A large struggle in today's society is finding unbiased news or even basic information. There is no say in when this all happened but information is hard to be trusted from anywhere anymore. If a website or news show holds information because they do not agree with its perspective is in a way lying to your audience. Google is the largest used search tool that is used by millions of people worldwide every day. People trust Google to give them access to all information on any subject they search, not just one-sided pieces of information.
In the most recent presidential election of 2016, the search results on Google have been claimed to be biased. Google was in favor of Hillary Clinton and manipulated the views of people who wanted to learn about the election. One of the biggest issues that Dr. Robert Epstein (democrat, a supporter of Hillary Clinton) discovered was the “very dramatic bias in Google’s search results” after comparing it to Bing and Yahoo. The results were strongly in favor of Hillary Clinton and ended up swaying lots of votes during the election. This happened when people who were unsure of who to vote or just wanting information would go to Google for answers and the results would make one candidate appear extremely more positively than the other. Epstein researched after the election “that the level of bias was sufficient…to have shifted over time somewhere between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes to Hillary without anyone knowing that this had occurred”.
Some people might not understand the gravity of this. Google, being the biggest and most used search engine, should be a trusted place to find any sort of information. Having claimed to be an unbiased information source, Google has violated the First Amendment. While this protects the freedom of speech and of the press, if you claim to be unbiased, then you are obligated to do that. The freedom of speech allows you to advertise for something/someone freely, however, if you claim to be unbiased, then it is a violation of the first amendment. There is nothing wrong with supporting someone and advertising for them unless you are claimed as unbiased.
This could also be seen as poor communication for you are not fully satisfying your readers with the information they need. Thousands of people everyday use Google for basic information and if some of it is biased, then who is to know what is true or not.
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