> But I wonder if Goog wasn't a majority "blue" company would he aggressively go after them.
"Majority blue" is in a majority of their employees vote Democrat? That's just what happens when you're headquartered in California, in a metro area, with a workforce that skews younger.
I don't think that Google is somehow pushing liberal objectives in a meaningful way.
Google checks all of the boxes to be an enemy of conservatives in America’s current culture war, even if they have no particular interest in fighting a culture war. Previously they could have relied on protection from the faction of the conservative movement that defaulted to respecting large successful American businesses, but that faction has been seriously weakened. Ever since Google fired James Damore for writing an anti-diversity memo conservatives have been out for blood.
> I don't think that Google is somehow pushing liberal objectives in a meaningful way.
But true or not, it is perceived that way by those who are aggrieved (social conservatives in the USA)... which is what your comment's parent was discussing.
I'm not disagreeing with your comment, but you aren't disagreeing with your parent comment either.
Google consistently makes headlines for culture war stuff from the blue side, it's the perfect foil for Trump.
It doesn't matter if they're biasing search results or not, that's complicated anyways, highly visible culture war stuff is what his audience is primed for.
Google also controls Youtube - an important political battleground. Conservatives have been overtly critical of "censorship" and critical of social media "deplatforming" of certain personalities (on the political right). Expect this consideration to be in the minds of YouTube & Google executives as they navigate this political minefield, intended or not.
A study showed that Google News returned links to CNN vastly more often than links to Fox News, even though Fox News has triple the market share of CNN.
> How else to explain why Google has restricted more than half of our 15 videos that are pro-Israel—even one by former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper?
Google may or may not be doing this intentionally; it may be some byproduct of the algorithm plus unconscious bias from left-leaning Googlers. But the result definitely pushes liberal objectives. Your typical Googler reviewing YouTube videos living somewhere like San Francisco simply isn’t equipped to figure out what is and isn’t within the mainstream of acceptability.
Might be based on user preference influencing weighting for search results. I've know I've personally done all I can to block Fox News and other low quality sources from Google News.
Or, it just the people doing the algorithm decided to rank Fox News lower than others. I have noticed that Fox news is showing up more on Google Top News RSS feed after commotion started to be made.
And, come on man. Seriously, every news network except Fox News for the past almost 3 years pushed the Russian collusion narrative and it's turning out to be almost the exact opposite. So, you really need to rethink what you view as quality news. I'm not saying that I think Fox News is the best quality, prefer Bloomberg to be honest.
Just because you don't agree with political ideology of a news network doesn't mean it's low quality.
Fox News is by a large margin the #1 cable news network. If search results were weighted based on user preferences you’d expect it to show up more, not less.
There might be less overlap between people who passively leave their TV running on Fox News and people looking up articles on the internet than you think. It's ranked #21 in News and Media sites[1]. CNN is ranked ninth, so actually it'd be pretty questionable if Fox News were returned in search results more than CNN.
Why is that the correct metric to use? CNN is a global news outlet, while Fox is primarily domestic. Unsurprisingly, CNN ranks highly on a measure of global website visits. What does that have to do with preferences in the US?
I mean, one possibility is that Google’s algorithms are causing the politics of web site visitors people in France to affect the search results of people in Kansas. That seems like an unintentional form of pressing liberal agendas.
You can drill down into US traffic, sure (and I'm sure Google delivers results that are ranked appropriate to region), but Fox still doesn't win there - it's beaten by Huffington Post, CNN, Google News, and Yahoo News.
Note that "cable news network" is an important qualifier in that statement. The network newscasts (ABC, CBS, NBC) each see 3x Fox's news programming viewership.
"Majority blue" is in a majority of their employees vote Democrat? That's just what happens when you're headquartered in California, in a metro area, with a workforce that skews younger.
I don't think that Google is somehow pushing liberal objectives in a meaningful way.