Google 'must review its search rankings because of rightwing manipulation'
Source: The Guardian/The Observer
Google 'must review its search rankings because of rightwing manipulation'
Hate sites are dominating and controlling searches on Muslims,
Jews, Hitler and women and search engine is failing to tackle
problem, say academics
Carole Cadwalladr
Monday 5 December 2016 19.48 GMT
Google must urgently review its search ranking system because of “compelling” evidence that it is being “manipulated and controlled” by rightwing propagandists, leading academics have said, after the Observer reported that hate sites are now dominating searches on Muslims, Jews, Hitler and women.
Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist and the author of Weapons on Math Destruction, said that unless Google acknowledged responsibility for the problem, it would be a “co-conspirator” with the propagandists. “This is the end for Google pretending to be a neutral platform,” she said. “It clearly has a terrible problem here and it has to own and acknowledge that.
“It simply can’t go on pretending that it has no editorial responsibilities when it is delivering these kinds of results. It is simply not defensible for it go on claiming ‘plausible deniability’. It has clearly become a conduit for rightwing hate sites and it must urgently take action.”
The Observer found that searches for “are jews” were offering the suggestion “are jews evil”, and nine out of the 10 top results gave links to rightwing antisemitic hate sites. Google refused to comment on the individual search results, but on Sunday, it moved to change some but not all of the autocomplete suggestions that the report highlighted.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/05/google-must-review-its-search-rankings-because-of-rightwing-manipulation
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