Breitbart reporter Patrick Howley claims that a NY Times reporter is asking Google to remove debunked Hillary Clinton health claims made by conspiracy theory websites such as Infowars, Drudge and Jim Hoft’s Gateway Pundit website, who all have dedicated numerous articles to Hillary Clintons alleged ill health which has been debunked over and over like the Benghazi investigations.
The issue with conspiracy mongering websites is that they want to use the power of Google’s search engine as a weapon in their lame attempts to get as much “Hillary is suffering from an illness,” information to the public as possible so it looks like fact and not fiction. Its called Google Bombing. The fact that all of this information is being produced by conspiracy theory websites who have no validity whatsoever, is strong enough to ask Google the question of why they would allow such misinformation to receive higher rankings in Google search. The Times reporter queried Google on these issues, and Breitbart claimed in huge headlines that the Times was attempting to cover up her illness. Talk about bullshit.
Google should fix this. It shouldn’t give quarter to conspiracy theorists https://t.co/frnJTHq113 pic.twitter.com/kZLTI4JxlU
— Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo) August 21, 2016
Of course Google should fix this. But, if they fix that problem they should also fix thousands of other articles that are put out by conspiracy mongering websites that peddle bullshit in order to harm other people online. Google is seen by many in the alt-right movement as a usable weapon against their enemies. If they produce a website that claims that Aliens landed on the moon, and the proof they offer is bullshit, why should Google give that website weight so people can then point to the bullshit as fact?
Its a slippery slope though, because asking Google to be the arbiter of what is fantasy or fact makes Google responsible for managing content online, which they cannot ever do. So if you remove these fake health issue posts, then Google is saying they will manage content, which is not Google’s job. They are a search engine for what is out on the internet, nothing more. While I agree that Google should fix these issues, we can’t really force Google to be the arbiter of fact versus fiction. That has to be left up to the reader to decide.