Tuesday, August 28, 2018
On Google's suppression of non-mainstream news outlets
Trump is in the news today for complaining that Google searches for “Trump news” turns up only “fake news” from “left-wing” sites (in which he includes every single “mainstream” news source with the exception of FOX News!), and charging Google with suppressing news from conservative sources. Interestingly, moments after he tweeted that I went to Google and did just that (searched for “Trump news”); the very first result was from FOX News!
The corporate media generally just regurgitated his charge without examining it, or at best brought on a Google spokesperson to announce that there is no political bias in their search results. But, as often the case, in his bluster and lunacy, there was some truth in what Trump was saying (or tweeting). What no one in the mainstream media has yet bothered to note, either previously or today while covering this Trump tweet story, is that Google’s search results were changed back in April, 2017 in response to the “fake news / Russian meddling” brouhaha. Three months later one site, the World Socialist Web Site, documented in detail how that change had resulted in *substantial* decreases in traffic to left-wing and progressive sites.
I have my own personal data point on Google’s suppression of left-wing material which illustrates how profound this effect is. In 2009 I wrote an article on my blog entitled “Capitalism Ad Absurdam”, a phrase I invented AFAIK (complete with misspelling; it should be “absurdum” but I never took Latin). If you search for that phrase (with quotes around it to search for the exact phrase) on Google, you will find NO links to my article. None. No matter how many pages you search using the world’s most powerful search engine, you will not find my article, unless you already know it is on my site and do a site-specific search (site:lefti.blogspot.com “capitalism ad absurdam”). By contrast, the search engine DuckDuckGo turns up 5 links to the article (and only those 5 links, nothing irrelevant). The article is really there. Google just doesn’t want you to find it. It’s not just “de-ranked”. It’s completely, 100% suppressed.
