There have long been concerns about the power being pooled by some of the world’s online media giants, and with good reason.

Companies like Google account for an inordinate amount of online traffic, and, as such, have found ever more clever ways to influence the world around.  And, thanks to the fact that we’ve never seen another corporation quite like this before, the normal regulatory protections that we would have against this influence are nowhere to be found.

This has had information experts concerned for some time, and keeping a keen eye on Google’s actions has become a full time job.

Their latest controversial adjustments could have an impact on the coming 2020 election as well.

Google’s search autocomplete feature fails to generate negative suggestions for the term “BLM,” in stark contrast to other search engines.

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Typing the words “BLM is” on Google currently only returns the suggestion “BLM israel.” It does not show a long list of suggestions, which is unusual for a popular search term and suggests that a list of suggestions formerly existed but was removed.

When stepping away from Google for a moment, the full picture becomes clearer:

On DuckDuckGo, Google’s privacy-focused competitor, searching for “BLM is ” generates a normal list of suggestions, some of which have negative connotations.

The list includes suggestions like “BLM is actblue,” “BLM is marxists,” “BLM is a cancer,” and “BLM is a front,” as well as “BLM is funded by.” The top three results on the “BLM is funded by” search are from conservative websites, including Breitbart News.

If we are to assume that these suggestions are generated by an algorithm, and that they depict the most frequently searched terms, then the suppression of this unscientific polling would make for less informed voters were “BLM” replaced with the names of candidates in upcoming races.  Or if search engines were to repress results that pointed citizens in the direction of fundraising for those candidates.

While the BLM movement may not be the end-all, be-all of presidential politics in 2020, the protection they are purported to be receiving from Google stresses the company’s commitment to censorship.

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