Report: Liberal News Outlets Dominate Google Search Results with 96 Percent of 'Trump' Stories
New evidence that technology’s giants are muzzling conservatives has emerged after the web site PJ Media wanted to find out if Google did in fact lurch to the left when users wanted the latest information on President Donald Trump.
Writer Paula Bolyard on Saturday reported on the results of her experiment, which the site was fully upfront about admitting was not scientific.
The headline of her article said it all: “96 Percent of Google Search Results for ‘Trump’ News Are from Liberal Media Outlets.”
The concept was simple. Bolyard typed “Trump” using Google’s “News” tab and let Google do the rest.
“I was not prepared for the blatant prioritization of left-leaning and anti-Trump media outlets,” she wrote, noting that no single right-leaning site appeared on the first page of search results, and that CNN, dubbed by Trump as “Fake News” for its coverage of him, is far and away the leading site listed.
She then looked at the first 100 items, and the trend continued. There were 21 articles from CNN, 11 each from The Washington Post and NBC, and 8 from CNBC. Other sites at the top of the list included The New York Times, Atlantic, Politico, Vox, CBS and the Wall Street Journal.
Fox News was listed twice.
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk said that tech giants are trying to influence the midterm elections.
“This is their great offensive to try to silence differing opinion,” he said Monday on “Fox & Friends,” Fox News reported. “And make no mistake, it’s not because the conservative voices are offensive. It’s because they are effective.”
Kirk said conservatives must fight the tech giants.
“We need to push back because it could be a huge, huge problem moving forward,” he said.
“The very bottom line is the left hates the idea that there are other ideas. And they control these public forums or these vehicles of conversation. They’re going to use every piece of power and influence they can to try to suppress our voice. And we cannot stand for it,” he added.
Bolward was hardly the first to suggest that Google buries the right while promoting the left.
A 2017 study by the website “Can I Rank” said that the bias in Google was clear.
“Among our key findings were that top search results were almost 40% more likely to contain pages with a “Left” or “Far Left” slant than they were pages from the right. Moreover, 16% of political keywords contained no right-leaning pages at all within the first page of results,” the study said.
“Our analysis of the algorithmic metrics underpinning those rankings suggests that factors within the Google algorithm itself may make it easier for sites with a left-leaning or centrist viewpoint to rank higher in Google search results compared to sites with a politically conservative viewpoint,” it added.
Google denies doing anything to skew the results.
“Google does not manipulate results,” said Google spokeswoman Maggie Shiels. “There are more than 200 signals taken into account when someone does a search which include freshness of results.”
Bolyard’s conclusion was that Americans need to be aware that their searches are being manipulated.
“With all the talk and hand-wringing about fake news and bad foreign actors using social media outlets to attempt to manipulate election results, far too little attention has been paid to power brokers like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and their ability — and perhaps even desire — to manipulate public opinion and shape the world into their own Silicon Valley image,” she wrote.
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