Conspiracy theories stem from a desire for a world which operates through consistent, logical motives, rather than random chance. But they often have at their core something really worth examining.



The reason why some people conclude “the world is run by lizard people” from the observation that “there is a self-reinforcing political and cultural establishment largely formed of people with similar backgrounds” is that the actual explanation is complex, obfuscated and largely unsatisfying.

And so too on the internet.

This week, people noticed that entering “Conservatives are” to Google doesn’t result in any suggested searches popping up – in contrast to searches for “Labour are”, which offers up “… finished”, “… a joke”, and “… scum”, or “Libdems are”, which offers “… finished”, “… pointless” and “… traitors” as search suggestions.

It’s not the first time seemingly arbitrary Google search suggestions have hit the news. The service generally allows suggestions to be produced purely algorithmically, based on common searches. But sometimes it steps in, either to remove specific suggestions, or, more typically, to override the system and prevent a specific term returning any searches at all.

Sometimes, it publicly announces when it does this. In 2014, for instance, it confirmed that it would be aiding the fight against online piracy by removing from search suggestions terms which returned results with too much pirated content.

But usually, those changes are made without confirmation that they’ve happened, or any explanation as for why. Sometimes, it’s possible to guess. In 2013, UN Women launched an ad campaign highlighting the misogyny of autocomplete. It showed that, for instance, a search for “women shouldn’t” finished with “drive”, “work” and “have rights”. A month later, though, and all suggestions for “women shouldn’t” disappeared completely.

It’s not hard to imagine what might have prompted Google to take action.

Other times, there are plausible explanations. According to Slate’s David Auerbach, Google used to complete “Jews are” with a list that included “not white”, “rude”, “smart” and “awesome” – which already suggested hefty editing, given the typical tenor of hate speech on the internet. Today, it doesn’t offer to finish it at all.

And sometimes, it’s barely explicable why a particular phrase gets removed, while others don’t. A 2010 crowdsourced list of some of the terms Google wouldn’t suggest at the time included a whole load of sex terms and most swear words – but also the band New Pornographers, the song Tainted Love and the words “gay dog”.

The site also catalogued a huge number of words that would offer no suggestions with the word “are” after them, including:

“Jews, Christians, Catholics, born-again Christians, evangelical Christians, atheists, Muslims, blacks, whites, Italians, Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, Germans, Arabs, French, [and] Buddhists”. A few of those are no longer fully blacklisted, instead offering just one result: “Catholics are not christians”, for instance, and “atheists are wrong”.

Which brings us back to “Conservatives are”. The closest Google came to an on-the-record explanation of why the term was removed was to say that: “Autocomplete predictions are produced based on a number of factors including the popularity of search terms. We do remove offensive or inappropriate content from autocomplete predictions.”

One thing to point out here is that “Conservatives”, unlike “Labour”, is a description of identity as well as a political party, and so it has a lot more in common with those words already blacklisted. And, as Google implies, there is likely to be a whole load of offensive content that was removed one-by-one from the results, including a particularly alliterative phrase, that could have one day caused someone in the Googleplex to give up and just blacklist the whole term.

But that can’t be the whole story. A similar pattern exists in America (“Republicans are” gets normal results, while “Democrats are” doesn’t), where both political parties are identities of a sort; and identities which are far more deeply held than conservatism, such as most nationalities and many religious, aren’t blacklisted at all.

It’s that lack of explanation that leads some to leap to conspiracy. There’s no evidence to suggest when the term “Conservatives” was added to the blacklist, and Google won’t tell me, but the mere timing of its discovery has drawn people to ask whether it’s part of some shady deal regarding the company’s £130m sweetheart deal with HMRC over back taxes.

The rationale is obvious, and recognisable from all conspiracy theories in history: Google is a huge company, which controls one of the world’s most valuable websites; it wouldn’t just make decisions at random; and so there must be a reason for this odd behaviour; it looks shady, so it must be a shady reason; therefore, Google must be thanking the Conservatives for their tax deals.

That, at least, was something Google felt comfortable denying. In a rare statement directly addressing the allegations, it said that it could “categorically state that tax is not remotely connected to this, nor are their ‘conspiracy theories’ founded in any way”.

But the problem with conspiracy theories – other than being untrue – is that they allow those in positions of power to distract from the real questions that need answering. What’s scary about Google removing something from the suggestions box isn’t that it might have been a sweetheart deal over tax; it’s that it can happen at all.

Google is in a position of power. The company controls the majority of the search market in the majority of the world. It’s the single biggest arbiter of information the world has ever seen: what shows up in a Google search can make or break political careers, business plans and creative industries. If you aren’t googleable, in a lot of jobs, you may as well not exist.

And so the fact that Google manually edits its search suggestions, without answering questions from the press or public about why, when or how, is concerning. For this piece, I asked if it would share a master list of all the blacklisted terms; if it would say when “Conservatives are” was added to that list; and if it would say why “Conservatives are” was added.

It wouldn’t answer any of the questions, or say anything at all on the record.

You don’t need to believe in conspiracies to be concerned by that.

• Google denies ‘Tories are/Labour are’ autocomplete ‘conspiracy theories’