Not feeling lucky
Another conspiracy theory that can’t be proven
THEY SAID that Mike Huckabee had thin skin. Before him, they said Bill Clinton had thin skin. And going back a little further, one speaker of the Arkansas House had such thin skin that he knifed a colleague on the floor of the General Assembly. OK, so that was going back a lot further—to 1837. But dealing with thin-skinned politicians is tradition in this shop. We know from them.
And yet, we’ve never seen nuthin’ like this president.
Can he not let one slight go before tweeting an insult in rebuttal? The president of the United States should have more to worry about than Alec Baldwin. But another day, another tweet. The latest? Something about Google rigging searches to hide good news about the Trump administration, or maybe just President Trump, and pushing bad news on the rest of us.
As the president explains it in his own grammatical style: “Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal?”
That is the kind of English, up, with which, it’s hard to put. And no telling which Fox News anchor might have mentioned the subject on air, leading to the tirade. But it’s more serious than just a hissy fit. According to The Washington Post, President Donald Trump’s economic adviser said the White House was looking into regulating Google searches.
For a president who has complained about over-regulation—and who has worked to slash regulations in a broad range of categories from environmental to labor—it’s a complete 180 to suggest more be added, particularly for one company.
We can complain about how most technology companies don’t like conservatives until the Brangus come home, but at the end of the day, these companies are private corporations, and they can do what they want with their products. The easiest solution, if you dislike their operating style, is to stop using them, not introduce government (read: government control) into yet another facet of private industry.
Besides, there’s a problem with the assertion that Google has a bias against the president. That claim shows a misunderstanding of how the technology works.
When a body searches for something on Google, the search engine uses several factors to determine what news articles, blog posts, videos and websites to show. Those factors can be your location when you perform the search, your past search history, keywords, and much more. Another factor is how well those news sites are designed for searches. If CNN or the Huffington Post has a better web team than Fox News, and they design their sites to be more optimal for search engines, they’re more likely to be picked up in instant results.
THIS ISSUE is more complicated than our president seems to understand at the moment. If he performs a quick Google search on himself and doesn’t like the results, that’s not sufficient reason for wanting government regulation.
It’s not like Google has banned conservative outlets from its news section. A quick check by your editorial staff pulls up articles from Fox News, Breitbart, Daily Wire and even a conservative newspaper of some note that you’re reading right now. So our friends on the starboard side of the media are indeed present.
Besides, calling for Google to be regulated reminds us of another place where that happened once upon a time. In 2010, Google pulled out of mainland China because the ChiComs had strict online censorship—and the company refused to block certain search results at the Communist regime’s behest.
Let’s not be like China. Their government has a long history of suppressing free expression and ideas the government views as opposition. Mr. President, if you don’t like Google, may we suggest switching your searches to Bing or Yahoo instead? We’ll take free market competition or additional government regulation any day.