New Leak Reveals Google Manually Manipulates News Blacklist
New documents confirm that Google maintains and manually alters a news media blacklist that has targeted conservative outlets.
Two official policies called the "misrepresentation policy" and the "good neighbor policy" contribute to the company's "XPA news blacklist," maintained by Google's Trust & Safety team,
The Daily Caller's J. Arthur Bloom reported Tuesday. "T&S will be in charge of updating the blacklist when there is a demand," one of the documents reads.
Many search features use "the deceptive news domain blacklist" to filter out sites that violate the misrepresentation and good neighbor policies … It was approved by Ben Gomes, Google's head of search, Google Fellow Pandu Nayak, and software engineer Paul Haahr. Haahr is also involved in "fringe ranking: not showing fake news, hate speech, conspiracy theories, or science/medical/history denial unless we're sure that's what the user wants."
The blacklist aims "to bar the sites from surfacing in any Search feature or news product.” …
A memo about the deceptive news blacklist, last edited on December 3, 2018, describes how a site can be blacklisted … "The investigation of the watchlist is done in the tool Athena, the Ares manual review tool, and intakes signals from Search, Webspan, and Ares in order to complete reviews." …
the "manual review tool" … shows that Google employees manually alter the blacklist. … this contradicted Google CEO
Sundar Pichai's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on December 11: "This is working at scale, we don't manually intervene on any particular search result." …
a Google spokesperson responded … "Our Google News inclusion policies are publicly available online. They provide guidelines on content and behaviors for matters like sponsored content, deceptive practices, and more." "Sites that do not adhere to these policies are not eligible to appear on news surfaces or in information boxes in Search," the Google spokesperson added. "These policies do not impact the way these sites appear in organic blue-link Google Search results." …
This statement did not contradict the document Bloom had uncovered. Google does manually choose which websites go on the blacklist, and that blacklist does determine many Google Search results. It seems Google emphasizes the distinction between selecting sites on the blacklist and "manually intervening in any particular search result." …
As for the blacklist itself, it includes many conservative sites, including Gateway Pundit, Matt Walsh's blog, Gary North's blog "teapartyeconomist.com," Caroline Glick's website, Conservative Tribune, and the
American Spectator.