New York Times covers up Google’s censorship
7 September 2018
Last September, the New York Times published an article, appearing on the first page of its business section, reporting allegations by the World Socialist Web Site that the internet search monopoly Google was censoring left-wing, anti-war and socialist web sites.
The article prominently cited, and linked to, the WSWS’s open letter to Google, “Stop the censorship of the Internet! Stop the political blacklisting of the World Socialist Web Site!” The open letter presented evidence that “Google is manipulating its internet searches” in order to “block news that your company does not want reported and to suppress opinions with which you do not agree.”
But on Wednesday, the Times posted on its website (and published Thursday on the front page of the business section of its Thursday print edition) an article by the same author, Daisuke Wakabayashi, which is a white-wash of Google’s censorship regime, echoing the company’s self-serving denials without any serious examination of the facts.
The article is the latest in a series of similar pieces by major US news outlets, which, using as a foil President Trump’s claims that the company is censoring right-wing news sources, uncritically parrot Google’s denials that it is blacklisting sites based on their political views.
Wakabayashi writes: “Google said political ideology was not a factor in any aspect of its search results. Google said that whether a user is conservative or liberal is not part of the information collected by the company, and that it didn’t categorize web pages by political leanings.”
He continues: “However, the scrutiny over misinformation after the 2016 presidential election pushed Google to make a change to its search…