A purported leak of 2,500 pages of internal documentation from Google sheds light on how Search, the most powerful arbiter of the internet, operates.
The leaked documents touch on topics like what kind of data Google collects and uses, which sites Google elevates for sensitive topics like elections, how Google handles small websites, and more. Some information in the documents appears to be in conflict with public statements by Google representatives, according to Fishkin and King.
It’s honestly quite strange that this sort of black box system is allowed to exist. How are governments around the world OK with a vast majority of the internet being filtered through a private company’s lens without any sort of insight into how it works? That sounds skeevy as shit.