Unfounded paranoia on the Right

In an article entitled Tech Needs to Explain Why Its Algorithms Hate Republicans, Mytheos Holt draws some highly dubious conclusions:

[W]e can now almost conclusively say that if you search for a Republican using Google or Yahoo, you’re far more likely to find out dirt about them than if you search for a Democrat. Though, unsurprisingly, the effect is at its most dramatic when using Google.`... [S]earches for all sixteen Presidential candidates of the 2016 election turned up an average of seven positive results for Democrats, whereas Republicans only found an average of 6. Searches for Hillary Clinton produced five positive articles to only one negative, whereas searches for Donald Trump produced four positive and three negative. A search for Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, would produce nine positive stories and zero negative, whereas searches for Ted Cruz produced zero (!) positive stories. And this was during the primary, when most people regarded Cruz as further to the Right on most issues than Trump, so the message is clear: The more conservative you are, the more Google has programmed its algorithm to hate you. [emphasis added]

This is just dumb. The fact that Google searches turn up more positive results for Democrats than do searches for Republicans is likely simply a function of the fact that there exist more articles that contain positive coverage of Democrats than there are articles that contain positive coverage of Republicans. This is the result of biased media coverage, which is simply reflected by Google searches.

I have no doubt that most Google employees and managers are ardent supporters of the Democratic Party, but the claim that Google has programmed its search algorithm to hate Republicans reveals less about the political proclivities of Google's employees than it does about how little the author knows about the nature of search algorithms on the World Wide Web.