Jill Stein of the Green Party has been an increasingly popular candidate choice for progressives, especially those who may be disenfranchised Bernie Sanders supporters, or those looking to support a woman for president as an alternative to Hillary Clinton. She’s the new Bernie Sanders, and being treated as such.
In what seemed to be an effort to help Hillary Clinton, Google refused to show Jill Stein in their their search results for presidential candidates.
I’d first noticed this on Thursday (14 July 2016) when I saw Jill Stein’s Twitter post about it.
Google is excluding our campaign from their results. Tell Google: stop censoring Greens! https://t.co/9ZFOL2zmlq pic.twitter.com/XuRlyhMuza
— Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) July 14, 2016
I was unsure about Jill’s claim since sometimes Googles results can be tailored to a specific user, so I tried the search myself and got the same results. So, I created a similar graphic (shown below) to protest this clearly unethical bias.
This incident raises the question about the role of news media, social media, content providers, and conduit providers in the political process. Should Google or any other news agency be permitted to tailor search results to serve a political end?
Showing results with Gary Johnson (an alternative to Donald Trump), but not showing results with Jill Stein (an alternative to Hillary Clinton) is a clear example of bias with an intent to sway the public. Jill Stein is not only an alternative to Hillary Clinton, but a very vocal opponent of hers. She consistently raises questions about Clinton’s ethics and trustworthiness.
About 48 hours later (by 2:48 AM on July 16), after Jill Stein’s call for supporters to demand that she be shown in the search results, Google corrected the problem
The search results shown below are a quiet admission that they’d been doing the wrong thing. Notice that Bernie Sanders is still showing in their updated results even though he isn’t a presidential candidate now that he’s endorsed Hillary Clinton.
This has been one of the worst years in history for news media bias. On Friday someone at Google force pushed a fake YouTube ‘Trending’ notification to millions of people’s mobile devices in promotion of an anti-Trump advertisement released by the Hillary Clinton Campaign.
There are 11 major stories that the mainstream media got wrong about Donald Trump, and probably just as many examples of bias against Bernie Sanders when he was competing with Hillary — such as claims that he’d lied about being invited to the Vatican (compelling the Vatican to show the invitation letter), harsh stories claiming that Bernie should drop out, and claims that Bernie attacked Hillary Clinton after promising not to run a negative campaign.
When the news media, content providers, and conduit providers stack the deck in favor of Hillary Clinton, it’s unlikely the outcome in November will be anyone except the person they’ve already chosen for us to believe in.