by WorldTribune Staff, August 28, 2018
Google search results are “rigged” in favor of “fake news,” President Donald Trump tweeted on Aug. 28.
Trump’s tweets appeared to be referencing a report by PJ Media by Paula Bolyard titled “96 Percent of Google Search Results for ‘Trump’ News Are from Liberal Media Outlets”.
“Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media,” the president tweeted. “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.”
Trump then asked if the search results were “illegal,” before elaborating: “96% of… results on ‘Trump News’ are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous.”
An AP report on the Trump attack said the president “cited no evidence for the claim” and repeated that point three times in the article.
However, AP cited the Bolyard study near the end of the article.
“Trump and some supporters have long accused Silicon Valley companies of being biased against them,” the AP report said. “But, while some company executives may lean liberal, they have long asserted that their products are without political bias, and indeed no such bias has been proven.”
Related: Conservatives charge social media ‘menace’ goes far beyond Alex Jones, Aug. 22, 2018
In the report, PJ Media’s Paula Bolyard described performing a Google search for “Trump” using the search engine’s “News” tab and analyzed the results using Sharyl Attkisson’s media bias chart.
“I expected to see some skewing of the results based on my extensive experience with Google, but I was not prepared for the blatant prioritization of left-leaning and anti-Trump media outlets,” Bolyard wrote. “Looking at the first page of search results, I discovered that CNN was the big winner, scoring two of the first ten results. Other left-leaning sites that appeared on the first page were CBS, The Atlantic, CNBC, The New Yorker, Politico, Reuters, and USA Today (the last two outlets on this list could arguably be considered more centrist than the others).”
Bolyard noted that no conservative-leaning sites appeared on the first page of search results.
“But it got much, much worse when I analyzed the first 100 items that Google returned in a search for news on ‘Trump,’ ” Bolyard wrote.
“CNN, by a wide margin, appeared most frequently, with nearly twice as many results returned as the second-place finisher, The Washington Post. Other left-leaning outlets also fared well, including NBC, CNBC, The Atlantic, and Politico. The only right-leaning sites to appear in the top 100 were The Wall Street Journal and Fox News with 3 and 2 results respectively.”
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