Perhaps still reeling from what's widely viewed as the bruising he
took in a debate watched by more than 80 million people on TV earlier this week
-- countless more online -- Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on
Wednesday opened a campaign rally with a previously discredited attack.
Trump began his speech at the Waukesha, Wisconsin, event by
touting an online Google poll that showed him up two points nationwide -- but
then followed that by saying Google's search engine was biased in favor of his
Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
Google was manipulating search results to suppress negative
stories about her, Trump claimed.
Trump did not elaborate on the basis for his accusation or
indicate whether his campaign had made any formal complaint about the issue.
Campaign officials did not respond to our request for further details.
Debunked
Conspiracy Theory
The allegation echoes a
conspiracy theory that surfaced after Clinton clinched the Democratic
nomination earlier this year. In brief, it accuses Google of meddling with its
autocomplete algorithm to prevent negative results from turning up in response
to searches of Hillary Clinton's name.
However, Google's autocomplete
feature is designed to avoid completing name searches with offensive or
inappropriate material regardless of who is the subject of the search,
explained Tamar Yehoshua, vice president of product management for Google
Search, in a post published in response to those charges.
Autocompletion is not an
exact science, and the output of prediction algorithms depends in part on the
popularity and freshness of search terms, Yehoshua wrote.
Those making the
accusations had suggested there was a conspiracy between the Clinton campaign
and Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google parent Alphabet and a supporter of
President Obama.
A Google spokeperson
declined to comment on Trump's W
Clinton campaign officials
did not respond to our request to comment for this story.
Difficult
to Pin Down
"Trump's accusation is so vague, it is hard to say just what
we are talking about, let alone whether it has any merit," Rick Edmonds,
media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, told the E-Commerce Times.
It is unlikely that an outside party can predict with any degree
of accuracy whether Google's algorithms are biased one way or the other,
suggested Kevin Krewell, principal analyst at Tirias Research.
Google's news aggregation service also is based on algorithms, as
are a great many online information services.
"It's impossible to make a definitive analysis of whether
Google's news feed has a bias against Donald Trump," Krewell told the
E-Commerce Times, "but Google's news feed is based on an algorithm which
likely weighs the relative importance of the sources.
The news algorithm, therefore, would favor widely read sources and
more reliable sources over smaller, less established niche sites.
Facebook
Brouhaha
A controversy over Facebook's alleged algorithm-tampering erupted
earlier this year, following publication of an inside story accusing staff of
manipulating its Trending Topics.
Human team members were curating the feed, according to the
report, downplaying certain information that came from politically conservative
outlets.
The company conducted an internal investigation and found no
systematic effort to manipulate trending topics. However, after sitting down
with a group of conservatives, including media pundits and officials, CEO Mark
Zuckerbergagreed to make several changes in how it compiled the
Trending Topics.
For example, Facebook ended the policy of relying on outside
websites or news outlets to determine whether stories were worthy of inclusion
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