Moral Quandaries surrounding Google’s Vague Attempt to Filter Fake News
In April 2017, Google announced a new initiative called Project Owl, meant to combat the rise of fake news on their search engine results. According to the article linked below by Daisuke Wakabayashi of the New York Times, Google has received backlash from web page producers and technology specialists alike. Producers of web pages, especially controversial web pages, are complaining that there is no transparency in Google’s initiative to “provide ‘algorithmic updates to surface more authoritative content.’” Without knowing how Google plans to distinguish between authoritative and non-authoritative content, the creators of web pages both small and large are losing their own power over the way their web page is seen (or not seen) in online search results. Some technology specialists are also worried about Google’s tampering with search results, since the power is completely one-sided. Google’s employees write algorithms that decide what type of content deserves a mark of “fake news” and what doesn’t, but they most certainly do not have to stop there—they can control the search results related to any web pages that they do not agree with or any web pages on controversial topics.
In terms of moral liability, some claim Google is allowed to make its own decisions about its use of its proprietary search algorithm technologies. But, as a part of parent company Alphabet, Google is a public company, and some claim their stockholders also deserve to understand the decisions being made to filter search results. Through this decade, Google’s part in connecting the web as a network cannot be overlooked. Our lecture on the history of search engines as part of the web highlighted the importance of the interconnectivity of web pages on the internet through Google’s “crawling” through links on the web to create an index that it can consult to both decide how page ranking should occur and to keep pace with web content changes due to current events, for example. One key to this process is a user base that trusts the company and the results they receive—without trust, Google would not be able to hold its position as the most useful and popular search engine on the web, so it is imperative that both Google users and producers of web pages trust Google’s PageRank, redirection of searches, and overall intentions. When these aspects of Google’s intentions are questioned, as seen in this article, a moral debate begins to form, as is explored above.
nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-search-bias-claims.html