Google employees wanted to show you this after the travel ban

Algorithmic bias or personal bias: make your choice.

Google employees sent emails to discuss ways to counter the "Islamaphobe" and "biased and biased" search results for terms such as "Islam" and "Hispanic" the Wall Street newspaper reports.

The travel ban in its original form imposed severe restrictions on visitors from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen to the United States. Although promoted as a security measure, it contained religious accents.

The emails mentioned the sensitivity of dealing with a political subject, but then they explored ideas to guide people who were looking for these terms on pages that contributed to causes conducive to immigration. A marketing employee wrote, "General Idea: Leveraging Research to Highlight Important Organizations to Give, News, and More. to keep people informed of their help and resources available to immigrants [sic] or people who travel »

Another employee suggested using an experimental feature called Highlights that would allow celebrities to insert text into the search results.

"These emails were only a brainstorm of ideas, none of which was implemented," said a Google spokesman in a statement to the WSJ. "Our processes and policies would have allowed no manipulation of research results to promote political ideologies."

Google has however been the subject of an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and has been fined in the EU for manipulating the search results of its own products.

It also regularly draws accusations of bias. A leaked video of Google leader Sergey Brin appeared and revealed that he was deploring the results of the last US presidential election. In August, President Trump turned to Twitter to suggest that Google's search results for his name only showed "Fake New Viewing / Reporting."[s] Media."

"In other words, they did it for me and for others, so almost all stories and news are bad," he added.

Next week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions will meet with state attorneys general to discuss what they call anti-conservative prejudices in the world of technology.