US

Google Employees Sought To Manipulate Search Results To Fight Trump’s Travel Ban: Report

Google icon (By J maroon5 2308 - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43555168)

• Google employees sought to manipulate search results to fight President Donald Trump’s travel ban, according to a report.
• Google employees brainstormed ways to tweak search results on topics including “Islam” and “Iran.”
• The tech giant claims the ideas for manipulation were never implemented.

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s travel ban, Google employees reportedly discussed ways to manipulate search results in order to push back against the president’s order.

That’s according to a report from Fox News host and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson, who obtained emails showing the internal Google discussions about manipulating search results.

“Shortly after taking office, President Trump issued his now famous travel ban. Almost immediately, Google employees began plotting ways to undermine the president’s executive order,” Carlson reported.

A Google product marketing manager named Mackenzie Thomas on Jan. 29, 2017, sent an email to other Google employees that read: “There is a large brainstorm going on throughout the marketing org,” Thomas told coworkers, according to Carlson’s report, which was confirmed by The Wall Street Journal.

Thomas suggested ways to “actively counter algorithmically biased results” for search results including “Islam,” “Iran,” “Mexico” and “Latino,” according to Carlson’s report.

“In other words, Google employees wanted to alter search results to make them more positive, for political reasons. Thomas also suggested promoting links for making donations to organizations fighting the travel ban,” the Fox News host reported.

“This of course would be completely dishonest and unethical behavior, but Thomas’s colleagues seemed all in,” Carlson added.

“We’re absolutely in, Mackenzie. Anything you need. Will put together a list of orgs with Meryl and H-L team,” replied product manager Rami Banna.

“These emails were just a brainstorm of ideas, none of which were ever implemented. Google has never manipulated its search results or modified any of its products to promote a particular political ideology — not in the current campaign season, not during the 2016 election, and not in the aftermath of President Trump’s executive order on immigration,” Google said in a statement to Fox News.

“Our processes and policies would not have allowed for any manipulation of search results to promote political ideologies.”

Carlson was skeptical.

“If you ran a bank, and you caught your tellers ‘brainstorming’ about how to rob the vault, would you be OK with that? Remember that Google fired an engineer named James Damore almost instantly last summer when he was caught expressing mildly conservative ideas in a private memo,” the Fox News host pointed out.

“Here Google employees are plotting to subvert our entire public conversation, but that’s fine with Google.”

Google’s liberal bias has been exposed before.

Carlson previously revealed how a Google executive sought to use company resources to boost voter turnout in favor of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

Google suspended its fact-check program in January after a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation revealed the search engine was falsely attributing wrong claims to conservative websites, which were the almost exclusive target of the fact-check program.

Follow Hasson on Twitter @PeterJHasson