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Does Google have a ranking bias against conservatives?

Source: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/06/08/google-rewards-reputable-reporting-not-left-wing-politics

Conservative pundits have long asserted that Google’s searching algorithm has a liberal skew that disadvantages right-wing consumers, but is that true? By analyzing how web search is conducted and the way pages get ranked one can easily see that Google’s bias skews towards credible sources more than it skews against conservative news. So how exactly does Google determine if a source is credible?

Without knowing the exact algorithm, we can generalize a credible website is both a good hub and and has a high hub score. If authorities are considered sources, then an article that draws on multiple sources is more likely to be credible than an article with few or no sources. In addition; if those sources are also referenced by other websites, the credibility of the sources increase which in turn increases the credibility of the websites referencing the sources. This definition of credibility devalues both extreme right-wing and left-wing websites since news articles from extremists websites are more likely to be fueled by emotions rather than facts.

The definition however, is not perfect. Incorrect news that gets spread by many people, like what happened with Facebook and the 2016 election, can appear credible even if it is not. An algorithm whose only judging criteria for credibility is the hub score is incapable of detecting wildly shared yet false information. Facebook’s attempt to correct for this problem was simply to hire people to manually fact-check potentially fraudulent sources, but that backfired when the people themselves were accused of having a bias.

So is bias an unsolvable inevitability? A basic definition of credibility is insufficient, but the addition of Pinski and Narin’s citation analysis could fill in the gaps. By weighing certain sources, journalistic and scientific, heavier than others, you could influence the hub score to reflect a source that was validated vs one that was just widely shared.

By applying the topics of link analysis and web search, Google’s search algorithm can be generalized and studied to show that the search giant does not exhibit anti-conservative prejudice.

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