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If you're a social networking user with any politically minded friends, then chances are over the past week you've been informed that there's something funny going on with Google results when looking up the Conservatives: they don't offer derogatory auto-complete choices. Some have suggested that this could be to do with a recent tax-deal made with the British government, but does that theory hold water?
The search term in question that have riled up conspiracy theorists and political commenters alike, is “Conservatives are,” which shows nothing in the auto-complete form on Google. In contrast, typing in “Labour are,” or “Lib dems are,” result in lots of disparaging comments, suggesting everything from them being done as political entities, to being a laughing matter.
Not so with the Conservatives it seems. So why is that?
The Guardian takes an interesting look at the whole thing, citing other incidents where Google censored auto-complete results. Searching for “Black people are,” or “Whites are,” results in a similar lack of search suggestions. Conservatism is a way of life for some people, not just a political entity, it points out. Perhaps that's why the results have been blanked?
But adding fuel to the conspiracy fire is the fact that the search for “Tories are,” also offers no auto-complete options. That is far stranger.
When contacted by reporters looking for comment on the story, Google uncharacteristically released a statement on the matter, stating quite “categorically that tax is not remotely connected to this, nor are their ‘conspiracy theories’ founded in any way.”
In many ways, this may read like a lame excuse, but it should be considered that while the aforementioned phrases don't elicit any auto-complete suggestions from Google, other phrases do. Simply changing the tense to the present with “Conservative party is,” gives you some similar suggestions to that of other parties. The same goes for other variants of the name.
Perhaps this is not so much conspiracy as coincidence.
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KitGuru Says: It all does seem highly suspect, but perhaps instead of wondering why Google has edited results about the Conservative party, we should instead consider why it arbitrarily adjusts search results at all. Google has more data than everyone, but it it looks to curtail access to some of it, that's a worrying precedent. It's been argued that ‘adult' or ‘hateful' results shouldn't be easily accessible, but is auto-complete really the route of all evil when it comes to the internet?
I’d be interested to know how many people use auto-complete, particularly when they then search for something they weren’t planning to search for.
Find it a little more than conspiratorial considering the tax deal that Google just made.
180 million back taxes paid out of the 2 BILLION it owed, Something tells me there is more to this than meets the eye, just like the SUN newspaper shit talking everyone except Tories before the election, funny that Cameron is best friends with the man who runs the SUN right?
We all new that most of the news is biased (not just in the UK, and it doesn’t just have to do with friends supporting friends), that in no way means that google is also biased. Considering the mixed “evidence” (some vague correlations, ignoring other correlations), it seems to be that conspiracy theory is the accurate description.
or maybe there are a lot more of one category making disparaging remarks about the other in the media- blogs, fora, website posts etc.
180 million paid of 2 billion owed, there is more than meets the eye. Thats one hell of a deal, if that was a smaller business that owed 2 billion in tax, the CEO would be in prison for fraud. Not paying 180 million.
You can’t be a small business and owe 2 billion in taxes 😉 I get your point, but this is how corporatism has worked for a long time. It’s not like google is the first company to get crazy tax benefits.
Of course not, but they are the first to publicly make such a preposterous monetary deal, paying on a tiny percentage of the actual taxes. It just annoys me because here in the UK, the current climate and current useless government are trying to blame unemployed and disabled people for the problems with our economy, every step of the way they shit talk the unemployed, and where as i agree there are people who abuse the benefit system, the figures show only 2% of all benefit claims are fraudulent, and the benefit bill is a few hundred million, just a little more than the back taxes collected from google, if the government got all the tax it was due, they could stop shitting all over unemployed people and treating all unemployed people as criminals(which is effectively what they are doing right now) I guess im just angry at being treated as if im a criminal, when the government of the UK are making these back handed tax deals and using underhand tactics to stay in power.
Like at the election, having their close friends at the SUN post a thousand shit post about other electoral candidates, using racist, sexist, and a plethora of other isms, while praising the current PM as “god” then it turns out he likes to fuck dead pigs heads, yet is still in power, and still being allowed to fuck this country over and over.
People voted for him; and Cameron won, because the (center-)left is incredibly devided, meaning that conservatives could just win a majority of constituencies.
And the problems you describe are barely different from the Netherlands. We’re infamous for our tax deals, fraud barely exists but receives the main focus, and there are right-wing newspapers talking trash on every idea that looks liberal. Most corruption is found with the conservatives, but they keep winning. It’s a weird world we live in.
It makes me sad, simply because being treated as a criminal because im down on my luck is wrong, people on this planet seem to have stopped caring for others and only seem to care for themselves.
Sad state of affairs.