Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson accused Google Thursday of skewing search results to tie capitalism to racism.
Berenson, who has gained a following online for his skepticism of stay-at-home orders and mask-wearing as means to fight the coronavirus pandemic, shared screenshots of the results of a search of the phrase “socialism and racism.”
However, Google automatically provideed search results for “capitalism and racism” while giving the option to “search only for socialism and capitalism.”
Results that appear include a 2019 article from the Neighborhood Funders Group called “Capitalism and Racism: Conjoined Twins” and a May 2020 article from The New Yorker called “Is Capitalism Racist?”
Fox News was able to verify the search results. In addition, when searching “capitalism and racism,” Google does not include “socialism” in its results.
“I assumed this was a joke, but it’s real: if you Google ‘socialism and racism,’ the top result you’re offered will be ‘capitalism and racism,'” Berenson wrote on Twitter.
He added, “Big Tech gets more openly ideological by the day. And weird that one of the world’s most profitable companies hates capitalism so much.”
A Google spokesperson told Fox News, “Our related words system helps us provide relevant results, by finding content on the web even when you don’t use words that are exact matches with what’s on a web page. Sometimes, our systems may learn that two words are closely related, and believe searching for both of them might be more useful. That is what is happening in this case. The related word system isn’t always perfect, which is why we clearly show that an expansion is happening, and make it easy to narrow the search, if desired.”
The spokesperson added, “We’ll take this feedback and look into how we can improve our systems overall.”
This isn’t the first time Google’s search results have been scrutinized. Back in 2018, President Trump went after the tech giant for only sharing results from left-leaning media outlets when searching for “Trump News.”
“Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal?” Trump tweeted at the time.
“96% of results on ‘Trump News’ are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!” he added.
Google, however, pushed back and denied ranking results to “manipulate” political sentiment.
“When users type queries into the Google Search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology. Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries. We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”