Charles Lane: I’d Be Surprised If Google Set up an Algorithm To Drown out Donald Trump

RUSH EXCERPT:

LANE: "But I — I would be very surprised if somebody at Google said, let’s set up the algorithm to drown out Donald Trump in any specific sense like that. I think these searches work in an incredibly complex ways that for some unconscious or otherwise neutral reason may be turning up what President Trump claims they’re turning up. But, of course, it’s just his claim. But there’s a bigger context for this, which is, a lot of stuff going on at Google, like a few months back an employee circulating a memo internally claiming that the company isolates conservatives internally, then he winds up on the outs. There’s a movement within Google to decouple Google, so to speak, from defense contracting and so forth. And I think the president’s pushing back against those things and he’s more generally trying to turn Google into just another part of this big, fake news media that has been his big foil all through his political career. You know, there’s a lot of suspicion, both on the left and the right, in sort of populist America about these giant technology companies. And I think in that sense, he’s just trying to turn them into another one of his scapegoats to show like everything is stacked against us, even the search engine."