SEARCH IS ‘RIGGED’
Trump threatens regs over ‘fake news’ bias against right-wingers
President Trump wants Google to do the “right” thing when it comes to information about himself, and one of his key advisers spoke Tuesday about tightening the screws on the internet search giant.
Top White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said that the administration is “taking a look at” regulating Google after the President claimed that the tech behemoth is “rigged” against conservatives.
“We’re just going to do some investigations, some analysis,” Kudlow told reporters outside the White House. “That’s what we do.”
Kudlow’s comments came hours after Trump thumbed out a couple of fact-challenged tweets on the matter.
“Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media,” Trump tweeted just before dawn. “In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD.” “Illegal?” Trump added. Definitely not, lawmakers and Google countered.
“You should read the First Amendment,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), who has overseen several congressional hearings about search engine algorithms, tweeted at Trump. “If government tried to dictate the free speech algorithms of private companies, courts would strike it down in a nanosecond.”
Pressed on the fact that Trump’s claim is based on a widely debunked theory, Kudlow hinted at his own ignorance: “This is above my pay grade.”
Google noted its search algorithms are designed to retrieve the most relevant results determined by a long list of factors including personal search history and geographic location. It also prioritizes credible, original reporting over conspiracy theory peddlers such as Infowars.
“When users type queries into the Google Search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds,” Google said in a statement.
“Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don't bias our results towards any political ideology.”
The statement added, “We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”
In short, Google's preponderance of “bad” stories about Trump are the result of a barrage of damning news events about him in recent weeks, including the convictions of his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and the President's ex-attorney Michael Cohen.
Trump's tweet came hours after his friend Lou Dobbs of Fox News aired a segment about a blog post published by conservative outlet PJ Media claiming that 96% of Google searches about the President result in stories from “leftleaning news outlets.”
“Is Google manipulating its algorithm to prioritize leftleaning news outlets in their coverage of President Trump?” the site's supervising editor Paula Bolyard asked in the piece.
Bolyard, using a chart grading news outlets on their political “bias,” claimed “leftleaning and anti-Trump” outlets are prioritized by the search engine while “rightleaning” sites are spurned.
Bolyard did not address the sheer volume of original news produced by the outlets listed in the “left” category, which plays a big part in how Google's algorithms function.
The “left” category on her chart was populated by outlets including the Daily News, Los Angeles Times, CNN, NPR, USA Today, The Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, MSNBC, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, BBC, Bloomberg News, BuzzFeed News, People magazine, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Vox, Esquire, Salon, Time and the HuffPost.
Conversely, the only major news outlets listed in Bolyard's politically “right” category are The Wall Street Journal, McClatchy, Forbes, The Economist, the Daily Mail and Fox News. The remaining outlets listed are mostly small and obscure, and produce little to no original reporting. Some of them, including Infowars and The Daily Caller, routinely traffic in right-wing conspiracy theories.
Beyond the factually flawed reasons for regulating Google on political grounds, some commentators noted the irony of a Republican President arguing the need for free speech restrictions on a major private company.
“I just want to remind you all the Republican Party is supposedly about free markets, so the fact that there's not a single peep as Trump and Kudlow yet again threaten a US corporation shows how unprincipled this party has become,” author Amy Siskind tweeted. “It's the party of Trump.”