If you Google “ did the Holocaust happen ” the first upshot is a liaison from Stormfront.org , a neo - Nazi and white supremacist forum that ’s widelyregardedas the internet ’s “ first major hate internet site . ”
That ’s troubling for sure , but Google ’s reply was far more concerning . Google toldFortunethat the companionship is “ saddened to see that hate system still exist , ” but it does “ not remove content from [ its ] search outcome , except in very limited cases such as illegal depicted object , malware and violation of our webmaster guideline . ” The Google spokesperson made trusted to add up , “ The fact that hate sites seem in Search results does not mean that Google endorses these perspective . ”
Titled “ Top 10 grounds why the holocaust did n’t happen , ” the first post on the meeting place ask other Stormfront penis to help oneself the original poster occur up with reasons the Holocaust did not happen so he can “ give a expert arguing . ” People on the message board claim things like “ no tons of human remains were ever find ” and “ Auswitcz [ sic ] was a place where synthentic rubber was being produced and U.S. intelligence agency was focused on Auswitcz for that reasonableness . No U.S. intelligence composition ever give any denotation of tout or aggregate liquidation . ” For the record book , this is all shit . The Holocaust happen .
In an epoch where misinformation runs rearing online , Google ’s refusal to modify these lookup result is distressing , though not unexpected . ( Facebookhasbeenexperiencingsimilarissues ! ) In Steven Levy ’s account of Google , In the Plex , he recounts when Sergey Brin ’s battle with a similar take in 2004 . He called alter the results “ bad engineering practice . ” But what happen when an uneducated person stress to look up facts and Google give suck them into an online forum spirt cabal possibility ?
In a 2008 interview with Yair Lapid , the Israeli political leader expect Brin about an anti - semitic website called “ Jew Watch ” which used to pop up when you google “ Jew . ”
“ An authoritative part of our value as a company is that we do n’t edit the search results , ” Brin state . “ What our algorithms farm , whether we like it or not , are the search solution . I think people require to know we have unbiased search results . ”
Google is a fomite through which multitude get selective information , but does the party have any responsibleness to encourage the right info ? While Google might not want to mess up with the result for “ did the Holocaust happen ” or “ Jew,”a FTC investigationpublished in 2015 by the Wall Street Journal revealed that Google “ manipulated hunt effect to favor its own services over rivals ’ , even when they were n’t most relevant for users . ”
https://gizmodo.com/the-european-commission-has-issued-google-with-antitrus-1771989279
While the source of the FTC report did not recommend taking legal action at the time , Google might soon again find itself in raging water . In May of this year , Politicoreportedthe FTC might be reopen its antitrust investigation because of concerns about “ Google ’s dealing over Android . ”
Since Google seems cool with altering its search results to gain the company , surely it can also demote the ranking of a hateful website that push prevarication .
[ Fortune ]
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