Trump Accuses Google of Burying Conservative News in Search Results

Whether or not the bias is intentional, this reminds me of the fairly recent accusations that claimed twitter was deliberatley preventing republican congressman from showing up on the front page. They said it wasn't deliberate, it was all done by an algorithm...that just happened to be written in a way that only flagged members of one political party.

Looking at the bigger picture, this may be a case of big tech companies not caring about political diversity while hiring, creating a cultural bias in their products. Just like the Usenix talk by the Harvard professor citing a study that facial recognition developed by a Japanese company had trouble recognizing non-asian faces, if a company's culture is mostly homogenous and leans heavily toward one end of the political spectrum, the developers could be adding an unconcsious bias to their algorithms that ranks people and websites at the other end of the political spectrum as untrustworthy or malicious. Normally political bias doesn't matter when it comes to products, a chair functions the same whether a liberal or conservative made it, but when the product is a list of relevant and trustworthy sites in response to a query, political bias can be very evident in the product.

An example I've seen of the news bias was shortly after Trump was elected, their was a covert raid on an Al Qaeda compound in Yemen. On CNN, the headline was something like "Trump authorizes covert raid that results in multiple Navy SEAL casualties." The Fox headline was something like "Trump authorizes covert raid of Al Qaeda stronghold that results in trove of intelligence data". Both are true, but the focus and tone of the articles was wildly different. If Google's algorithm results in only sites with a negative bias against Trump being pushed to the top of search results, I don't see why it shouldn't be investigated for the same reason that pro-Trump Russian influence is being investigated on social media sites. I think everyone can agree that covert meddling in politics, whether intentional or not, is a threat to democracy and fair elections.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentat...

The tweets in question:

> Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of....

>....results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!

> I think the poster's referring to the overrepresentation of black scientists in that result

I don't think there is any overrepresentation in the result set, though there does seem to be a small cluster at the top (the top 5 and 9 of the first 12, but then a sudden drought.)

I'll admit, that does seem a bit odd. Everyone else is playing dumb, but they're being disingenuous. From what I see, on both lists, there's only 1 white male in the first 10 results, and in both cases they're not in the top 5. It certainly looks like a curated list and they've gone out of their way to make sure there's representation for a wide array of people.

Is this bad? Should they have done something different? I don't know. I guess it comes down to what you expect when you search for those terms, who is searching for those terms, and if these lists have proven to be helpful to those searching for these terms.

The first ten inventors I see when I search for "US inventors" are:

Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel Morse, Eli Whitney, Nikola Tesla, George Washington Carver, Charles Goodyear, Lewis Howard Latimer, Henry Ford, George Eastman

... which does corroborate OP's "American inventors" hypothesis.