The Media Research Center is calling on Google to “stop its war on democracy” and “provide algorithmic transparency” after the watchdog organization demonstrated manipulated search results for Republican Senatorial campaign websites.
“The Media Research Center is calling upon Google to stop its war on democracy. To regain the trust of conservatives it must provide algorithmic transparency to show that liberal groups and candidates are treated the same way as conservatives,” the MRC stated. “MRC is also calling upon members of Congress to take action protecting American’s free speech liberties. Congress should investigate Google’s search bias and its results on the midterm elections.”
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In truth, it’s not even a close call whether Google manipulated the search results. The astounding reporting by MRC has unmasked the tech giant as a partisan player with its thumb on the scale for Democratic candidates.
The findings revealed that campaign websites for 10 Republicans among the 12 tight races were found significantly lower on results pages compared to their opponent’s sites among organic search results.
Seven Republican candidate’s websites were completely hidden from the first page of Google search results, according to the MRC. While Republicans were hidden, eight Democratic candidates had websites that were promoted within the first six results on Google.
“Google’s bias is undeniable when shown in comparison to other search engines. Bing and DuckDuckGo both show, with on (sic) exception, all 12 Democrat and Republican senate candidate’s websites within the top five organic search results,” the Media Research Center said.
For its part, Google looked right into the camera and solemnly swore — no fingers crossed, no fibbing — that they don’t know what happened but it’s impossible for their non-partisan, completely innocent algorithms to be biased against those evil — er, those Republican candidates.
“While we cannot respond to specific claims without seeing the research, there is no validity whatsoever to allegations of political bias on Google Search. As third parties have found, political ideology is not a factor in our search ranking systems. We don’t and would never manipulate search results, modify our products or enforce our policies in any way to promote or disadvantage any particular political ideology, viewpoint, or candidate,” a Google spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
And if you believe that, I’ve got a beautiful old bridge spanning the Chicago River I’d like to sell you.
Google has been saying something similar for 20 years whenever unmistakable proof of their bias is exposed. “It’s all science stuff that you wouldn’t understand so just go back to sleep. We’re not in the business of explaining ourselves to a bunch of yahoos.”
Google issued a statement after the MRC report was released that claims there is no issue with biased search results.
“This report is designed to mislead, testing uncommon search terms that people rarely use. Anyone who searches for these candidate names on Google can clearly see that their campaign websites rank at the top of results – in fact, all of these candidates currently rank in the top three and often in the first spot in Google Search results,” a Google spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
Perhaps they could explain “uncommon search terms” and what they consider to be “uncommon.” Regardless, the statement doesn’t explain why Democratic candidates are ranked so much higher in “uncommon” searches than Republicans.
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