Google accused of ‘left-wing bias’ as study finds JUST 11% of ‘Top Stories’ are from right-leaning news sites
GOOGLE has been accused of “left-wing bias” after a study found that the search engine was disproportionately promoting left-leaning news sites.
Academic research by two universities shows that right-wing news sites – like FOX News – were underrepresented on the search engine.
It appears to confirm what US conservatives have long suspected: Google’s systems unfairly endorse and promote left-wing news.
Journalism experts at Columbia University and Northwestern University investigated Google’s Top Stories box.
That’s the rail of news stories that appears at the top of your Google page when you search for a newsworthy topic, like Donald Trump or Brexit.
Researchers collected 6,302 unique links to news articles shown in the Top Stories box.
For each of the links, researchers counted an “article impression” each time one of those links appeared.
Just 20 news sources account for more than half of the article impressions, according to the research.
And the top 20% of sources (136 of 678) accounted for 86% of article impressions.
Importantly, the top three outlets – CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post – accounted for 23% of all impressions.
“These statistics underscore the degree of concentration of attention to a relatively narrow slice of news sources,” Diakopoulos, who worked on the study, explained.
The study also examined the “diversity of sources” in terms of their political leanings.
It used ratings data from an earlier study, which identified the “ideological alignment” of the 500 most-shared news sites on Facebook.
And the results appear to show a clear left-wing bias on Google.
“Our data shows that 62.4% of article impressions were from sources rated by that research as left-leaning,” a study author noted.
This is in contrast to just 11.3% of sources rated as right-leaning.
The study does note that more news appears to be “produced on the left” – by about 2.2x.
But in the study, left-leaning sources were 3.2x more frequent than right-leaning sources.
For instance, FOX News, which is the USA’s biggest right-leaning news site, only had 3% representation.
Google plays a huge part in delivering users to news websites.
Nearly 23% of all news traffic came from search engines, according to web-tracker Parse.ly.
It means Google is effectively a curator of the news – and is facing growing pressure to manage this role responsibly.
“Prior research has shown that search engines can affect users’ attitudes, shape opinions, alter perceptions and reinforce stereotypes, as well as affect how voters come to be informed during elections,” Diakopoulos said.
“As such, media diversity is an important aspect to the way that Google—or any news aggregator—curates sources and perspectives.”
The study also found that Google tends to focus on very timely content.
Around 83.5% of all articles were less than 24 hours old, and 13.1% were less than an hour old.
There is a steady drop-off in terms of impressions the older an article is.
In a statement, a Google spokesperson told The Sun: “We have no insight into the methodology these researchers used.
“Other researchers have found exactly the opposite.
“The fact is that like Google search and Google News, our top stories feature has absolutely no signal for a story’s political point of view, and simply reflects the overall corpus of news and information on the web.”
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Google is making efforts to become more inclusive, and recently added 53 gender-fluid emojis to its Android phones.
But the firm often faces controversy: last year it was accused of “spying” on your real-world movements.
And Google was even forced to apologise earlier this year, after it emerged that it hid a secret microphone in its home cameras, and “forgot” to tell everyone.
Do you think Google is biased? Let us know in the comments!
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