Big tech companies have been trying to say that they don’t favor one political ideology over another. But their users don’t agree.
An Axios poll, released on Sept. 6, showed that a large number of people believe Google search results are skewed to favor a certain side. Two-thirds (67 percent) of those who identified as Republican said they were concerned that Internet search engines were “biased to favor a liberal point of view.”
Government regulations were also a key part of the survey, with an overall 51 percent expressing concern that the government would not do enough to regulate the internet. 47 percent of Republicans, 52 percent of independent voters, and 55 percent of Democrats feared that the government will not do enough to regulate technology companies.
Over all, 36 percent of those surveyed believed that Google searches favor of the left.
Republicans weren’t the only ones expressing that concern: 13 percent of those who identified as Democrat and 29 percent of those who identified as independent expressed the same concern.
More specifically, 73 percent of conservatives stated that internet search engines produce results skewed toward leftist ideology, along with 53 percent of moderate Republicans and 30 percent of independent voters.
This replicates the results of a poll conducted by McLaughlin & Associates and released by the Media Research Center, which stated that 64.6 percent of those polled believed that social media companies are “purposely censoring conservatives and conservative ideas from their sites.”
The Axios poll addressed other aspects of tech company problems. When it came to trusting technology companies, especially when dealing with foreign interference on their platforms during election cycles, almost no one had complete trust in the companies’ abilities. Democrats, independents, and Republicans were almost all in agreement: 57 percent of those surveyed did not have much trust or any trust at all in these companies.
