“The reality is that tech companies have been using automated tools to moderate content for a really long time and while it’s touted as this sophisticated machine learning, it’s often just a list of words they think are problematic,” said Ángel Díaz, a lecturer at the UCLA School of Law who studies technology and racial discrimination.

I suspect billions of people will be happy to receive their answers to complicated queries directly on the search results page, uninterested in where the information comes from, so long as it’s accurate enough.

But to everyone who depended even a little bit on web search to have their business discovered, or their blog post read, or their journalism... See more