No, Big Tech Isn’t Silencing Conservatism
Conservative perspectives abound on Google—it just depends on how you search
Top tech executives testified on Capitol Hill this week regarding the role of foreign influence and liberal biases in how their products operate. Absent from the hearings was a senior executive from Google, which was notable given the president’s recent claims that Google “rigs” the results of its search engine, biasing results in favor of liberal outlets — what he describes as misinformation.
But based on a study I conducted on the sociological relationship between partisanship and news and information, I would argue that it’s profoundly problematic to lump together questions of foreign influence with an accusation that conservatism is being silenced. Doing so conflates a thwarted attack on the U.S. democratic process with anecdotal evidence that a political ideology is being coded out of the algorithmic design of Twitter, Facebook, and Google.
People believe Google is weighing facts instead of rank-ordering results that match the entered keywords.
Such confusion highlights one of the central findings of my recent study: that most of us don’t understand how Google works. We fail to realize the…
