In what she described as a \u201cpoisonous connection\u201d<\/em> between liberal political bias and Silicon Valley\u2019s biggest tech firms, Carrie Sheffield, national editor of the conservative-leaning Accuracy in Media (AIM), called it \u201cchilling\u201d<\/em> that politically conservative voices were being silenced.<\/p>\n Read more<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a dearth of conservative and libertarian thought that is openly expressed in Silicon Valley and is quite often suppressed,\u201d<\/em> she claimed citing data from the Lincoln Network, a conservative organization based in Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n Author and journalist Eric Burrows argues that the Google discussions represented a wider effort by social media companies to control the way all users used their platform.<\/p>\n \u201cIn my view, it\u2019s the continuation of big tech companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Skype, and all the rest of them continuing to show their bias, but also to exert their control over the way regular folk use the internet,\u201d<\/em> he told RT.<\/p>\n Burrows and Sheffield\u2019s comments come after messages seen by the Wall Street Journal document discussions between Google staff over potentially \u201cleveraging\u201d<\/em> its search engine algorithm to suggest ways of countering President Trump\u2019s travel ban, after he imposed immigration restrictions on a number of Muslim-majority countries in January 2017.<\/p>\n Ideas suggested by staff but never implemented included tweaking \u201cIslamophobic, algorithmically-biased results from search terms ‘Islam,’ ‘Muslim,’ ‘Iran,’ etc.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cPrejudiced\u201d<\/em> search results using terms such as \u201cMexico,\u201d \u201cHispanic,\u201d<\/em> and \u201cLatino,”<\/em> could also be altered, the email chain suggested.<\/p>\n READ MORE:\u2018It looks like spam\u2019: Facebook hit with more claims that it unfairly censors conservatives<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Also discussed in the email chain were ways of promoting search results to suggest donating to progressive organisations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and towards content that keeps \u201cpeople abreast of how they can help as well as the resources available for immigrants [sic] or people traveling.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Another report claimed that the company twigged its algorithms so that when users entered \u201cCalifornia Republican Party\u201d<\/em> into Google, the term \u201cnazism\u201d<\/em> joined \u201cconservatism\u201d<\/em> and \u201cmarket-liberalism\u201d<\/em> as the party\u2019s ideologies.<\/p>\n
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