Speaking of Google and politics, Julian Assange claims that Google has made a deal with Hillary Clinton and is backing her [0]. That's not far-fetched considering how intertwined Google and White House are. The Intercept has a really detailed analysis and a chart showing how Google and WH share so many lobbyists and executives [1]. Google wants to keep Democrats in the White House so they can continue their influence over various decisions and FTC (which squashed the investigation into Google's anticompetitive practices).
And just today, Google was accused of whitewashing Hillary Clinton's record and not showing negative autocomplete terms [2].
Google's "don't be evil" mantra is just a way to inoculate themselves from criticism. If anyone accuses them of anything unethical or evil or inappropriate, they can always claim how they are "not doing anything evil" because that's their policy. It becomes circular logic.
Assange has exposed Google's close ties to the State Department in the past as well. For example, give this NY Times article a read [3]. If you want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, Assange also published a book about his meeting with Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen of Google [4] and he published the complete transcript of their meeting. He also covered how Jared Cohen, formerly a State Department employee, was involved in regime changes around the world while at Google.
Assange also states that in 2015 former Google CEO Eric Schmidt launched “The Groundwork,” a startup specifically designed to get Clinton elected. [5]
Finally, Clinton's email release also confirmed that Google was involved in helping Syrian rebels who were trying to bring down the Syrian regime [6].
> And just today, Google was accused of whitewashing Hillary Clinton's record and not showing negative autocomplete terms.
That was a pretty silly accusation. It was mostly based on comparing Google autocomplete terms to Bing and Yahoo autocomplete terms. To show a pro-Clinton bias on the part of Google what you need to concentrate on is comparing Google autocomplete terms for Clinton searches to Google autocomplete terms for other people.
Do that experiment and you find that the kind of things that appear to be removed from Clinton autocomplete are also removed from the autocomplete of many other people, including many politicians, current and past celebrities, and criminals.
There is a good discussion of how Google tries to avoid autocompletes that could be seen as disparaging here [1].
"...Our Autocomplete algorithm will not show a predicted query that is offensive or disparaging when displayed in conjunction with a person’s name..."
So, I guess somebody at Google is deciding what is offensive or disparaging? And we shoulld trust that the standard is being applied equally to both parties, in spite of Google having a vested interest in the Democrats? OK, let's see.
There is a VERY VERY popular nickname for Secretary Clinton, "Crooked Hillary", which has been widely reported on, and is all over Twitter. So let's try:
"Crooked Hil" -> The final item in the list is "Crooked Hillary Bernie". Which makes no sense. Why not remove it entirely?
Now let's try Trump.
"Crooked Tru" -> First item on the list is "Crooked Trump". Which isn't even a meme or anything.
Politics is full of offensive and disparaging statements. By censoring those terms, Google is presenting a worse search product to the world.
On [2], the article you link to provides strong evidence for why Google isn't doing that, and if it was its not specifically for HRC but for just about any person. In other words, they're simply running search differently from Yahoo and Bing.
And just today, Google was accused of whitewashing Hillary Clinton's record and not showing negative autocomplete terms [2].
Google's "don't be evil" mantra is just a way to inoculate themselves from criticism. If anyone accuses them of anything unethical or evil or inappropriate, they can always claim how they are "not doing anything evil" because that's their policy. It becomes circular logic.
Assange has exposed Google's close ties to the State Department in the past as well. For example, give this NY Times article a read [3]. If you want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, Assange also published a book about his meeting with Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen of Google [4] and he published the complete transcript of their meeting. He also covered how Jared Cohen, formerly a State Department employee, was involved in regime changes around the world while at Google.
Assange also states that in 2015 former Google CEO Eric Schmidt launched “The Groundwork,” a startup specifically designed to get Clinton elected. [5]
Finally, Clinton's email release also confirmed that Google was involved in helping Syrian rebels who were trying to bring down the Syrian regime [6].
[0] http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/google-wor...
[1] https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-google-search-vi...
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banalit...
[4] https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
[5] http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/09/julian-assange-google-is-i...
[6] http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...