Since I am not remotely tech-savvy I have no idea how to get Google News to carry Booman Tribune articles. But a lot of sites have figured it out, including some of the most odious Republican blog communities. According to an article by NewsBusters Google News has recently begun a purge of right-wing sites that exhibit what they consider hate speech. In the examples cited, the offense is always the same: articles about Islam and its relationship to terrorism. I have no doubt, having read some of the sites effected, that Google had good reasons to consider the articles hate speech. But I do wonder whether Google can craft a responsible policy that filters out certain types of speech without it becoming an arbitrator of political correctness. As Newsbusters points out:
According to the April 2006 Nielsen/NetRatings report, 49 percent of all searches conducted in the U.S. in March 2006 were carried out on Google. This is an astounding market share that continues to grow.
In addition, a recent study by Hitwise ranked Google News as the fifth most visited news website behind Yahoo, the Weather Channel, MSNBC, and CNN, clearly making it a growing force in news aggregation.
This penetration has given the company unprecedented influence on society. Appearing on the first page of any word search result list all but assures higher hit rates, which equates to higher revenues for e-tailers as well as brick and mortar retailers using the web to drive traffic, and more reads for news and opinion providers.
Part of the point of the Google News software is that it relies on algorithms to collect its news rather than editorial judgment. The hope is that the final product (what you see when you do a news search) will be completely unbiased. Of course, that doesn’t work if they filter out content of a certain type at the outset. In this case, they are filtering out speech that denigrates Islam and Muslims. I have two concerns with that. First, no religion should be safe from criticism or critique. Where does Google draw the line? And second, tomorrow they may decide to ban some other type of speech.
This isn’t exactly a free speech issue, as Google is under no compulsion to feature anyone’s writing in their news crawl. It’s more of a opening for a conversation about the power of Google to frame the parameters of debate. And also, how do I get them to list our stuff?
