Google employees debated whether Conservative media outlets in the company’s search function
EXCLUSIVE: GOOGLE EMPLOYEES DEBATED BURYING CONSERVATIVE
MEDIA IN SEARCH
By Peter Hasson | Reporter 310:19 PM 11/29/2018 |
INVESTIGATIVE GROUP
- Google employees debated whether to bury
The Daily Caller and other conservative media outlets in the company’s
search function as a response to President Donald Trump’s election
- “Let’s make sure that we reverse things in four years,” one
engineer wrote in a thread that included a Google vice president
- Google employees similarly sought to manipulate search results
to combat Trump’s travel ban
Google
employees debated whether to bury conservative media outlets in the company’s
search function as a response to President Donald Trump’s election in 2016,
internal Google communications obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation
reveal.
The Daily Caller and Breitbart were specifically
singled out as outlets to potentially bury, the communications reveal.
Trump’s election in 2016 shocked many Google employees, who had been
counting on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to win.
Communications obtained by TheDCNF show that internal
Google discussions went beyond expressing remorse over Clinton’s loss to
actually discussing ways Google could prevent Trump from winning
again.
“This was an election of false equivalencies, and
Google, sadly, had a hand in it,” Google engineer Scott Byer wrote in a Nov. 9,
2016, post reviewed by TheDCNF.
Byer falsely labeled The Daily Caller and Breitbart
as “opinion blogs” and urged his coworkers to reduce their visibility in search
results.
“How many times did you see the Election now card
with items from opinion blogs (Breitbart, Daily Caller) elevated next to
legitimate news organizations? That’s something that can and should be fixed,”
Byer wrote.
“I think we have a responsibility to expose the
quality and truthfulness of sources – because not doing so hides real
information under loud noises,” he continued. (RELATED: Google Search Labels Republican Women
‘Enablers’)
“Beyond that, let’s concentrate on teaching critical
thinking. A little bit of that would go a long way. Let’s make sure that we
reverse things in four years – demographics will be on our side.”
Some of Byer’s colleagues expressed concern that
manipulating search results could backfire and suggested alternative measures.
One Google engineer, Uri Dekel, identified himself
as a Clinton supporter but argued that manipulating search results was the
wrong route to take.
“Thinking that Breitbart, Drudge, etc. are not
‘legitimate news sources’ is contrary to the beliefs of a major portion of our
user base is partially what got us to this mess. MSNBC is not more legit than
Drudge just because Rachel Maddow may be more educated / less deplorable /
closer to our views, than, say Sean Hannity,” Dekel wrote in a reply to Byer.
“I follow a lot of right wing folks on social
networks you could tell something was brewing. We laughed off Drudge’s Instant
Polls and all that stuff, but in the end, people go to those sources because
they believe that the media doesn’t do it’s job. I’m a Hillary supporter and
let’s admit it, the media avoided dealing with the hard questions and issues,
which didn’t pay off. By ranking ‘legitimacy’ you’ll just introduce more
conspiracy theories,” Dekel added.
“Too many times, Breitbart is just echoing a
demonstrably made up story,” Byer wrote in a reply to his original post. He did
not cite any examples.
“That happens at MSNBC, too. I don’t want a political
judgement. The desire is to break the myth feedback loop, the false
equivalency, instead of the current amplification of it,” Byer added.
“What I believe we can do, technically, that avoids
the accusations of conspiracy or bias from people who ultimately have a right
and obligation to decide what they want to believe, is to get better at
displaying the ‘ripples’ and copy-pasta, to trace information to its source, to
link to critiques of those sources, and let people decide what sources they
believe,” another Google engineer, Mike Brauwerman, suggested.
“Give people a comprehensive but effectively
summarized view of the information, not context-free rage-inducing
sound-bytes,” he added.
“We’re working on providing users with context
around stories so that they can know the bigger picture,” chimed in David
Besbris, vice president of engineering at Google.
“We can play a role in providing the full story and
educate them about all sides. This doesn’t have to be filtering and can be
useful to everyone,” he wrote.
Other employees similarly advocated providing
contextual information about media sources in search results, and the company
later did so with a short-lived fact check at the end of 2017.
Not only did the fact-check feature target
conservative outlets almost exclusively, it was also blatantly
wrong. Google’s fact check repeatedly attributed false claims to those
outlets, even though they demonstrably never made those claims.
Google pulled the faulty fact-check program in
January, crediting TheDCNF’s investigation for the decision.
A Google spokeswoman said that the conversation did
not lead to manipulation of search results for political purposes.
“This post shows that far from suppressing Breitbart
and Daily Caller, we surfaced these sites regularly in our products.
Furthermore, it shows that we value providing people with the full view on
stories from a variety of sources,” the spokeswoman told TheDCNF in an email.
“Google has never manipulated its search results or
modified any of its products to promote a particular political ideology. Our
processes and policies do not allow for any manipulation of search results to
promote political ideologies.”
The discussion about whether to bury conservative
media outlets isn’t the first evidence that some Google employees have sought
to manipulate search results for political ends.
After Trump announced his initial travel ban in
January 2017, Google employees discussed ways to manipulate search
results in order to push back against the president’s order.
A group of employees brainstormed ways to counter “islamophobic,
algorithmically biased results from search terms ‘Islam’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Iran’,
etc,” as well as “prejudiced, algorithmically biased search results from search
terms ‘Mexico’, ‘Hispanic’, ‘Latino’, etc.”
Trump speculated to The Daily Caller in
September that Google and Facebook are trying to affect election outcomes.
“I think they already have,” Trump said, responding
to questions about potential election interference by Google and Facebook.
“I mean the true interference in the last election
was that — if you look at all, virtually all of those companies are super
liberal companies in favor of Hillary Clinton,” he added.
“Maybe I did a better job because I’m good with the
Twitter and I’m good at social media, but the truth is they were all on Hillary
Clinton’s side, and if you look at what was going on with Facebook and with
Google and all of it, they were very much on her side,” Trump continued.
Google this month corrected a “knowledge panel”
about a Republican women’s group that labeled them “enablers.”
Google cited Wikipedia for the disparaging
description, though a similar change made to Wikipedia’s page for the women’s
group was corrected almost immediately. Google left up the digital vandalism
for three weeks.
Google apologized in May after search results for
the California Republican Party falsely listed “Nazism” as one of the
state party’s ideologies.
Then, too, Google blamed manipulation of the party’s
Wikipedia page for the inaccurate and disparaging description.
Comments
Post a Comment