By: Braydon Chen
Lawmakers in the United States are doubting the accuracy of online Google searches for abortion centers. They were concerned that some results that appeared on the search engine advertised ‘fake clinics’ — unlicensed medical facilities that didn’t help pregnant women but tried to dissuade them from abortion.
When a letter was sent to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google’s parent company, many important members of the Google company, including twenty Democratic members of Congress and Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, suggested that they correct the inaccurate results on searches for abortion clinics.
The total data recorded reported that a total of eleven percent of Google search results ended up having people being led to facilities that weren’t even medical centers that didn’t help people with abortion at all. Thirty-seven percent reported Google Map queries. Twenty-eight percent of online users complained that Google ads were found that led to medical centers that didn’t do any help with abortion. This is extremely dangerous and unhealthy for women with pregnancy and causes big inconveniences when dealing with abortion.
‘Sixteen states and the District of Columbia specifically protecting abortion rights at the state level’ according to Guttmater Institute, a research center that supports abortion rights. Imran Ahmed, who is the CEO of Countering Digital Hate said that there were many people fundraising and trying to prevent abortion misinformation from happening to anyone.
Fixing this abortion misinformation problem is very important for Google’s success in the future. Google is an extremely important website worldwide. Google is known as one of the most popular search engines in the world, with over ninety percent of the population using it. If people started seeing misinformation about abortion, they might assume bad things about other searches on Google, and Google’s popularity could go down very fast.
When people are taking advantage of the internet and using it in harmful ways, major technology platforms, just like Google, need to step up and act responsibly to not let misleading information appear on the internet.