Wall Street Journal: Google Is Blacklisting Conservative News Sites, Despite Denials Made Under Oath

Reported by the Daily Mail, which recapitulates the WSJ reporting. (The WSJ is behind that annoying paywall.)

Google 'DOES blacklist sites, has targeted conservative news sites and changes its algorithms to favour big businesses,' claims new report - despite the tech giant's denials

The Wall Street Journal claims Google has been blacklisting sites

It also claims that conservative publications have been blacklisted

The WSJ claims that Google made algorithmic changes in favour big businesses over smaller ones including on behalf of a major advertiser, eBay

They claim the blacklist policy instructs engineers, known as 'maintainers', to focus on sites that actively aim to mislead

A Google spokesperson said the company does 'not manually determine the order of any search result'

...

The WSJ report also claims that Google made algorithmic changes to its search results that favour big businesses over smaller ones, and in at least one case made changes on behalf of eBay, which is a major advertiser.

The company also boosts some major websites, such as Amazon and Facebook in search results, according to people familiar with the matter.

Google's engineers have also created blacklists to weed out more-incendiary suggestions in auto-complete, the feature that predicts search terms as the user types a query - particularly those relating to controversial subjects such as abortion or immigration.

The WSJ compared Duckduckgo and Google autocomplete results in Joe Biden, and found that 'creepy' was suggested every time by the former but never by Google.

Here's an example of that: I just googled "John Solomon" to find his most recent reporting, and his own blog, JohnSolomonReports.com.

Google answered my query with a page full of media hits on Solomon -- including from the ostensibly-authoritative trash website Daily Beast -- attacking his credibility.

The link to his actual blog did not appear on the first page of results. Frustrated, I opened Bing and searched there.

They do this deliberately. They claim "it's the algorithm," but the algorithm is made -- and repeatedly tweaked and biased -- by intentional human action.

And what does Heritage have to say about this -- you know, Heritage, the supposedly conservative organization?

The "conservative" organization which deceives old people into thinking Heritage will "fight for conservatism" if they include a generous bequeathment to this corrupt organization in their wills?

Well, they say: "Build your own internet, peons."

How original!

Now, I'm sure there's nothing in that suggestion that maybe Heritage is screwing over the old ladies they cadge into donating to them in order to favor the huge monopoly corporations that pay them off.

Except... yeah, Heritage has in fact been on Google's payroll for eight years.

So everybody, make sure you keep sending your money to these corrupt zombie organizations.

I mean, sure, they'll put your money and Google's money together and then strike a fair balance entirely in Google's favor, but do make sure you keep this gigantic DC donation-leech pink and plump with your blood.

68 In regards to the "build your own networks crowd"...Gab did that. I know some people don't like them because icky people use that site but they did it...and then:

Their hosting service dropped them.
Their backup hosting service dropped them.
Their domain registrar dropped them.
Their payment processor dropped them.

Every time they got a new system in place...boom, all of a sudden they got dropped by someone else.

It's almost like there's a concerted effort to control what you are permitted to see.
Posted by: Laughing in Texas

Well, wrongthinker, they're not telling you to build your own website. They're telling you to build your own internet, as well as your own credit-card payment transfer companies so that people can subscribe and donate.

All you need to do is make your own internet and your own banks.

And then hope that Google doesn't just pay its "conservative" allies enough to get them to lobby to make the new internet and new banks illegal.

posted by Ace of Spades at 01:04 PM

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