A day after a report went viral criticising Google for using its muscle to bury anything that is spoken against it, a former Forbes reporter has claimed that she was also put under pressure by the tech giant to \u2018unpublish\u2019 a story.Kashmir Hill wrote a piece on Friday on online technology news platform Gizmodo saying Google had pressurised her and her publication to take down the story regarding its then-new social media platform \u201cGoogle Plus\u201d.<\/p>\n
She said \u201cthe incident happened in 2011, around the same time that a congressional antitrust committee was looking into whether the company was abusing its powers\u201d.<\/p>\n
Her claims follow a story regarding Google\u2019s \u201cabuse of power\u201d that was published in the New York Times on Wednesday which explained how Google\u2014unhappy with a scholar\u2019s statement who hailed European antitrust regulators\u2019 decision to fine the company $2.7 billion in late June\u2014fired nearly 10 scholars of the team from the tech giant-funded think tank The New America Foundation.<\/p>\n
After this story, Hill wrote that when she was working for Forbes she was pressurised to withdraw a story.<\/p>\n
At the time, in addition to writing and reporting, Hill helped Forbes run social media, and therefore, she attended a meeting with Google salespeople about Google Plus.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Google salespeople were encouraging Forbes to add Plus\u2019s \u2018+1\u2019 social buttons to articles on the site, alongside the Facebook \u2018Like\u2019 button and the \u2018Reddit\u2019 share button. They said it was important to do because the Plus recommendations would be a factor in search results\u2014a crucial source of traffic to publishers,\u201d Hill recounted.<\/p>\n
\u201cI asked the Google people if I understood correctly: If a publisher didn\u2019t put a +1 button on the page, its search results would suffer? The answer was yes,\u201d she noted.<\/p>\n
After the meeting, Hill approached Google\u2019s public relations team and the press office confirmed that the Plus button would influence the ranking, saying: \u201cIf you don\u2019t feature the +1 button, your stories will be harder to find with Google.\u201d<\/p>\n
The reporter later published a story headlined, \u201cStick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers\u201d, that included bits of conversation from the meeting.<\/p>\n
\u201cGoogle promptly flipped out and never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) between Google and Forbes,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Reportedly, Google also pressurised the higher-ups at Forbes by saying the article was problematic and had to come down.<\/p>\n
Soon after the report was unpublished, search results stopped showing the original story at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cDeliberately manipulating search results to eliminate references to a story that Google doesn\u2019t like would be an extraordinary, almost dystopian abuse of the company\u2019s power over information on the internet,\u201d she wrote, adding that she does not have any proof supporting her claim.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Google on Saturday responded to Hill\u2019s claims saying they had nothing to do with removing the article from the cache.<\/p>\n
Google\u2019s Vice President of Global Communications Rob Shilkin, said that like Google\u2019s other client meetings that discuss new features, the meeting with Forbes at that time was held under a non-disclosure agreement.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur sales team called their fellow attendees of the meeting from Forbes to express surprise that the article was based on a meeting held under NDA. I understand that one of our PR reps raised this concern to you, and then your editor. I understand that our PR rep asked that the piece come down from Forbes\u2019 website, as it was reporting on a confidential business meeting,\u201d Shilkin said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs for the Google cache, it\u2019s trivial for a website owner to request its cache to be cleared. I assume this is what happened because we had nothing to do with removing the article from the cache,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
The executive said that Google wouldn\u2019t engage in this type of behaviour\u2014never have, never will.<\/p>\n
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