The Chief Executive Officer and Founder of WebiMax, Ken Wisnefski, says the President Donald Trump’s statement accusing Google of showing bias in their search results is a reflection of an on-going debate on Google’s power and their ability to manipulate search results based on political or competitive influence.
The United State of America’s President had tweeted, accusing Google of always playing negative news about him. The tweet read, “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,” he added. “Google & others are suppressed voices of Conservatives.”
But Wisnefski in a press statement circulated through email by Andrew Schetter explained that Google uses a series of automated programs or “spiders” to crawl the Internet and index pages based off of keywords and other factors. He also noted that there has always been the notion that some of these core algorithmic features could be overridden in certain situations to promote or suppress content based on Google’s hierarchy personal viewpoints.
“Much of my career has been based around the prominence of search results. Google has gone from a brand to a verb. Everyone “Googles” information all the time. It’s not unheard of to think that for specific hot topic areas, especially President Trump, that Google may indeed try to promote more negative than positive. It’s a high visibility subject matter and in turn, the results that are provided can ultimately impact the public’s opinion on such topics,” Wisnefski continued.
According to Wisnefski, President Trump’s every move is covered so closely by both left-leaning and right-leaning publications that he is bound to see his name appear number one for different searches on different sites but admittedly, there seems to be an undertone of more negative commentary that exists
The American public has become warier of social media and search engines than ever since the wake of the 2016 election and the notion of content trying to manipulate public views is at the forefront. Google was fined a record $5 billion by the EU for Android antitrust violations. This was a conscious effort on Google’s part to promote aspects that were beneficial to Google over other options.