In the midst of the Tuesday fury over allegations that Google News uses a biased algorithm that results in far fewer links to conservative news sites, the top story on Google News was a CNN article defending Google News.
You can’t make this stuff up, people.
When readers went into Google, clicked “news,” then clicked “top stories” in the U.S., the No. 1 link was a CNN article headlined “Trump slams Google search as ‘rigged’ — but it’s not.”
The piece lays out what President Trump has said about reports of Google bias, then provides a platform for the search engine to deny, deny, deny.
“Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology,” a Google spokesperson told CNN. “We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”
The hilarity came after PJ Media conducted an informal study on Monday and found that liberal news outlets appear in Google News search results far more frequently than conservative outlets, which are often completely missing. When searching “Trump,” for instance, CNN had “nearly twice as many results returned as the second-place finisher, the Washington Post.”
“Other left-leaning outlets also fared well, including NBC, CNBC, The Atlantic, and Politico,” PJ Media reported, adding that the “only right-leaning sites to appear in the top 100 were The Wall Street Journal and Fox News with 3 and 2 results respectively.”
After the PJ Media story emerged, Trump got in on the act, writing on Twitter: “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,” the president proclaimed. “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.”
Later on Tuesday, Trump warned Google, Facebook and Twitter, saying the social platforms are “treading on very, very troubled territory and they have to be careful.”
“Google has really taken advantage of a lot of people and I think that’s a very serious thing and it’s a very serious charge,” Trump told reporters after a meeting with the president of FIFA. “They better be careful because they can’t do that to people.”