Is Google Promoting a No on Brexit by pushing down Pro Brexit Web Sites?
Google is the EU Remain campaign's secret weapon
Ad-slinger quietly pushes pro-Brexit views down its
results
31 May 2016 at 14:30 By Andrew Orlowski
Google has demoted the site EU Referendum to “below the
fold” in searches for the term “EU referendum”, where it isn’t visible to most
web surfers unless they scroll down.
The political site, which was founded by author and
researcher Richard A.E. North in 2004, was the top search result for the
topical expression across all the major search engines for a decade.
At Google, the site has been demoted to 10th (or 13th,
depending on how you count it) for the search term, with links to the BBC and
the pro-EU Guardian newspaper ranking higher. North’s site still ranks No.1 for
the same term over at Yahoo! and Bing.
Google dominates the market with over 90 per cent share
of search engine traffic in Europe.
The No.1 ranking search result on average receives 33 per
cent of the traffic generated from a search, studies have found, a number which
diminishes rapidly as the ranking falls. Sites in 10th place receive only
around 2.4 per cent.
Europhile newspaper the Financial Times ranked
EUreferendum.com as the most influential British political blog in 2006, and
the site kept its top spot in the search results even after a domain move.
The dramatic fall in EU Referendum’s search ranking, in
the absence of a broader change in the algorithm, points to manual
intervention.
About EU Referendum
North is the co-author of four books on the EU along with
Christopher Booker, the journalist and co-founder of Private Eye, in addition
to two military histories. Most recently he developed the three step “Flexcit”
strategy for exiting the EU (pdf): “The aim would be a community of equals in a
‘European village’, rather than a Europe of concentric circles, using the
Geneva-based United Nations Economic Community Europe (UNECE). It would become
the core administrative body, on the lines proposed by Winston Churchill in
1948 and again in 1950. Thus, the exit from the EU becomes the start of an
ongoing process, the means to an end, not the end itself.”
North saves most of his ire for high profile Brexit
campaigners who have failed to answer how the UK could plausibly leave, arguing
the absence of a coherent exit plan only benefits the Remain campaign.
By email, North told us: "It is vital that people
should realise Google's potential (or actual) power. What started out as a good
working tool has gone the way of the rest - power corrupts and Google corrupts
absolutely."
A Google spokesman denied there is any manual
intervention in search results ranking.
Google's role in affecting the outcome of elections has
been the subject of some recent academic debate.
“Google’s search algorithm can easily shift the voting
preferences of undecided voters by 20 per cent or more – up to 80 per cent in
some demographic groups – with virtually no one knowing they are being
manipulated,” according to peer-reviewed work by psychologist Robert Epstein,
that he described to Politico last year.
“America’s next president could be eased into office not
just by TV ads or speeches, but by Google’s secret decisions, and no one –
except for me and perhaps a few other obscure researchers – would know how this
was accomplished.”
Facebook manipulated users in India’s 2012 election
campaign without their knowing it, describing it for Nature as “A
61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization”
(pdf).
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