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87 views • August 28, 2018

KUDLOW: LOOKING INTO REGULATING GOOGLE

Mark Liu
In a string of early morning posts on Twitter, President Donald Trump called out Google for biased search algorithms, appearing to cite a PJ media report that found liberal media dominated news results. Trump accused the company of predominantly showing news results from the "fake news" media and questioned if the practice was lawful. "Google search results for 'Trump News' shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media," he wrote on Aug. 28. "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? 96% of... results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!" Days earlier, the report from PJ media found that 96 percent of Google search results for news on the president came from liberal media outlets. The report's findings were gathered from an analysis of Google search results for "Trump" using the search engine's "News" tab. The data was then put through Sharyl Attkisson's media bias chart. A test conducted by The Epoch Times on Aug. 28, using similar methods as above, found similar results. Using Google Chrome's incognito mode (so cookies and search history won't affect results), a search for "Trump" revealed 86 percent of articles shown by Google came from liberal or left-wing media sources. Analyzing the first page of results only, The Epoch Times found that 3 out of 27 articles shown in total were conservative, and they all came from a single conservative site—Fox News. The majority of the articles shown were from CNN, Washington Post, and The New York Times, all liberal sites. The top 2 results came from the Washington Post and ABC News, followed by Fox News at number 3. The media outlet that showed up the highest number of times was CNN—appearing a total of 6 times. A Google representative did not respond to a request for comment on the alleged bias, at the time of publication. Censorship Claims Aside from Google, other companies with international influence such as Facebook and Twitter have likewise been subjects of criticism over reports that they censored conservative voices. Earlier this month, Facebook severely penalized PragerU, a nonprofit organization that produces conservative educational videos, only to remove the penalties and apologize a day later, after saying the sanctions were a mistake. It was the latest apology in a string of similar incidents “We just discovered that PragerU is being heavily censored and shadow banned on Facebook,” PragerU social-media influencer Will Witt said in a post. Witt's reference to shadow banning is a term used to describe the practice by social media platforms of reducing or limiting the visibility of a user’s content. In January, Project Veritas released a number of undercover videos of current and former Twitter employees, describing to investigators how the company uses an array of tools to identify users with conservative, pro-Trump, pro-America, or even pro-God views and target them for censorship. Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey also admitted in a recent interview with CNN that he himself and most of the company’s employees share a “left-leaning” bias. In another incident, both Twitter and Facebook reversed a decision to block a campaign video by California Republican candidate Elizabeth Heng, upon “further review.” Her video had included graphic footage depicting the communist genocide in Cambodia—which her parents survived—in the 1970s. Heng argued that her parents’ story had rooted personal relevance.
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