Google has admitted that it “blacklisted” a significant number of videos on YouTube ahead of last year’s abortion referendum, and interfered with search results. This newspaper was also directly affected by the interference.
Voters who searched for certain terms had the results of their searches manually altered by Google, ensuring that videos chosen by the company appeared first. Searches affected included “unborn life”, “irish catholic” and “abortion is wrong”.
The decision by Google to change the results of these searches was taken a week before the referendum, but was not disclosed to the public, and was only revealed after a source leaked it to the American investigative website ‘Project Veritas’ this week.
Studies have repeatedly shown that searches on YouTube usually peak in the final few days before a vote – the very timeframe in which Google altered its results.
Decision
The decision was taken at around the same time that the company banned YouTube advertising by campaign groups – a decision most observers agreed disproportionately harmed the pro-life side.
Approached by The Irish Catholic, the company admitted the interference, but said that it was done to help voters. A spokeswoman told this newspaper: “In the midst of the Irish referendum on abortion, our systems brought authoritative content to the top of our search results for abortion-related queries. This happened for both pro-choice and pro-life queries, there was no distinction.”
Pro-life spokesperson Niamh Uí Bhriain said the fact that Google kept its actions a secret was a matter of grave concern: “The fact is that voters were never supposed to find out about this”, she said. “Search results were altered and voters were overtly and deliberately manipulated by Google, and we do not know which content was blocked, and which was promoted. This is obvious interference in a democratic vote”.
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