That wasn’t meant as an endorsement of Breitbart, to be sure. But parent raised the question of why people think this, and trust in media is a crucial point these days.
Breitbart articles discussing Google censorship aren’t radical alt-right preaching. You can strongly believe that Google is making informed and conscientious decisions about censorship and rankings on their platform, and then read a different perspective on Breitbart to understand the other viewpoint.
For example, in response to a question as to why when doing an image search on Google for “idiot” that Trump is the result (Currently he is 3 of the top 10 results. I mean, that is pretty funny actually) Sundar Pichai swore to Congress that Google does not manually intervene on any search result. Is that really credible?
Maybe it’s a little hard to quantify what is a “real” news site anymore. Some people assume this is self-evident, but I am skeptical of everything I read.
I sometimes find it entertaining to see what slant opinionated news sites will put on a story and compare it against the MSM.
These conspiratorial arguments that search engines are politically biased stems from technical illiteracy and/or a lack of critical thinking. The arguments are used as a distraction by certain people who want Americans to disregard any new information that may paint them in a negative light - and it is working on a subset of Americans.
That example was meant to be funny. That’s not to say there is not evidence of direct intervention in search rankings when the algorithm results were undesireable.
It’s beyond question that Google manually intervenes in Search results in some cases. That could be entirely innocuous or concerningly dubious. The question is exactly how, how often, and should they be accountable for it?
Real news sites post reported news. Breitbart digests news from real news sites. It's essentially a glamorized group blog, like Daily Kos. In fact, Breitbart is basically the right-wing version of Talking Points Memo, another group blog dressed up to look like a news site.
Fox News is a sharply right-wing news site with a very strong editorial bias. I don't like Fox News, but I can't argue that it doesn't belong in the same bracket as CNN. Breitbart does not.
No, I'll say that group blogs are a legitimate thing, and sometimes they get big-ticket interviews, and every once in awhile they even break a story. But that doesn't make them news organizations.
I'm not saying that sites like Breitbart should be buried (boycotts, though, seem fair game). I actually like Talking Points Memo every once in awhile. But I don't use blogs as my primary news source and Google shouldn't promote blogs as if they are.
Breitbart articles discussing Google censorship aren’t radical alt-right preaching. You can strongly believe that Google is making informed and conscientious decisions about censorship and rankings on their platform, and then read a different perspective on Breitbart to understand the other viewpoint.
For example, in response to a question as to why when doing an image search on Google for “idiot” that Trump is the result (Currently he is 3 of the top 10 results. I mean, that is pretty funny actually) Sundar Pichai swore to Congress that Google does not manually intervene on any search result. Is that really credible?
Maybe it’s a little hard to quantify what is a “real” news site anymore. Some people assume this is self-evident, but I am skeptical of everything I read.
I sometimes find it entertaining to see what slant opinionated news sites will put on a story and compare it against the MSM.