Google has quietly increased censorship of its market-dominant search engine and added a range of new topics where human moderates can manually penalize websites and suppress them in search results.
If a site is affected by one of these manual censorships, “part or all of the site will not appear in Google search results,” according to the technology giant.
The list, which is published in full on Google’s support website, contains the following:
- Discover Policy Violation: Adult Content
- News and Discover Policy Violation: Dangerous Content
- News and Discover Policy Violation: Harassing Content
- News and Discover Policy Violation: Hateful Content
- News and Discover Policy Violation: Manipulated Media
- News and Discover Policy Violation: Medical Content
- Discover Policy Violation: Misleading Content
- News and Discovery Policy: Sexually Explicit Content
- News and discover policy violation: terrorist content
- News Policy Violation: Transparency
- News and Discover Policy Violation: Violence and Gore Content
- Policy Violation by News and Discovery: Vulgar Language and Blasphemy
Publishers affected by a manual action by Google will be able to appeal by resolving the policy violation issue and then submitting their site to Google for review. Google states that it may take a few days or a week “before the tech giant makes a final decision and then leaves
Google once tried to hide its search censorship. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, swore before Congress that the company would not “manually intervene on a specific search result”, a statement that one of Google’s former employees was a liar.
Leaks such as the Good Censor briefing and YouTube’s search lists, both published by Breitbart News, went viral because of frequent censorship of search results, especially political search results, and contrary to Pichai’s statements, frequently appearing on Google .
But because Republicans did not impose consequences on Google or other tech companies for their increasing political interference and erosion of Americans’ ability to exercise their First Amendment rights online, Google and other tech companies became less concerned about hiding their censorship.
Analysis by Breitbart News also revealed that Google suppressed links to conservative news sites, including Breitbart, for searches for “Biden” and “Joe Biden” before the 2020 election – but this was partly discovered by data from Google’s examine own publishing console. a sign of how relaxed the technology giant has become about the political interference being discovered.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His new book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election, featuring exclusive interviews with sources within Google, Facebook and other tech companies, is currently on sale.