Google’s relationship to online extremism.

This weekend we’re bringing you a timely piece by The Guardian about Google’s relationship to online extremism.

The problem is that hate websites are, in effect, tricking Google’s search engine so that their propaganda shows up prominently in the results when users type in keywords like "Muslims," "Jews," "Hitler," and "women." And Google is failing to tackle the problem.

For example, in a Google search using the words “was Hitler bad?,” the top links are dominated by Holocaust denial sites.

The results are not pure chance. “[Google] keep[s] using this analogy that they’re like a card catalogue, but they’re really more like a card shark that can be gamed,” says Julia Powles, a Cambridge University researcher on technology and law. “It raises deeply disturbing issues about the democratic distribution of information.”

The question of what content Google promotes is particularly meaningful as the trial of Dylann Roof, who massacred nine African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, gets underway. By his own admission, Roof’s radicalization began on the search engine:

“[I] type[d] the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. … How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?”

The onus is on search engines like Google to provide a measure of quality control so that false propaganda is not elevated above factual information. But with no indication that Google plans to implement meaningful controls, the reality, as data scientist Cathy O’Neil put it, is that “we have replaced our guardians of information with algorithms that … can be toyed with and manipulated.”

As always, please let us know what you think, and feel free to share any pieces with us that you think might interest our audience.

Source SPLC