<p class="p1"><strong>Google is doing a really bad job hiding its anti-conservative bias. </strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">During the 2016 election, Google was caught prioritizing positive information about Hillary Clinton and prioritizing negative information about Donald Trump in search results. </span></p>
<p>Last week, the company fired engineer<span class="s1"> Mike Wacker after he spoke with <em>Fox News</em> about the harsh work environment he endured as a Republican working at Google: </span><span class="s1">“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.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">This week, <em>The Daily Caller</em> exposed a “blacklist” designed to block opinionated content from appearing in special search features. The list</span><span class="s1"> does not affect organic search results (the blue headlines Google provides in response to a search).</span></p>
<p><strong>The blacklist includes:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Conservative websites <em>Breitbart</em>, <em>American Spectator</em>, <em>The Gateway Pundit</em>, <em>Tea Party Economist</em>, and <em>Conservative Tribune</em></li>
<li>Religious websites <em>St. Philip the Deacon Lutheran Church</em> and <em>Bring Your Bible to School Day</em></li>
<li>Investigative website <em>Consortium News</em></li>
<li>Discussion platform <em>Free Thought Project</em></li>
</ul>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">The blacklist blocks content from those sites (and more) from appearing in Google&#8217;s &#8220;featured snippets&#8221; (showcased content most likely to contain the information a user seeks). </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">“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.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Until <em>Breitbart’s</em> inquiry on Wednesday, Google’s “featured snippets” for the word “hebephilia” included a photo of teenage Ivanka Trump sitting on her father’s lap. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><strong>Hebephilia is a term referring to an adult’s sexual interest in children between the ages of 11 and 14.</strong> </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Google claimed the photo came “from another source” and removed it from the snippet (but it still appears in Google Image results). </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">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.”</span></p>
<p><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-9589" src="https://punchingbagpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Screen-Shot-2019-06-13-at-5.32.06-PM-300x172.png" alt="" />The blacklist also applies to Google&#8217;s<span class="s1"> “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. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif;">Internal memos show that a </span><i>Washington Post</i><span style="font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif;"> op-ed was blocked from appearing in response to the question “Who is the dictator of Russia?”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">As noted by a Google employee: “We are going to be removing opinion docs from all of newsey/political/sensitive webanswers.&#8221; </span><span class="s1">Notes like this suggest Google&#8217;s blacklists are edited manually by employees (</span><span class="s1">an accusation Google has repeatedly denied).</span></p>
<p>&#8212;</p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">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 </span><span class="s1">contracts preventing them from featuring any other search engine on their sites. </span></p>
<p>This misconduct, which lasted more than a decade, stifled competition and innovation.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Editor&#8217;s note:</strong> 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.</p>