, Columnist
Google Is Filtering News for the Wrong Reason
If the standard is corporate safety, democracy has a problem.
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We've known for a long time that Google makes content decisions, but recent moves in the direction of censorship are going too far. Unfortunately, it's hard to imagine a regulatory backlash given Google's victims: websites that no mainstream politician will defend.
Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google's parent company, Alphabet, told a conference on Monday the company was working to engineer RT and Sputnik, the Russian propaganda channels, out of the Google News aggregator. "We don’t want to ban the sites,” Schmidt said. "That’s not how we operate. I am strongly not in favor of censorship. I am very strongly in favor of ranking. It’s what we do."