Google Employees Discussed Tweaking Search Results To Counter Trump's Travel Ban (wsj.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Days after the Trump administration instituted a controversial travel ban in January 2017, Google employees discussed how they could tweak the company's search-related functions (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) to show users how to contribute to pro-immigration organizations and contact lawmakers and government agencies, according to internal company emails. The email traffic, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, shows that employees proposed ways to "leverage" search functions and take steps to counter what they considered to be "islamophobic, algorithmically biased results from search terms 'Islam', 'Muslim', 'Iran', etc." and "prejudiced, algorithmically biased search results from search terms `Mexico', `Hispanic', `Latino', etc." The email chain, while sprinkled with cautionary notes about engaging in political activity, suggests employees considered ways to harness the company's vast influence on the internet in response to the travel ban. Google said none of the ideas discussed were implemented. "These emails were just a brainstorm of ideas, none of which were ever implemented," a company spokeswoman said in a statement. "Google has never manipulated its search results or modified any of its products to promote a particular political ideology -- not in the current campaign season, not during the 2016 election, and not in the aftermath of President Trump's executive order on immigration. Our processes and policies would not have allowed for any manipulation of search results to promote political ideologies."

Comments

Google's problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Google needs to realize that by moving away from a neutral platform to one that is politically biased that they have lost the public trust. Not all of the public yet, but enough that people are talking about, even those that are not political. Whether it's here on Slashdot, at work or at the dinner table people are talking about Google's bias, even in liberal states.

Google needs to damage control and it's going to take more than claims of not being biased to do it. Google needs to come clean about past bias, remove the SJW weighting and be honest with people about what they did. Nothing less than a full mea culpa is going to work at this point.

They can claim they aren't biased all day long, but people keep seeing (and not seeing) the same results. Nothing has changed. When Google declined congresses invitation it showed a lot of people a company that is that is arrogant and completely out of touch with the average American.

As it is right now, your starting to see a lot of people who are looking at Google and declaring that their monopoly is overdue for antitrust action. This is starting to become much more prevalent in conservative media which has traditionally stood against antitrust actions.

Re:Google's problem

[davecb]

The cited discussions suggest that the majority, and even the management, was against political bias. I'm constantly surprised that companies (like mine!) succeed in actually discussing both sides of questions instead of jumping in on one side and firing anyone who disagrees.

I once had an ex-CTO that wanted to do evil as a matter of policy. He still gives me nightmares (;-))

Re:Non-story

[NaCh0]

Management? More like the PR department said they didn't do it.

The social justice engineers probably still did it because everyone knows certain keywords get tuned by hand. Google has become a company whose denials have to be read with the same skepticism given to a lawyer/politician's statement. The specific carve outs and what is not said is as important as what they have told you.