Are internet search engines apolitical?
President Trump has accused Google and some social medial platforms of rigging search results so that “bad” news coverage from the “Fake News Media” finds its way to the public over other, fairer, coverage. Google responded stating that their goal is to ensure users are provided with the most “relevant” results and the search tool they provide doesn’t list results according to any political ideology or bias. Whether this is true or not remains to be proven, but there are reasons to believe Trump is right.
A Pew Research Center Survey conducted earlier this year report that 85% or Republican or Republican-leaning U.S. adults maintain the likelihood that social media outlets routinely purge their sites of political content. The same survey also reports that 72% of Americans think political content is intentionally censured too so that the content that online platforms find objectionable is discarded from their sites.
Take for instance Google’s high-profile firing of James Damore. Damore wrote an internal memo making suggestions for Google’s own anti-discrimination policy. The left had a field day when this memo fell into the public hands. The accused Damore of sexism, among other things, regardless of the fact that his memo went to great lengths to suggest Google not rope men and women into separate categories but rather treat everyone as an individual. Among the suggestions Damore had for Google was that Google “Stop alienating conservatives.” Is it beyond the realm of possibility that Google would be inserting bias into search engine results when their own employees believe they were alienating conservatives at the company itself?
Another high-profile case was the censuring by Facebook of outspoken Trump supporters, Diamond and Silk, who grew a large social medial following for their proTrump posts during the 2016 election. Facebook deemed these two African-American conservatives as “unsafe.” In a congressional hearing last summer, Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, referred to their censorship as an enforcement error.
What about Twitter? Twitter’s own policy specifically states, “You may not make specific threats of violence or wish for the serious physical harm, death, or disease of an individual or group of people,” and then later, “You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. We consider abusive behavior an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.” It was surprising then that although it was reported, Twitter failed to censure a tweet in which the spokeswoman of the NRA, Dana Loesch, was mentioned in a post that to get her to change her views, the murdering of her children, “needs to happen.”
Maybe twitter should have a policy that reads, “In order to ensure that people feel safe expressing diverse opinions and beliefs, we prohibit behavior that crosses the line into abuse, including behavior that harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence another user’s voice.” Oh, wait they already do, I guess it just “needs to happen.”
Do tech giants and internet search engines filter out information conservatives might find useful or informative in shaping their opinions? Probably. In fact, likely. And it’s going to take a lot more than a press release to gain the confidence of 72% of American adults that they don’t.
Paul Curtman is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, a member of the Missouri General Assembly, a conference speaker, an author and columnist who lives in Washington, Missouri, with his wife and two children.