Google’s Attempts to stop “Fake News,” and their effect on leftist media
https://www.salon.com/2017/10/18/fake-news-or-free-speech-is-google-cracking-down-on-left-media/
This article is about how leftist media sites like Democracy Now!, Alternet, the World Socialist Web, and others have had declines in search result traffic as a result of Google’s efforts to stop the spread of hate speech and “fake news.” After the 2016 election, many critics accused web entities like Google and Facebook of indiscriminately allowing biased and untruthful news sources to have equal footing with established and fact-based news organizations. The “fake news” sites were largely far-right and nationalist, but Google’s efforts to suppress the spread of inaccurate and unfactual news stories has also targeted left-leaning sources. Some see this as an unwitting mistake, while others see in it an effort to silence voices of dissent that are fact-based, but simply do not use the same rhetoric or present the same viewpoint as more “established” organizations like newspapers and TV channels.
This ties into what we have been learning about PageRank formulas and web search results. This article underlines the fact that PageRank is only part of a larger algorithm that determines which sites receive primary placement in web searches, since Google’s efforts to suppress some sites necessarily means that it is not placing the site strictly according to its PageRank. Rather, this article quotes a Google spokesperson who says that Google uses “PageRank, the specific words that appear on websites, the freshness of content, and your region” to determine the order of search results.
Since PageRank is not the absolute determinant of where a site is placed in the results for a web search, one obviously wonders how the order is determined. However, Google has refused to share the details of its algorithms for years, “citing competitive concerns and also worries that providing too much information would allow website producers and publishers to game its algorithms.” Overall, this article shows how the prioritization of web search results is a nearly incomprehensible system to normal users of the web; and this underscores what makes “fake news” possible: that users cannot differentiate between reliable and unreliable sources simply based on their position in search results.