Google Manipulated YouTube Search Results for Abortion, Maxine Waters & David Hogg.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai gave a sworn testimony to congress last month where he claimed that his company does not manipulate YouTube search results or any other search results for that matter.
But, an internal discussion thread was leaked to Breitbart News that shows Google regularly intervening in YouTube search results.
A recent intervention by the platform pushed pro-life videos out of the top ten search results for “abortion”.
The company holds a list of terms they consider “controversial YouTube queries,” and those terms then get “blacklisted”.
According to the leaked discussion, some of the terms on the blacklist relate to abortion, abortions, the Irish abortion referendum, Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and gun control activist David Hogg.
A source within the company, who wishes to remain anonymous, leaked the internal Google discussion thread to Breitbart.
“We have tons of white- and blacklists that humans manually curate,” said a Google site reliability engineer.“Hopefully this isn’t surprising or particularly controversial.”
The software engineer, who started the discussion thread out of concern, called the manipulation of “abortion” search results a “smoking gun.”
Via Breitbart:
At least one post in the discussion thread revealed the existence of a file called “youtube_controversial_query_blacklist,” which contains a list of YouTube search terms that Google manually curates. In addition to the terms “abortion,” “abortions,” “Maxine Waters,” and search terms related to the Irish abortion referendum, a Google software engineer noted that the blacklist includes search terms related to terrorist attacks. (the posts specifically mentions that the “Strasbourg terrorist attack” as being on the list).
“If you look at the other entries recently added to the youtube_controversial_query_blacklist(e.g., entries related to the Strasbourg terrorist attack), the addition of abortion seems…out-of-place,” wrote the software engineer, according to the source.
A left-wing journalist from Slate wrote about her disgust in the YouTube search results for “abortion,” saying that it was filled with “anti-abortion political misinformation” and that she was worried these videos would keep women from getting the “healthcare” that they “need.”
She contacted Youtube and after making her inquiry about the “extremist” views on abortion, the journalist noted that Youtube did change its search results to include more pro-abortion videos.