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Google and its Political Bias

Networks Blog Post

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/googles-bias-conservative-sites/316785/#close

In class, we went into depth about the use of in-links between hubs and authorities to rank websites. The recursive process demonstrated in class was logical and independent of the identity of any individual website, which then begs the question: why are search platforms accused of non-conservative biases? In this post, I will be exploring the process through which news sites are ranked on Google and reasons for the liberal-leaning slant the company appears to have.

Senator Cruz says that conservative sites are being flagged for hate speech, and President Trump has even tweeted:

“Facebook, Twitter and Google are so biased toward the Dems it is ridiculous! Twitter, in fact, has made it much more difficult for people to join @realDonaldTrump. They have removed many names & greatly slowed the level and speed of increase. They have acknowledged-done NOTHING!”

However, Google and similar search engines have an incentive to be unbiased. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 grants platforms immunity from the content that appears on their sites. Once search engines begin to censor information, they lose their title as platforms and become liable for any information that appears on their sites. Then why does Google provide more exposure to liberal media?

To better understand this, we must explore the process behind Google site rankings. First, a domain must apply to be part of Google News for it to even be considered as a legitimate news site. The guidelines for a domain to register are related to accuracy and not to ideology, so this does not filter out an websites based on its political views. Additionally, subdomains must also register and are not covered under parent domains.

Despite the lack of ideological segmentation in this step, the resulting pool of news websites that qualify to be present in Google’s News feed has a predominately liberal slant. According to research done by a team from the Computational Journalism at Northwestern University, of a sample size of 187 domains, 74.3% were liberal leaning, while only 25.7% were more conservative. When looking at subdomains, 62.4% have a liberal slant and only 11.3% have a conservative slant.

Therefore, Google has a liberally slanted pool of information to choose from, which would then be reflect in its search results. To remedy this issue and create a stronger conservative footprint in this pool, conservative websites need to register as news sources and register any subdomains they may have.

Apply for Google News allows websites to be present in the ranking system, but does not impact how a website is ranked. For a news page to make it to the organic search result page (versus Google News), it needs to maximize Google’s ranking factor criteria. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play. Such factors include:

  • How many links come to your site and are they quality links? (This was discussed in class)
  • How fast do your pages download?
  • Is your site ad-heavy?
  • Is your content optimized for your search queries?

These are factors that liberal and conservative websites alike can take into consideration when trying to optimize their rank. If Google even tried to create a factor that determined “liberalness,” conservative and liberal websites alike can modify their site structure to ensure a higher ranking score for that factor. For example, if Google decided to count the number of buzzwords related to “Obama” to determine political ideology, both conservative and liberal websites can increase the presence of the word on their websites to receive a higher rank.

Therefore, much of the bias that exists in Google comes not from Google itself, but from the website news pool, and can be resolved by having conservative domains optimize their websites to increase their rank in Google’s organic search.

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