Google’s search engine is being accused of no longer giving neutral search suggestions when it comes to the Black Lives Matter movement. It is worth noting that other search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are returning all sorts of search suggestions, both positive and negative. Google, however, is not displaying any negative search results and is only showing the term “BLM israel” if one searches for the term “BLM is.”
Considering the fact that the Black Lives Matters movement is widely discussed across the world, searching for the phrase “BLM is” should have generally displayed a wide number of suggestions, as it does on other search engines. Yet, searching for the phrase “black lives matter is” in particular, returns positive search suggestions only, a stark contrast to the other search engines.
On DuckDuckGo, searching for the phrase “BLM is” has been returning mixed results; some positive and some negative.
Based on what Breitbart News reported, it was found that Google at one time displayed an unbiased and neutral set of search suggestions much like DuckDuckGo or Bing. But those suggestions seem to have disappeared out-of-the-blue.
Google has followed a similar pattern back in the 2016 US presidential election as it did not show any negative search suggestions for the then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. It is also worth noting that they returned negative search suggestions for candidates such as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
When this happened, Google defended itself by saying that its “Autocomplete algorithm will not show a predicted query that is offensive or disparaging when displayed in conjunction with a person’s name.”
Google simply said that it has systems in place to ensure that “potentially policy-violating predictions.”
“Autocomplete is a feature that saves you time by predicting the query you may be typing, and we have systems in place to prevent potentially policy-violating predictions from appearing. Whether or not a prediction appears, you can still search for whatever you want on Google. We don’t and would never modify our products or enforce our policies in any way to promote or disadvantage any particular political ideology, viewpoint or candidate,” said a spokesperson for Google.
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