by WorldTribune Staff, August 31, 2018
President Donald Trump on Aug. 30 warned America’s tech giants, who have been termed “masters of the universe,” against censoring conservative voices.
“I’ve made it clear that we as a country cannot tolerate political censorship, blacklisting, and rigged search results,” Trump said in calling out companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter during a rally in Indiana.
“We will not let large corporations silence conservative voices,” he said.
Google employees have “confirmed the existence of blacklists at the company and persecution against conservatives,” Breitbart News reported last month, adding that “one campaign by left-wing employees at Google attempted to get Breitbart News removed from its AdSense platform.”
“Sharing even the most milquetoast neoconservative articles from the National Review can get you reported to Human Resources,” Breitbart said.
Dr. Robert Epstein spoke about different types of search manipulation at Breitbart’s townhall event “Masters of the Universe”.
Epstein detailed how influential the links in the top two results for a Google search are. Epstein explained: “It turns out that what’s at the top of the list, people believe is better and truer than what’s lower in the list, that’s why 50 percent of the clicks go to the top two items.”
Epstein continued, “so it turns out we showed in our studies that if you favor one candidate in search results, so maybe higher ranked results make that candidate look better, you click on it, it takes you to a webpage that makes that candidate look really good, if you favor one candidate in search results among voters who are undecided you can easily shift at least 20 percent of them towards that candidate, up to 80 percent.”
Trump on Aug. 30 suggested that such activities were un-American, reiterating the principle of free speech.
“We’re not going to let them control what we can and cannot see, read, and learn from, we can’t do that,” Trump said. “America is a free country and we’re going to stay always a free country.”
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