Even Google search is being gamed by right-wingers.

[canetoad]

Google forced to change 'racist', 'sexist' algorithm after being 'gamed' by Right

The search giant has been forced to make changes after a glitch in its results was exposed.


In news that should give everyone who uses the world's biggest search engine pause for thought, Google has been forced to change an algorithm that suggested racist and sexist questions via its autocomplete function, and directed users towards ideologically skewed results.

While there's a lot to like about the company's swift response, the issues at stake here are significant and not readily addressed by the quick-fix patch it has offered. And for those of us who have come to believe that Dr Google is a values-free neutral dispenser of information, the lesson is clear. You shouldn't, at least not entirely.

<snip>

Similarly, the top automatically generated result when the words "are women…" were typed was "are women evil?", while the top result for "are Muslims…" was "are Muslims bad?"

Cadwalladr hypothesised, and quoted people who believed, that this was evidence the search engine was being "gamed" by activists pushing an extreme right-wing agenda, using bots and flooding the web with links that conspire to elevate right-wing searches in Google's predicted queries, and right-wing sites in its results.

http://www.theage.com.au/comment/google-forced-to-change-racist-sexist-algorithm-after-being-gamed-by-right-20161208-gt6s1i.html

[Nwgirl503]

1. Anyone else on the_donald at Reddit?

This group (300k+ of tech savvy people) has been working for months on things like this. Right after the election there were thousands of them posting about subverting the #notmypresident hashtag. Shit is not normal. Besides foreign groups, there are huge groups of domestic people, much like Trump talked about in the debates when he dismissed Russian interference as it possibly being some fat guy in a basement, doing this.

They're mean and determined. And knowledgeable.