There's a new view growing in popularity among the literati: The search engine Google undermines democracy. "Google Search Is Quietly Damaging Democracy" read a recent headline in Wired, summarizing an article which claimed that Google's search results "mislead the public on issues of grave importance to sustaining our democracy." The article, written by a professor who has made similar claims before Senate subcommittees, echoed others along the same lines—as well as calls for action to combat Google's problematic nature. One organization wants suggested search results to be redirected to "counternarrative resources." Another threatened to organize advertiser boycotts unless Google follows their demands to ax links to their political foes.
But is Google really the biggest problem facing democracy? Or is the hysteria around Google's dangerous potential really just another manifestation of the more mundane fear of viewpoint diversity that seems to be a plague on our current cultural moment?
Google is a giant spreadsheet that maps keywords to websites and then, somewhat arbitrarily, sorts those websites by their relevance and reputation. Because this sorting is unscientific, sometimes Google searches can have inaccurate results.
Some of these inaccuracies are funny. In response to the question, "Who is the king of the United States?" Google once named Barack Obama in the snippet at the top of the search results. This happened because Google gave top ranking to a sarcastic Breitbart headline—"All Hail King Barack Obama, Emperor Of The United States Of America!"—which was obviously satire to anyone who clicked on the link. That irony was lost on the search engine.
In a way, it's a problem that stems from Google's efficiency. When people rely on the quickest answer to a question, rather than seeking out the best and most plausible answer, we are bound to have issues with sometimes reaching a wrong conclusion. No technology can be a substitute for critical thinking and common sense.
So what should Google do about a website ironically calling President Obama a king? If Google is a search engine, and someone searches for the phrase "King of the United States," surely Google should return results for that exact phrase, or close synonyms, without judgment. Do we really want our search engines analyzing content and hiding information deemed false, or offensive, or politically incorrect?
I know some people do want this. There is a view among some elites that the Internet has made information more accessible but less assessable. They see this as a dangerous escalation because all manner of supposedly unsavory individual, each convinced of the rightness of their fringe views, can now find comfort in knowing someone else believes they are correct. As military historian Robert Bateman condescendingly put it, "Once, every village had an idiot. It took the Internet to bring them all together."
And yet, the alternative that some academics want is not actually more democratic; it's illiberal and totalitarian: Because they believe people don't read past the first search result on Google, they want Google to be curating and censoring what it shows so that the top result agrees with them.
I feel differently. In a free society, everyone has the right to be disagreeable, but no one has the right not to be disagreed with. While I might myself disagree with the results that appear at times at the top of a Google search (the recipe for a French onion soup is a good case in point!), and while Google may sometimes veer away from facts, as in the case of King Obama, offensive material can be so easily ignored or countered by scrolling down a little further into the search results and clicking on those links which lead to intelligent commentary and free discussion.
There's a broader point to be made here: Content moderation on Google is not just about freedom of speech; it's about moderating people's access to information. Asking Google to get into the business of watering down its results has the real potential to result in people being prevented from having access to essential services, if you go too far.
There is a real conversation to be had around how Google and its monopoly over search shapes society in uncomfortable ways. If we had a plurality of truly functional search engines, it would perhaps be less problematic if some search engines answered calls from their users to go down the path of litigating what is right or wrong.
But we don't have a plurality of search engines. We really just have one: Google. And we don't need our only search engine censoring out speech that is supposedly vulgar or socially inappropriate.
Ayden Férdeline is a public interest technologist and a former technology policy fellow with the Mozilla Foundation. He researches how digital policy-making processes around the world can become more representative and inclusive. He is based in Berlin. Follow him on Twitter @ferdeline.
The views in this article are the writer's own.
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August 21, 2022 at 07:00PM
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