Accused by Trump of rigging search results, Google denies political bias
By
Andre Damon
29 August 2018
On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump accused technology monopolist Google of manipulating search results to suppress right-wing news sources.
“Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media,” Trump wrote in a Twitter post. “In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent.” Trump added, “Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see.”
Later in the day, Trump told reporters that by engaging in censorship, Facebook, Google and Twitter “are really treading on very, very troubled territory and they have to be careful.”
Trump was reacting to actions by the Internet giants to promote publications aligned with his opponents in the ruling class, like CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Facebook and Twitter have also taken action in recent weeks against the fascistic social media personality Alex Jones.
Contrary to Trump’s claims, however, the main target of the censorship measures adopted by the Internet companies is not right-wing, but rather left-wing, socialist and anti-war publications. In August 2017, the World Socialist Web Site revealed that changes to Google’s search algorithm announced in April sharply reduced search traffic to left-wing sites, with search traffic to the World Socialist Web Site falling by 75 percent.
On August 25, 2017, the World Socialist Web Site published an open letter to Google demanding that the company stop its censorship of the internet. Google never replied to the letter.
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