Google Bias

New "temporary limits" on all Twitter accounts, announced by Elon Musk, have led to reported outages across the social media platform as it attempts to monetize the service and cut costs.

Musk tweeted Saturday afternoon that he had taken new action to combat "extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation." The platform will temporarily restrict the number of tweets users can view per day.

Unverified accounts are now limited to viewing 800 posts each day, while new accounts that have not been verified will be limited to only 400 posts per day, Musk wrote.

Google released an audit Friday examining how its services and policies impact civil rights and racial equity, following years of pressure from advocates and Democratic lawmakers for such a review.

The disclosure came hours after The Washington Post revealed that the tech giant had hired a prominent law firm to undertake it. The company uploaded the audit without fanfare in an update to the bottom of the human rights page on its website.

On an episode of Joe Rogan’s popular podcast last year, he turned to a topic that has gripped right-wing communities and other Americans who feel skeptical about the pandemic: search engines.

“If I wanted to find specific cases about people who died from vaccine-related injuries, I had to go to DuckDuckGo,” Mr. Rogan said, referring to the small privacy-focused search engine. “I wasn’t finding them on Google.”

Google will now tell users when search results are rapidly changing around a breaking story. Some searches will now bring up a warning that “it looks like these results are changing quickly,” and a subheading will explain that “if this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for results to be added by reliable sources.” In a blog post, the company suggests that users might want to check back later when it’s found more results.

Google Play store has removed at least 100,000 negative user reviews targeting Robinhood, the stock trading platform caught in the center of the GameStop trading frenzy.

Robinhood’s rating on Google Play had dropped from four stars out of five on Wednesday to just one star on Thursday. It had bounced back to four stars at the time of this publication.

Google has secured a tight grip around the research done by its staff, according to internal communications and other information obtained by Reuters.

A new “sensitive topics” review procedure has, in at least three cases, “requested authors refrain from casting its technology in a negative light.” News of Google’s new process broke after Reuters was able to get its hands on internal Google communications and speak with researchers involved with the work. There were at least 13 “sensitive topics” listed in the new review policy, including bias, China, COVID-19 and Israel.

Google has added a layer of scrutiny for research papers on sensitive topics including gender, race, and political ideology. A senior manager also instructed researchers to “strike a positive tone” in a paper this summer. The news was first reported by Reuters.

“Advances in technology and the growing complexity of our external environment are increasingly leading to situations where seemingly inoffensive projects raise ethical, reputational, regulatory or legal issues,” the policy read. Three employees told Reuters the rule started in June.

A Tuesday incident in which certain websites briefly vanished from Google search results may have inadvertently exposed an internal list aimed at suppressing certain news outlets, a former engineer for the company said.

The word was spread throughout the day on Tuesday, that Google had taken some sort of action to demote leading politically conservative websites in its search results. Newsbusters alleged Tuesday that Google “has seemingly blacklisted numerous conservative websites,” listing Breitbart, The Washington Free Beacon, The Blaze, The Daily Wire and other top sites on the right.

Another reporter, Charlie Nash of Mediaite, posted about this as well, while also noting that some left-wing sites had also apparently disappeared from results.