Google parent company Alphabet said the search engine will “derank” articles from Russia Today and Sputnik because of allegations the Russian government meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
At the Halifax International Security Forum on Saturday, Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt said search algorithms would be used to limit the reach of articles, the BBC reported.
“We’re well aware of this one, and we’re working on detecting this kind of scenario you’re describing and deranking those kinds of sites,” Schmidt said.
The Russian news outlets called the move censorship, but Schmidt said censorship was not the intention.
“I am strongly not in favor of censorship. I am very strongly in favor of ranking. It’s what we do,” Schmidt said, the BBC reported. “It’s a very legitimate question as to how we rank A or B, right? And we do it the best we can in millions and millions of rankings every day.”
Schmidt pointed out that as Google works to defend its search engine against what he called “weaponized” information, those who seek to manipulate news for their own gain “will get better tools too,” the BBC reported.
Sputnik and RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said in a statement published at RT: “Good to have Google on record as defying all logic and reason: facts aren’t allowed if they come from RT, ‘because Russia’ — even if we have Google on congressional record saying they’ve found no manipulation of their platform or policy violations by RT.”
Twitter stopped allowing RT and Sputnik to place ads on its platform earlier in November, and the Department of Justice forced RT to register itself as a foreign agent.
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