SALT LAKE CITY — When you conduct a Google search for “Donald Trump” or “Breitbart News” or “abortion,” what comes up?
If you’re a conservative, you might not like what you see, according to Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee and others who contend that Google, the most used search engine in the world, deliberately hides conservative viewpoints and websites.
Their complaint isn’t new. President Donald Trump and his staff accused Google of bias before he was elected, prompting one technology blog to investigate why “Crooked Hillary” — Trump’s nickname for Hillary Clinton — wouldn’t appear at the top of the screen in a Google search five months before the election.
But with Google and other technology companies under heightened scrutiny by the Justice Department, Lee and other critics are newly emboldened in their accusations against the company that is reported to process more than 5 billion searches each day.
In an Aug. 6 letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Lee, along with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., pushed back on Pichai’s recent testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, when he said Google doesn’t manipulate search results and doing so would go against the company’s “core values.”
Lee and Johnson remain skeptical, saying, “Unfortunately, for you and the democratic discourse in this country, there are numerous examples to support that the contrary is occurring.”
Those examples, the senators said, include leaked video and emails that show Google executives’ dismay at Trump’s election, recent reported difficulties in trying to reach conservative websites, and a 2015 study co-authored by Robert Epstein, one of Google’s most prolific critics.
In testimony before Congress, Epstein said he believes Google may have influenced the result of up to a quarter of national elections worldwide since 2015 because “many races are very close and because Google’s persuasive technologies are very powerful.”
Lee and Johnson put six questions to Google in their letter and asked for a response by Thursday, Aug. 20. It’s unclear if their efforts are related to ongoing antitrust investigations regarding Google and other tech giants, which are bipartisan. In a July 30 letter, Lee also posed questions on bias and market power to the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Squarespace, as well as Google.
But even if Google executives are personally biased against conservatives, some industry experts doubt that the bias affects your internet search. Here’s why.
Magic algorithms?
On Twitter recently, Epstein, a San Diego psychologist who holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, displayed a Google search return that he believes shows Google’s bias. When he typed “Trump is,” the first two suggestions were “Trump is losing” and “Trump is losing election.”
When a reporter for the Deseret News conducted the same search, however, the first suggestion Google gave was “Trump is winning 2020.”
That said, if you’re a conservative looking for search returns that suggest bias, it doesn’t take long.
The top result on a recent search with the word “abortion” was Planned Parenthood, and none of Google’s top suggestions led to articles or websites opposing abortion, although nearly as many Americans are opposed to abortion (46%) are those who support its availability (48%), according to the most recent polling from Gallup.
Epstein has said he is not a conservative but worries about Google’s effects on democracy.
But Dr. Francesca Tripodi, a sociologist who studies search engines, recently testified before Congress that seemingly biased results are more likely the result of the words we enter.
“We think of algorithms as magic, but what is happening is very simple. Google transforms our input, key words, into a value — content that best matches what Google believes is the most relevant match, directions, videos, news, et cetera,” said Tripodi, an assistant professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a senior researcher at the Center for Information Technology and Public Life.
Google’s tracking of its users is well documented; it makes money from ads tailored to its users. And while exactly how its search engine works is a closely held secret, the company says the relevance and usability of websites, combined with the “quality of content” and its timeliness, are among factors that influence what shows up on your screen.
But it’s not just Google algorithms at play, Tripodi said. The internet is full of companies trying to get our attention through a practice called “search engine optimization” —embedding content with words and phrases that are most likely to get the attention of Google and other search engines.
In trying to get the widest possible exposure, some conservative websites might include words that seem incongruous, such as “liberal” or “social justice,” Tripodi said. She cited videos on PragerU, a sort of TED Talk channel for conservatives, cofounded by talk radio host and author Dennis Prager.
Social justice tends to be a progressive concern, but the term is “being leveraged within the right-wing media ecosystem to elevate their content even if the content is challenging the very notion of what they’re trying to discuss,” Tripodi said. That might make content less likely to show up when a conservative searches for it using other, more predictable terms.
A preference for virility
Tripodi told lawmakers she believes there are essentially “parallel internets driven by distinct worldviews.”
“We think of Google as a window into the wider world. It’s more like a mirror that reflects our own interests and biases back to us,” she said.
That’s also the view of Stephen Levy, editor at large at Wired magazine and author of the 2011 book on Google, “In the Plex,” and “Facebook, The Inside Story.”
“There is no evidence whatsoever that what (Lee) is implying is taking place, that the algorithm or people at Google are saying, ‘This is a conservative publication, a conservative thought, let’s downgrade this’,” Levy said.
Nevertheless, Google, Facebook and other internet giants are working to crack down on misinformation, Levy said. “The way Google works, if a lot of credible sources don’t link to something, it won’t be deemed as credible. The population deems what’s credible, and that’s what rises in search engines.”
A study done by The Economist made a similar conclusion.
Researchers for the magazine conducted Google searches for 31 terms in 2018, using a browser with no search history “in a politically centrist part of Kansas.” The searches resulted in 175,000 links, with no obvious partisan bias.
“If Google favored liberals, left-wing sites would appear more often than our model predicted, and right-wing ones less. We saw no such trend. Overall, center-left sites like The New York Times got the most links — but only about as many as our model suggested. Fox News beat its modest expectations. Because most far-right outlets had bad trust scores, they got few search results. But so did Daily Kos, a far-left site.”
The Economist concluded that Google’s bias is not partisan, but prefers “to boost viral articles.”
“The most incendiary stories about Mr. Trump come from leftist sources. Gory crime coverage is more prevalent on right-leaning sites. Readers will keep clicking on both,” the report said.
But conservatives who read about an email purportedly sent by Eliana Murillo, then a Google department head, might understandably have hard time believing that code written at Google isn’t partisan.
As Tucker Carlson of Fox News, and later Breitbart News and the Washington Examiner, reported, an email was circulated at Google that those outlets said implied that the company worked to turn out the Latino vote in hopes of electing Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.
“We emphasized our mission to give Latinos access to information so that they can make an informed decision at the polls, and we feel very grateful for all the support to do this important work,” Murillo wrote, “A large percentage of Latino voters in Florida were new voters who had become citizens just in time to vote. We saw high traffic for the search queries ‘votar,’ ‘como votar,’ and ‘donde voter,’ in key states like Florida and Nevada.”
Conservatives also point to a leaked video in which Google executives bemoaned the election of Trump, with Google co-founder Sergey Brin saying he was “deeply offended” by the vote.
However, Murillo, who is no longer with Google, also wrote in her email, “We kept our Google efforts nonpartisan and followed our company’s protocols for the elections strategy.” That’s in keeping with Pichai’s testimony that the company isn’t partisan because it would violate its core values, which include “You can make money without doing evil.”
If conservatives eventually prove that Google executives were lying, and the company did promote a partisan agenda, it leads to another problem with no easy solution: What then?
“Even if the fears that aren’t backed up by evidence are true, the government has no business intervening in a decision like that,” Levy said. “It would be like saying, ‘Hey, Fox News, you’re boosting this conservative opinion, the government should look into this and make you be balanced.”
And although Tripoldi doesn’t believe conservative bias is a problem at Google, she does believe that people of all political leanings ought to be interested in how Google and other tech giants dominate the marketplace. She said she finds it disheartening that so much of recent testimony has revolved around conservative bias.
“The idea that Google controls too much of the market should be a bipartisan concern,” she said, adding, “Whenever you have a small number of firms controlling how a large percentage of how people access news and information, that is indeed worth investigative inquiry.”