The Politics of "Unbiased" Conservative Search Engines

I occasionally run ads on this newsletter, but I don’t typically write about them. I’m going to do so today, however, because the advertiser my newsletter host’s ad network brought me is pretty weird. And its weirdness is a good way to talk about how the American right is constructing a politically correct parallel economy for themselves.

Let’s start with the ad itself. (I’ve screenshotted it, because I’ve moved hosts since writing this and so don’t have the ad directly in this post anymore.)

Still with me? Let’s talk about Freespoke.

Freespoke is interesting, from both product and messaging standpoints. Briefly, here’s the main features they highlight that sets Freespoke apart from Google, Bing, and other competing search engines, and so constitute the core of its sales pitch to users:

It attempts to categorize individual results along the political spectrum, labeling sources as “left,” “right,” or “middle.”

It is “100% private” in that it doesn’t ask you to log in.

When your search points you to products, it “showcases American-made and Veteran-owned businesses” instead of the “low-quality products made overseas” other search engines point you to.

It blocks porn.

If you guessed after reading these that Freespoke is a project of the political right, give yourself a star. It’s founded by Todd Ricketts and Kristin Jackson. Ricketts is the co-owner of the Chicago Cubs, and served as the national finance chairman for the Republican National Committee. Jackson has a long history in the GOP political and policy worlds. When Freespoke brands themselves as an “unbiased” search engine and that they don’t “manipulate the information,” it’s clear what they have in mind is all the left-wing “bias” and “manipulation” present on search engines like Google.

There’s No Such Thing as Unbiased Search

Every search engine, including Freespoke, has some bias. Every search engine manipulates the results it shows you. It would be impossible for a search engine to do otherwise because, no matter what you search for, there are more results on the web plausibly related to it than it can functionally show you at once. So it has to have some method for choosing which are relevant, and that method is necessarily a form of “bias.” Furthermore, a search engine doesn’t show you all the relevant results simultaneously. Instead, it lists them, and listing them means it has to put them in some kind of order. That ordering is necessarily a form of “manipulation.”

Even if Freespoke can somehow get around those iron laws of search engine design, you might notice that points 3 and 4 in their sales pitch are both forms of bias and results manipulation. They have a bias in favor of American made products. They manipulate results by excluding pornography. (I’m reminded of Substack’s defense of their content moderation policies as being a deep commitment to free speech, but it’s a “free speech” that allows Nazis but bans sex workers. )

Bias Labeling Doesn’t Work

Playing with Freespoke, the results are … fine. Not noticeably better than what you get elsewhere. (It’s unlikely Freespoke spun up a search engine from scratch, given the complexity and resource intensiveness of that undertaking, so I suspect they, like many “alternative” search engines, are using Bing’s API, or something like it. But I can’t find enough information to confirm either way.)

Their political bias labeling feature runs into the same problems these assessments always do, whether hand crafted with human judgement or, in most cases, based on AI-powered language assessment. Namely, where they do work, they’re not terribly helpful, and where they could be helpful and interesting, they don’t work. The left-right political spectrum is too blunt an instrument for cataloging ideologies.

Still, people keep thinking they can make this work. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the L.A. Times, has been all over the news lately for wanting to shoehorn it into his newspaper. The response probably isn’t what he was hoping for. Basically everyone is pointing out that it’s a bad idea, and not just a bad idea, but a pretty stupid one. Bias filters don’t work. Why? Here’s just a handful of reasons:

Subjectivity of Language: Language is inherently subjective, and words can have different connotations and interpretations depending on the context and the reader’s background. Seemingly neutral language can carry implicit biases, and seemingly biased language can express what are actually pretty level takes.

Complexity of Bias: Bias can be multifaceted and manifest in various forms, making it difficult to capture with a single metric or score. A “bias meter” or a left-right spectrum necessarily oversimplifies and fails to account for the nuances of journalistic practices.

Lack of Contextual Awareness: Bias meters often lack the ability to consider the broader context of a news story, including historical events, cultural norms, and the specific circumstances surrounding the event being reported. This can lead to misinterpretations and inaccurate assessments of bias.

Limited Understanding of Intent: It is difficult for a bias meter to determine the intent behind a journalist’s choices. A seemingly biased presentation may be the result of unintentional biases or constraints such as space limitations or editorial guidelines.

Potential for Manipulation: News organizations or individuals could potentially manipulate a bias meter by intentionally using language or framing techniques to achieve a desired score. So even if the meters or labels work now, if enough people start paying attention to them, they’re more or less guaranteed to stop working.

I’ll also note that, from personal experience, these labels fail. I’ve spent my career mapping out and arguing for a quite consistent set of political principles derived from a foundation of coherent moral claims. But if you pull up the lists I’ve been added to by various users on Bluesky (Bluesky’s protocol means all the lists you create, including the list of users you’ve blocked, are publicly accessible), you’ll discover I’m on one for “Tankies & Radical Leftists,” another for fascists, and yet another for classical liberals. Throughout my time writing and podcasting about political issues, I’ve been accused of being on the right and on the left. So what’s my bias?

“Oh, the internet. It can be a scary place… but less so with Freespoke.”

Finally, let’s talk about the first line in the ad, because it gets to this alternative ecosystem conservatives are building. Years ago, for a podcast, I had to watch several of the God’s Not Dead movies. For those unfamiliar, these are a series of films made by Christian evangelicals for Christian evangelicals. I’m an atheistic Buddhist, so I’m not the target audience for these movies, and not only hadn’t seen them before, but I hadn’t seen any of the movies made by the alternative movie industry that exists to serve evangelical audiences. The movies are terrible and mostly crazy, but one theme that stood out is “The world outside your narrow evangelical community is scary and threatening, and so you all need to stick together, and not let its corrupt values influence you.” It was striking how much these movies presented a world that simply doesn’t exist, not even remotely. Yet their entire game is convincing their audience it does and that they’re living in it.

Freespoke doesn’t seem quite as crazy as God’s Not Dead. But that line in the ad positions it with a similar pitch. The kinds of people deeply worried about pornography, and very concerned about not buying products made by foreigners, and fretting about Google hiding the “truth” from them, are quite likely the sorts of conservatives scared of a (largely imagined) world dominated by the cultural left and out to get them. The story Freespoke is selling is that if you just use their search engine, you’ll be on the path to “Finding the truth, and the freedom to make up our own minds!,” as Mary C. puts it in one of the site’s testimonials. You’ll have access to the unbiased “truth” LaurieAnna W. found: “My husband and I searched a variety of topics we felt were being censored on Google, the difference in Freespoke is amazing! All the information they are suppressing is right there!…Great site!”

And with those truths and suppressed information in your pocket, you needn’t feel as threatened by the liberal arts sophomores at Sarah Lawrence you’ve never met, because you’ve got the “arrived at my own conclusions” truth on your side. But of course a great many of those sources you find while “doing your own research” are, well, quite bad. You’re not on the uncensored path to enlightenment and instead largely and systematically misinforming yourself.

I don’t hold all this against Freespoke. Like I said, playing with it gives more or less okay results, and the left/right/middle labels aren’t uproariously bad, even if they are pretty useless. Let a thousand non-Googles bloom, catering to the tastes of diverse audiences. That’s the market in action.

But the sales pitch warrants some skepticism.