Anti-fascist organisations have attacked Google for including material produced by the far-right British National Party (BNP) on its online news service. BNP content dealing with race issues was today being presented on the Google News site alongside reports from organisations such as the BBC and Reuters, the international news agency.
The criticism comes as Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, and fellow party activist Mark Collett, appear in Leeds Crown Court on race-hate charges after an undercover BBC documentary infiltrated the party.
Sabby Dhalu, joint secretary of Unite Against Fascism (UAF), the anti-racist coalition, said: “The BNP is an openly racist organisation. Through Google using the BNP as a supposedly legitimate news source it legitimises the party. It should not be treated as a legitimate organisation in this way.”
The Google News site, which Google makes available as a beta – or test – site, gathers together thousands of news sources that can be searched for keywords. Today, when “Mary-Ann Leneghan”, the name of the Reading schoolgirl who was murdered in May was entered, a story written by a BNP “correspondent” on the current murder trial was shown at the top of the list of stories on the case.
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The article, which is posted on a BNP site, accuses the BBC of bias in its reporting of the case. It sits alongside but outranks stories from the BBC, Reuters, The Times and The Daily Telegraph on the same trial.
The BNP has consistently drawn criticism from across the UK’s political mainstream. Last year, the Standards Board for England ruled it could be described as a “Nazi” organisation. The ruling followed a complaint to the local government watchdog from the BNP against a Liberal Democrat councillor who told a public meeting: “Nazis are not welcome in our town.”
A spokesperson for Google told Times Online: “Google News has no human editors selecting stories or deciding which ones deserve top placement. Our headlines are selected by computer algorithms, based on factors including how often and on what sites a story appears online.”
However, Google, which operates under the motto “don’t be evil”, has admitted in the past that there is some human intervention in the process. In an interview with Times Online last year, Nathan Stoll, the product manager for Google News, said that people do play a part in the process. News sources are tagged – “by hand” – to avoid, for example, spoof articles on a satirical site such as The Onion appearing among a list of straight news stories, he said.
He added: “It’s absolutely the case that we would remove anything that we were notified promoted hate or violence. That’s a long-standing position of ours.”
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A Google spokesperson said today: “Given that content is added, deleted, and changed on the web everyday, we cannot screen everything that is made available in our index.
“If we are notified by the authorities of illegal content in our index we will remove the web pages in question from our index. Google is a law-abiding business, and therefore we will promptly take the necessary steps to comply with the law of the relevant jurisdiction.”
The Google News site is a window to potentially massive audiences and media executives openly admit that Google can make a huge difference to a site’s popularity. It has more than 6 million users a month. Such is Google’s influence on the web, editors have been prepared to sign non-disclosure agreements in return for a glimpse into what Google plans for their industry.
Such secrecy has already sparked criticism. At the World Editors’ Forum in Seoul last year, an event which attracts senior newsroom executives from across the world, there was a vigorous disagreement between Krishna Bharat, the creator of Google News, and American and Japanese speakers over Google’s reluctance to reveal exactly what sources it uses and how it adds or subtracts from the list.