The Media Research Center’s war against Google for failing to spread right-wing propaganda continued in an Oct. 29 post by Tom Olohan:
A top Google executive made clear at a Wednesday hearing that the tech giant was proud of its censorship record. This admission may have dire implications for Big Tech’s ability to censor without consequences.
Markham Erickson, a government affairs executive at Google, repeatedly stated at a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation hearing that though the Biden administration had pressured Google to censor, the search giant had ultimately acted independently. Erickson also emphasized that Google had not admitted wrongdoing or made changes despite settling President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the company for censoring him in 2021.
Ultimately, Erickson did not blame the third-party actors for the rampant censorship, but said, “No matter how the information comes to us, we feel a responsibility and are proud of the way we handle those communications to make independent decisions.”
Olohan didn’t mention that Google is a private company and, thus, cannot “censor” anyone.
Olohan whined again in a Nov. 3 post:
Big Tech behemoths have gone to great lengths to promote Wikipedia. Now, Google has been busted actively suppressing an emerging competitor.
Following the launch of Grokipedia, X owner Elon Musk’s “AI-driven” online encyclopedia, Google Search offered an outrageous response to users searching for Musk’s creation: “Did you mean: Wikipedia?” Immediately below this, Google taunted users with the least impartial source possible: a Wikipedia article on Grokipedia.
Yes, Google made Wikipedia the authority on its competitor and its first search result.
And where did Google put Grokipedia? Google buried it on the third page of search results, behind yet another result for Wikipedia’s entry on Grokipedia.
Olohan offered no evidence that the Wikipedia entry on Grokipedia was in any way incorrect. And despite claiming that “Both Google and Wikipedia are infamous for consistently pushing a leftist agenda and ensuring right-of-center sources don’t see the light of day,” he never proved that anything in the entry was “leftist.”
Of course, we have to ask: Given the MRC’s history of touting pretty much everything Musk-related (except for the nudification feature in Grok AI), can we assume that its promotion of Grokipedia reflects its right-wing bias?
Gabriela Pariseau brought her own brand of whining to a Nov. 6 post:
Google News is the only major Big Tech news aggregator that consistently highlights Al Jazeera, a network so sympathetic to radicalism that MRC’s Dan Schneider refers to it as “Hamas News.”
Google propped up the leftist Qatari-funded media outlet Al Jazeera a staggering 15 times in recent weeks. MRC analysis found that Google News was the only major news aggregator that consistently included Al Jazeera. Google’s persistent promotion of Al Jazeera, a network known for its hostility towards Israel, serves as yet another example of the tech giant’s disdain for the Jewish state.
Schneider commented on Google’s pattern of radicalism. “Every scientific evaluation of the major AI platforms shows that they are all biased to the left. But Google seems desperate to win the gold medal for being the most radical of them all,” he said. “This is just the latest example of how it pushes its agenda. It is no wonder that several Congressional committees and regulatory agencies are investigating it.”
Pariseau cited no evidence Al Jazeera is “leftist,” just a couple of examples of it not following right-wing narratives on the Israel-Hamas conflict.