As you know, Google has become a verb and is a synonym for “looking something up” online, but when so much of the world relies on a single source for accessing their information, there are inherent dangers of censorship and political favoritism regarding the massive amount of content they control. Beneath the surface of being “just a search engine,” Google has a very deep and far-reaching political agenda and their control over so much of the Internet and their ability to manipulate how billions of people see the world has dramatic implications.
Most people treat Google like a magic eight ball which answers any question they ask since it is literally as convenient as clicking a few keys (or today, using Okay Google or Siri voice recognition search systems) which most people blindly trust “tells the truth.” Because Google’s algorithms are considered trade secrets it’s difficult for most people to understand how they work or see how they favor certain people, issues, websites, and political viewpoints over others. But while it’s difficult, it’s not impossible. In this chapter we’ll take a look at some of the examples that researchers have discovered and the concerns they raise.
It’s also important to point out that people’s long-term memories are actually becoming atrophied and aren’t retaining information like they used to in the recent past since their brains don’t make it a priority to store a lot of information anymore because people can just “Google it.”607 It’s a cliché but true, that as computers got smarter, most people got dumber.
As the war against ‘fake news’ and ‘offensive’ content heated up after the 2016 presidential election, of course Google jumped on the bandwagon and used the moral panic as an excuse to expand their censorship under the disguise of this new moral crusade.
CEO Eric Schmidt said, “We’re very good at detecting what’s the most relevant and what’s the least relevant. It should be possible for computers to detect malicious, misleading and incorrect information and essentially have you not see it. We’re not arguing for censorship, we’re arguing just take it off the page, put it somewhere else… make it harder to find.”608
If you’re wondering where Schmidt’s political allegiance lies, he was with Barack Obama on election night in 2012,609 and “helped recruit talent, choose technology and coach the campaign manager,” Obama operative David Plouff admitted.610 And where was he on election night in 2016? He was at Hillary Clinton’s party, where he was photographed wearing a “staff” badge.611
The visitor logs during the Obama administration show that Google’s lobbyist had visited the White House 128 times between January of 2009 and October of 2015.612 That was more visits than lobbyists for Comcast, Verizon, Facebook, and Amazon combined.613 That same year Google spend $16 million dollars on lobbying, the most out of any tech company.614 Why would a search engine need to work so closely with the Obama administration?
Google’s secret algorithms determine which webpages will show up and in what order when someone looks something up. While you will get thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of results for any given topic, SEO (search engine optimization) experts have conducted studies which show that over 90% of people click on something that’s on the first page of those search results.615
If you sell things online, like every major retailer does◦— from Best Buy to Advance Auto Parts, or run a news site, you want your website to show up as one of the first results when someone searches for something relevant to your work. Having a first-page result is what makes or breaks many online businesses, and it’s entirely up to Google which pages will show up, in what order, or even if they’ll show up at all, no matter how relevant they are to your search.
“Google, Inc., isn’t just the world’s biggest purveyor of information; it is also the world’s biggest censor,” declared US News and World Report after a 2016 investigation.616 Their report highlights the little-known fact that Google has nine different blacklists (that we know of), and have created censorship tools for various repressive governments around the world to keep information hidden from their people no matter how detailed their searches are.617
Their report pointed out, “When Google’s employees or algorithms decide to block our access to information about a news item, political candidate or business, opinions and votes can shift, reputations can be ruined and businesses can crash and burn. Because online censorship is entirely unregulated at the moment, victims have little or no recourse when they have been harmed. Eventually, authorities will almost certainly have to step in, just as they did when credit bureaus were regulated in 1970.”618
Their report concludes that, “Google has rapidly become an essential in people’s lives◦— nearly as essential as air or water. We don’t let public utilities make arbitrary and secretive decisions about denying people services; we shouldn’t let Google do so either.”619
When you Google a person, on the right hand side of the page there are several boxes which usually include a photograph of them, along with a few sentences describing them using information taken from Wikipedia. If you lookup a product, it may give you the supposed satisfaction ratings along with some other information about it like the price. These “Knowledge Panels” were introduced in 2012, and as one writer pointed out, “materialize at random, as unsourced and absolute as if handed down by God.”620 They show results for almost anything you look up, from what the capital of a city is, to the best restaurant in town.
A researcher from the University of Technology in Austria pointed out that, “Google has become the main interface for our whole reality. To be precise: with the Google interface the user gets the impression that the search results imply a kind of totality. In fact, one only sees a small part of what one could see if one also integrates other research tools.”621
Google doesn’t just play favorites with the top search results; their control goes much deeper than that. An interesting example of Google admitting they are manipulating the search results can be found in what they call their Redirect Method, which they admit was implemented in 2016 when they created an algorithm to show search results of imams [Muslim religious leaders] denouncing ISIS along with videos of former extremists denouncing their past beliefs whenever someone was searching for ISIS related material.
“This came out of an observation that there’s a lot of online demand for ISIS material, but there are also a lot of credible organic voices online debunking their narratives,” said Yasmin Green, Google’s head of research and development. He went on to admit, “The Redirect Method is at its heart a targeted advertising campaign: Let’s take these individuals who are vulnerable to ISIS’ recruitment messaging and instead show them information that refutes it.”622
One specific example of this is a video showing long breadlines in Raqqa, the ISIS capital, which was chosen to come up as one of the top results when people search for certain travel routes to Syria. The idea is Google hopes to show potential ISIS fighters that the Islamic State isn’t the paradise they thought it might be, and are trying to put their curiosities to rest. The Redirect Method proves that Google is actively manipulating the search results in hopes of influencing the way people think and the actions they do or do not take as a result of their Google searches.