According to a Daily Caller report, Google engineers conspired about whether the company should bury search results of prominent conservative news websites.
“Communications obtained by TheDCNF show that internal Google discussions went beyond expressing remorse over Clinton’s loss to actually discussing ways Google could prevent Trump from winning again,” the report said.
Daily Caller obtained posts from Google engineer Scott Byer in which he wanted to make Google the arbiter of truth in media, and disparaged conservative media outlets as “opinion blogs.”
“This was an election of false equivalencies, and Google, sadly, had a hand in it,” Byer said on Nov. 9. 2016, the day after President Donald J. Trump’s historic triumph over Hillary R. Clinton.
“I think we have a responsibility to expose the quality and truthfulness of sources – because not doing so hides real information under loud noises,” he reportedly said. “Beyond that, let’s concentrate on teaching critical thinking. A little bit of that would go a long way. Let’s make sure that we reverse things in four years – demographics will be on our side.”
Engineer Uri Dekel’s response was a bit more tempered, though he still referred to conservatives as “deplorable,” a word added the lexicon of every leftist in 2016 thanks to remarks made by Clinton.
“Thinking that Breitbart, Drudge, etc. are not ‘legitimate news sources’ is contrary to the beliefs of a major portion of our user base is partially what got us to this mess. MSNBC is not more legit than Drudge just because Rachel Maddow may be more educated / less deplorable / closer to our views, than, say Sean Hannity,” Dekel said, replying to Byer.
“I follow a lot of right wing folks on social networks you could tell something was brewing. We laughed off Drudge’s Instant Polls and all that stuff, but in the end, people go to those sources because they believe that the media doesn’t do it’s job. I’m a Hillary supporter and let’s admit it, the media avoided dealing with the hard questions and issues, which didn’t pay off. By ranking ‘legitimacy’ you’ll just introduce more conspiracy theories,” he said.
Byer, who really hates Breitbart, disagreed.
“Too many times, Breitbart is just echoing a demonstrably made up story,” he said without providing examples.
Google engineer Mike Brauwerman had another suggestion.
“What I believe we can do, technically, that avoids the accusations of conspiracy or bias from people who ultimately have a right and obligation to decide what they want to believe, is to get better at displaying the ‘ripples’ and copy-pasta, to trace information to its source, to link to critiques of those sources, and let people decide what sources they believe,” he said. “Give people a comprehensive but effectively summarized view of the information, not context-free rage-inducing sound-bytes.
David Besbris, Google’s vice president of engineering also added to the conversation.
“We’re working on providing users with context around stories so that they can know the bigger picture,” he said. “We can play a role in providing the full story and educate them about all sides. This doesn’t have to be filtering and can be useful to everyone.”
How comforting to know that the platform by which nearly the entire world receives information has a far-left bias.
According to the report, Google denied ever manipulating any search results.