Did a “Glitch” Reveal the Truth?
Free Speech platform calls for transparency as Google faces
allegations of Blacklisting
Las Vegas, Nevada – Parler, the People-driven social platform, is calling for Google to reveal information on its algorithmic search function and how the company selects what results to display.
Google made international headlines when conservative-leaning online publications like Breitbart and Drudge Report did not appear in search results for a two-hour period yesterday. The progressive site Occupy Democrats was also affected, while legacy media sites were not.
Company spokespeople called the incident a “glitch,” but former Google engineer Michael Wacker says that the incident indicates the existence of systemic backlisting of conservative sites by Google. Wacker argued that the search giant likely accidentally blocked them completely, while normally they only throttle or otherwise manipulate the search results to suppress their visibility.
Dr. Robert Epstein, a researcher and registered Democrat who has argued Google has the power to sway up to 10 percent of American voters in the 2020 election, agreed with the assessment. Epstein told Mediate, “It's likely that a person or algorithm at Google added 'breitbart.com' and other URLs to one or more of the company's blacklists. Then, perhaps after some pushback, someone pulled those URLs off the blacklists.”
Google controls over 86 percent of the global search market.
“The credible allegations that Google backlists sites that challenge their corporate agenda is chilling,” said Parler CEO John Matze. “Activists and critical thinkers on both sides of the aisle have long suspected Google of manipulating search results to obscure content, and this is further evidence of that behavior. The implications are huge and could even constitute illegal interference in our elections. Google should come clean and reveal their process for determining how content is displayed—who is making those choices and why those choices are made.”
Parler does not collect user data or algorithmically curate content. A user’s timeline consists (aside from sponsored ads) of posts from the users one follows, arranged chronologically. Tags operate in the same way. Content is never censored, throttled or blacklisted.
Parler was founded in 2018 and has 3.3 million users. The platform is committed to free speech, does not mine or sell user data, and does not censor content based on politics or ideology. Parler continues to stand with the People and against Technocronyism.
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