberal sources. This article categorized virtually every single mainstream news outlet as “liberal.”
“Google & other people are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and facts that’s good,” Trump tweeted. “They are really controlling that which we can & cannot see.”
Later yesterday, Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economic adviser, told reporters the administration is “going for a look” to find out if Google’s search results are at the mercy of any federal regulations.
In response, Google said its search algorithms matched to providing relevant results to the operator.
“Search is not used to get a political agenda and now we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology,” the provider said in a very statement. “We continually try to improve Online search therefore we never rank search results to govern political sentiment.”
Still, Google’s search algorithm remains private, and it is unclear the company produces its results. On every side of the political spectrum, there’s unease with the lack of regulation and oversight over algorithms and software that could be liable for ranking content on countless websites.
Google does employ thousands whorrrre tasked with reviewing a news source’s authority, determined by major awards like Pulitzer Prizes and clearly labeled advertising. When a web site is deceptive, the reviewers are told so it can have a minimal score. Higher-ranked news sources are generally mentioned above lower-ranked sources.
In recent months, Trump and various conservatives have routinely argued that conservative opinions and voices are stifled and censored on social network. The controversy has intensified after conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was banned by a number of platforms, including Facebook. Depending on reports, his pages were removed for including and inspiring hate speech.
Jacob Groshek, a communications professor at Boston University, claimed it is not likely Google could well be discriminating against conservatives, the way it would not be financially beneficial.
“Google’s algorithm is designed to provide you information that you like,” Groshek said. “I do not believe google’s algorithm is rigged in favor of any political party.”
Herald wire services contributed to this report.
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