You type in a question to Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. and the engine returns a set of results based on an algorithm that the company has designed.
The company has manipulated the results. People who have paid them money, get their results at the top of the list. If the company's own products and pages get high priority. Certain websites get deprioritized. All of these choices are done by tweaking the rules behind the scenes that the algorithm follows. Some of the changes (such as the paid results) are obvious. Others, like the de-prioritization or the self-promotions, are more subtle, and may pass under the radar. The search engines have the power to subtlety or overtly promote one side of an issue and suppress the other. They can hide positive representations of one candidate while promoting positive representations of another, they can shift the ratio of good to bad, and they can be as overt or covert about it as they want.
So the question is, should search engine results be treated as "speech"?
The company has manipulated the results. People who have paid them money, get their results at the top of the list. If the company's own products and pages get high priority. Certain websites get deprioritized. All of these choices are done by tweaking the rules behind the scenes that the algorithm follows. Some of the changes (such as the paid results) are obvious. Others, like the de-prioritization or the self-promotions, are more subtle, and may pass under the radar. The search engines have the power to subtlety or overtly promote one side of an issue and suppress the other. They can hide positive representations of one candidate while promoting positive representations of another, they can shift the ratio of good to bad, and they can be as overt or covert about it as they want.
So the question is, should search engine results be treated as "speech"?
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