In every election, there are conspiracy theories. John McCain and Obama both had their citizenship status challenged, and Donald Trump is currently pretending, yet again, that Obama is a “secret Muslim” after claiming credit for predicting the tragedy at Orlando. Mitt Romney was accused of trying to turn America into a “Mormon theocracy.” Still, they all have to take second to the latest one: That Hillary Clinton and Google are conspiring to deflect people from her past.
The Conspiracy
If you really want to sit through the whole explanation from SourceFed, you can find it here, but the gist is simple. Supposedly, Hillary Clinton’s autocomplete results are favorable. For example, here are the results of typing “Hillary Clinton” into Google and Bing on top of each other:
This would seem to be a slam dunk, if you take it out of context, but there are a few very large problems here. Google is more than just its algorithms, and manipulating autocomplete is, at best, a questionable method for getting elected.
Why Autocomplete?
The first problem here is that this theory, called the “search engine manipulation effect,” is almost completely theoretical. It’s based on one study conducted by the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in 2015. The study argues that “primacy,” or what people see first, is likely to influence their decision-making, and that this extends to the political realm. The study claims to have found that favorable search engine rankings can shift attitudes by 20% or more.
The problem, though, is that the experiment leaves out a pretty crucial factor. It was conducted in America using Australian politicians Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard to, of course, be scientific and take bias out of the equation. This is very intelligent, very scientific, and while it does offer some intriguing perspective on unknown candidates, there’s a rather glaring problem here.
Many Americans know, say, Tony Abbott, if they know Abbott at all, for his propensity to eat whole raw onions. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has been in the American public sphere for nearly a quarter of a century. She went from First Lady to Senator for New York State to Presidential candidate to Secretary of State to Presidential nominee. She is the wife of an ex-President. Unless you’ve been up on a mountain since 1990, you probably have an opinion of this woman and it seems unlikely Google playing nice will change it.
In fact, this study does more to explain the popularity of Bernie Sanders, a relatively obscure politician before his Presidential bid, than Hillary’s election win. Sanders got more favorable press out of the gate, and thus had a valuable advantage as people learned more about him, as everything they saw was positive. But Hillary is, possibly, the accidental beneficiary of Google’s policies.
Algorithms Are Biased, But Not In The Ways People Think
First of all, and as Mashable points out, if Google were skewing autocomplete results, it should at least be consistent. If you type in, say, “Hillary Clinton em” you’ll get search results related to the email investigation. Also important, once you scroll past the social feeds and ads, Hillary’s first page of results on Google today are, well, this:
That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. Google also laid out its autocomplete policies in a bit more detail, including stating that insulting words or slurs are removed from autocomplete results. But the real issue here boils down to common sense.
Google’s algorithms are seemingly all-seeing and all-knowing, but the truth is that they blow up in the company’s face constantly, and any company that relies on algorithms is relentlessly putting out fires. Just as an example, Google Image Search, last year, tagged black people as gorillas, much to the company’s horror and frantic apologizing. And the same is true of autocomplete. It can only work with what people give it, and the same is true of other search engines. If Google is filtering out slanderous and insulting language, it’s to the benefit of any political candidate. But if Google were going to twist its algorithms to benefit anybody… it’d likely be Bernie Sanders.
Following The Money
Simply put, Alphabet, the company that owns Google, has been among Bernie Sanders’ biggest donors. At the beginning of the campaign, Bernie Sanders got more favorable searches on Google, which was picked up even by the Sanders fanbase’s bete noire, the Washington Post. And you have to question why Hillary would focus on Google’s autocomplete results when she, by any measure, was severely lagging behind in social media. Wouldn’t it make more sense to try and compromise his edge in that arena?
Simply put, the claim doesn’t hold up logically. There’s no proof it works, there’s no motive for Google to help Clinton, and there’s no reason to do it in the first place. This won’t stop people from claiming this happens, of course, but you should treat it with the same skepticism as claims that Obama is working for ISIS.