By Joe Mellor, Deputy Editor
Conspiracy theorists have claimed that Google has censored search results for the Conservative party, even though autocomplete results for the party are blank.
Google suggests common searches for all of the other major political parties, usually not very complimentary, but nothing appears for searches for “Conservatives are” or “Tories are.”
If you do the same search replacing Labour for Conservative suggested searches bring up “…finished”, “a joke” and “right wing.”
For the Liberal Democrats the search engine brings up “traitors,” “…pointless.”
Google have strenuously denied there is anything untoward about this, and suggested searches are based on searches for the same topic that have been made previously.
The tech powerhouse has stood by their search engine results after the story emerged since the anomaly was noticed.
Google says its algorithm automatically weeds out “offensive” search terms from its results.
However, further investigation would not back that up. Searching for “Labour are s” suggests “Labour are scum”, wheras “Tories are s” returns no suggestions.
This theory comes to light after the Tories’ relationship with Google has come under intense scrutiny since a lenient tax deal was granted by HMRC. Google will pay only £130m in tax for a decade of business operations in the UK. They raked in billions in income during this period.
Even some Tory MPs believe the deal was “derisory, however the Chancellor branded the agreement as “a great victory.”