(DailyWire) Google search is burying news articles explaining Hamas’ terrorism under curated pull-quotes that seek to make a false equivalence between Israel and the terrorists, a Daily Wire review of search results conducted this week found.
If a user searches “Hamas rape women,” before showing the bountiful search results describing sick sexual assaults and war crimes, Google injects a large text section saying “What did Hamas do to women in Israel?” Incredibly, it answers that the most notable thing that Hamas does to women is release them: “Hamas on Monday released two elderly Israeli women held hostage in Gaza,” it says, pulling from the Associated Press, which once shared office space with Hamas.
The apparent bias and misinformation comes in the form of a section labeled “People also ask,” which redirects users from what they had searched to something else entirely, then shoves an answer in their face without the need to click any link — likely causing many people to simply accept the answer instead of reading full articles from search results.
If you ask, “Does palestine support hamas,” Google will use another feature, called “featured snippet,” to bury its own search results and instead put a paragraph in large font at the top telling you, “Just 27 percent of respondents selected Hamas as their preferred party.”
The search giant says it uses snippets to “help people more easily discover what they’re seeking.”
“Google’s search results sometimes show listings where the snippet describing a page comes before a link to a page,” it explains. “We display featured snippets when our systems determine this format will help people more easily discover what they’re seeking.”
But the “featured snippet” from Foreign Affairs is dramatically different than the picture that users would get by clicking on the first search result — which they would be more likely to do if the “snippet” weren’t placed on top. The first result, a column in The Hill, says that not only did Hamas beat the other political party Fatah in the most recent election in 2006, but that according to recent polls, “If new presidential elections were held with two candidates, Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh, … Haniyeh would win in a landslide with 58 percent.”
In Gaza particularly, “Gazans give Abbas just 33 percent, while 64 percent would vote for Hamas’s Haniyeh.” The article also says that even if Palestinians disagree with Hamas, it’s not because they disagree with terrorism or anti-Semitism. It says:
When you search Israel-related topics, Google puts in its “People also ask” section the question, “Does Hamas use human shields?” Then it gives a vague answer, pulling from the United Kingdom-based Guardian, that says, “Israel has cited what it says are numerous examples of Hamas using human shields as a tactic.”
Then it makes it seem like Israel does the same thing or worse, stating it as a fact instead of an allegation, and pulling from a Palestinian activist group instead of a media outlet. “Since 2000, [Defense for Children International Palestine] has documented at least 31 cases involving Palestinian children being used as human shields by the Israeli army,” it says.
