Whether or not the bias is intentional, this reminds me of the fairly recent accusations that claimed twitter was deliberatley preventing republican congressman

Whether or not the bias is intentional, this reminds me of the fairly recent accusations that claimed twitter was deliberatley preventing republican congressman from showing up on the front page. They said it wasn't deliberate, it was all done by an algorithm...that just happened to be written in a way that only flagged members of one political party. Looking at the bigger picture, this may be a case of big tech companies not caring about political diversity while hiring, creating a cultural bias in their products. Just like the Usenix talk by the Harvard professor citing a study that facial recognition developed by a Japanese company had trouble recognizing non-asian faces, if a company's culture is mostly homogenous and leans heavily toward one end of the political spectrum, the developers could be adding an unconcsious bias to their algorithms that ranks people and websites at the other end of the political spectrum as untrustworthy or malicious. Normally political bias doesn't matter when it comes to products, a chair functions the same whether a liberal or conservative made it, but when the product is a list of relevant and trustworthy sites in response to a query, political bias can be very evident in the product. An example I've seen of the news bias was shortly after Trump was elected, their was a covert raid on an Al Qaeda compound in Yemen. On CNN, the headline was something like "Trump authorizes covert raid that results in multiple Navy SEAL casualties." The Fox headline was something like "Trump authorizes covert raid of Al Qaeda stronghold that results in trove of intelligence data". Both are true, but the focus and tone of the articles was wildly different. If Google's algorithm results in only sites with a negative bias against Trump being pushed to the top of search results, I don't see why it shouldn't be investigated for the same reason that pro-Trump Russian influence is being investigated on social media sites. I think everyone can agree that covert meddling in politics, whether intentional or not, is a threat to democracy and fair elections. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentation/mickens https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentat...