Google Blacklist Blocks Conservative Sites

Google is doing a really bad job hiding its anti-conservative bias. 

During the 2016 election, Google was caught prioritizing positive information about Hillary Clinton and prioritizing negative information about Donald Trump in search results. 

Last week, the company fired engineer Mike Wacker after he spoke with Fox News about the harsh work environment he endured as a Republican working at Google: “If left unchecked, [Google’s] outrage mobs will hunt down any conservative, any Christian, and any independent free thinker at Google who does not bow down to their agenda.”

This week, The Daily Caller exposed a “blacklist” designed to block opinionated content from appearing in special search features. The list does not affect organic search results (the blue headlines Google provides in response to a search).

The blacklist includes:

• Conservative websites Breitbart, American Spectator, The Gateway Pundit, Tea Party Economist, and Conservative Tribune
• Religious websites St. Philip the Deacon Lutheran Church and Bring Your Bible to School Day
• Investigative website Consortium News
• Discussion platform Free Thought Project

The blacklist blocks content from those sites (and more) from appearing in Google’s “featured snippets” (showcased content most likely to contain the information a user seeks). 

“Featured snippets are generated automatically to help people easily find pages that our systems determine may have the most relevant information,” explains a Google spokesperson.

Until Breitbart’s inquiry on Wednesday, Google’s “featured snippets” for the word “hebephilia” included a photo of teenage Ivanka Trump sitting on her father’s lap.

Hebephilia is a term referring to an adult’s sexual interest in children between the ages of 11 and 14.

Google claimed the photo came “from another source” and removed it from the snippet (but it still appears in Google Image results).

In December, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked in court why a search for “idiot” returned an image of Donald Trump. Pichai said: “This is working at scale, we don’t manually intervene on any particular search result.”

The blacklist also applies to Google’s “web answers,” a service that responds to simple questions with a box of information. For example, the question “What is the capital of Syria” yields a search box containing information about Damascus.

Internal memos show that a Washington Post op-ed was blocked from appearing in response to the question “Who is the dictator of Russia?”

As noted by a Google employee: “We are going to be removing opinion docs from all of newsey/political/sensitive webanswers.” Notes like this suggest Google’s blacklists are edited manually by employees (an accusation Google has repeatedly denied).

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In a separate effort to police Google, regulators in Europe hit the company with a $1.7 billion fine over its decision to force customers of its ad sales platform (AdSense) to sign contracts preventing them from featuring any other search engine on their sites. 

This misconduct, which lasted more than a decade, stifled competition and innovation.

The European Commission fined Google a record $4.8 billion last year for abusing market dominance in mobile and $2.7 billion the year before that for manipulating shopping search results. Google is appealing all three cases.

Editor’s note: Subtle propaganda is the worst kind of propaganda. Google has become trustworthy in the eyes of most Americans, but their actions clearly show they are not.