Google has slightly increased the censorship of its dominant search engine in the market, adding a series of new topics where human moderates can manually penalize sites by suppressing them in search results.
If a site is affected by one of these manual acts of censorship, “some or all of that site will not be shown in Google’s search results,” according to the technology giant.
The list, published in full on the Google support website, includes the following:
- Discover policy violation: adult-themed content
- Breaking news and discovery policy: dangerous content
- Violation of News and Discover policy: harassing content
- Violation of news and discovery policy: hate speech content
- Violation of news and discovery policy: manipulated media
- Violation of News and Discover policy: Medical content
- Discover policy violation: misleading content
- Violation of News and Discover policy: sexually explicit content
- Violation of news and discovery policy: terrorist content
- News policy violation: transparency
- Violation of News and Discover policy: violence and bloody content
- Violation of News and Discover policy: vulgar language and desecration
Publishers who have been hit by a manual action by Google may appeal the decision by “fixing” any problem that violated the policy and then submitting their site to Google for review. Google says it could take “several days or a week” for the tech giant to reach a final decision, leaving
Once upon a time, Google tried to hide its search censorship. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai insisted, under oath before Congress, that the company does not “manually intervene in any particular search results,” a statement that one of Google’s former employees said was a lie.
Leaks like the “Good Censor” briefing and YouTube search blacklists, both published by Breitbart News, attracted viral attention because they revealed manual censorship of search results, in particular political search results, and contrary to statements from Pichai, occurred regularly on Google.
But since Republicans have failed to impose any consequences on Google or other technology companies for their growing political interference and erosion of Americans’ ability to exercise their First Amendment rights online, Google and other technology companies were less concerned with hiding their actions. of censorship.
The Breitbart News analysis also revealed that Google has suppressed links to conservative news sites, including Breitbart, in searches for “Biden” and “Joe Biden” before the 2020 election – but this was discovered in part by analyzing the data itself Google’s publisher console, a sign of how relaxed the tech giant was at the discovery of its political interference.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent for Breitbart News. His new book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election, which contains exclusive interviews with sources within Google, Facebook and other technology companies, is currently available for purchase.