On 28 March, Briony Swire-Thompson began seeing reports online that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) might cancel grants for research on misinformation. At first, she didn't think she would be affected. Swire-Thompson, a psychologist at Northeastern University, studies misinformation--but not the political lies that get most of the attention. She's interested in false information about cancer, and why people fall for it. "There's a lot of people online trying to sell their snake oil," she says.

Around the time of the 2016 election, YouTube became known as a home to the rising alt-right and to massively popular conspiracy theorists. The Google-owned site had more than 1 billion users and was playing host to charismatic personalities who had developed intimate relationships with their audiences, potentially making it a powerful vector for political influence. At the time, Alex Jones's channel, Infowars, had more than 2 million subscribers. And YouTube's recommendation algorithm, which accounted for the majority of what people watched on the platform, looked to be pulling people deeper and deeper into dangerous delusions. The process of "falling down the rabbit hole" was memorably illustrated by personal accounts of people who had ended up on strange paths into the dark heart of the platform, where they were intrigued and then convinced by extremist rhetoric--an interest in critiques of feminism could lead to men's rights and then white supremacy and then calls for violence. Most troubling is that a person who was not necessarily looking for extreme content could end up watching it because the algorithm noticed a whisper of something in their previous choices.

A full hour before the sun rose in Washington, DC, Tuesday, President Donald Trump fired off a pair of tweets claiming that Google had "rigged" search results against conservatives. Like so many Trump grievances, the argument seems steeped less in fact than a roiling stew of personal animus. But in Google News, the latest subject of his ire, Trump may have found the perfect target. In Trump's tweets--which he later deleted, then tweeted again, with no substantive changes--you can see the outlines of an attack that can't be easily fact-checked or dismissed. Charges of bias against Google will stick, because no algorithm is truly neutral.