Study: Vast Majority of News on Google Comes from Left-Leaning Sources
It’s not a secret that Google has massive influence in directing internet traffic, but it is a secret how Google’s algorithms decide which news content to display.
To find out more about Google’s impact on news media, Northwestern University Professor Nicholas Diakopoulos and Northwestern student Daniel Trielli undertook an audit study of Google’s “Top Stories” box.
“To audit Top Stories, we scraped Google results for more than 200 queries related to news events in November, 2017,” Diakopoulos explained in an article for Columbia Journalism Review.
“We selected the queries to test by looking at Google Trends every day and manually choosing terms related to hard news events.”
Diakopoulos found that three news outlets accounted for 23 percent of all results.
“The data shows that just 20 news sources account for more than half of article impressions. The top 20 percent of sources (136 of 678) accounted for 86 percent of article impressions. And the top three accounted for 23 percent: CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.’
Using an earlier study that identified the ideological bent of news outlets based on who shares the content on Facebook, the professor found that left-leaning stories dominated the Top Stories results overall.
“Our data shows that 62.4 percent of article impressions were from sources rated by that research as left-leaning, whereas 11.3 percent were from sources rated as right-leaning. 26.3 percent of impressions were from news sources that didn’t have ratings,” Diakopoulos explained.
“But even if that last set of unknown impressions happened to be right-leaning, the trend would still be clear: A higher proportion of left-leaning sources appear in Top Stories.”
“Audit suggests Google favors a small number of major outlets” — writeup of new #chi2019 research with @DanielTrielli looking at how Google directs attention to news information: https://t.co/4TgORxCdzk
— Nick Diakopoulos (@ndiakopoulos) May 10, 2019
Google’s results would be perfectly fair if left-leaning outlets produced six times more content, but that’s not the case, according to Diakopoulos.
“In GDELT there were 2.2 times as many articles from left-leaning sources as right-leaning sources,” the professor wrote.
And it’s certainly not the case that sources like CNN and The Washington Post are six times more trustworthy. In fact, the opposite might be true.
The Post infamously stoked the flames of an unwarranted witch hunt against the innocent Covington Catholic High School students.
And there’s a reason why the phrase “CNN is fake news” is so popular.
A very likely explanation for Google’s “Top Stories” results is that Google’s algorithm favors left-leaning websites.
Until Google becomes more transparent with its algorithms and news curation methods, users can only assume that Google is censoring conservative content.
And the tech giant isn’t doing much to convince users otherwise: It has already been caught red-handed blacklisting conservative outlets for dubious violations of “Google News inclusion policies.”
Google isn’t the unbiased “platform” that it pretends to be. It seems more and more likely that social media giants have a clear left-wing bias.
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