this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2022
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So that's why Google made that hard turn to the right and started censoring leftist sources from their search results.
Think reddit is filled with them too and that is why they have gotten so crazy.
What did they censor? I can still find anything I want to tbh, I don't think they did censor anything. Even RT is still searchable last I did it this year after the war started
I only notice that US media has gotten better at SEO so that any research into propaganda has overlapping keywords with their headlines
Pretty much everytime something groundbreaking happens, Google manually adjusts the search results so that only the official narrative or the approved sources show up.
Yea I'm gonna have to not believe this unless there's evidence they manually adjust the search results
My extremely limited knowledge of how the search works tells me what probably happens is the official narrative and approved sources are by far the most popular websites in English and so obviously they'd show up first in the results
Also to manually adjust the search means there has to be some black box somewhere in the search code that's only viewable and modifiable by certain individuals, and if that was the cause, I feel like that info would've been talked about by Google employees on hacker news or team blind. That would've been a very big change that wouldn't go unnoticed by the eyes of hundreds if not thousands of engineers
I mean I just opened an incognito tab right now and googled "Uyghur genocide fake" and you know what was the very first result? An article from Ministry of Foreign Affairs dot Chinese Government explaining the propaganda
I believe it's just smart SEO by the propaganda sites. For example, for the longest time Palestine was commonly called an "open air prison" by Western media. When this issue got popular again sometime last year, all the Uyghur genocide news stories suddenly started using "open air prison" to describe Xinjiang. This effectively hides the Palestine news if you only search that phrase because the Uyghur stories are much newer than the Palestine ones, so it's search ranking is a lot higher
It's been a topic of contention for years now. They were first found to be doing it to favor businesses that use their advertising a while ago. Now they're being found doing other stuff. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-manipulates-search-results-report-2019-11
It says they censor autocomplete for sensitive topics like abortion, guns, and their blacklist includes "... sites as required by U.S. or foreign law, such as those featuring child abuse or with copyright infringement"
Look, I know Google is obviously a US state arm but the claim that they "started censoring leftist sources" is incorrect if I can still search and access the entirety of the Chinese intranet, Cuba intranet, Wikileaks, GrayZone, RT, ML/conspiracy social media figures etc.
I know YouTube has censored many videos of Uyghur families debunking the propaganda and has tons of bullshit state funded channel warnings but Google Search is seemingly clean for now (for whatever reason)