Google News and other major news aggregators overwhelmingly steered users toward left-leaning outlets in sections they could not personalize, according to an AllSides audit released after months of review. In the non-customizable sections of Google News, just 1% of articles came from right-leaning outlets, while 73% came from outlets AllSides rated as left leaning.
The same pattern showed up across the industry’s biggest feeds. AllSides said Apple News curated 2% of its articles from right-leaning outlets and 50% from the left in non-personalized sections, while Bing News drew 5% from conservative media and 72% from the left. Yahoo News, the group found, pulled 2% from the right and 53% from the left.
The timing gives the findings extra force. The audits ran between June and December 2025, over two-week periods, after FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson launched an inquiry into tech censorship in February 2025 and said his agency wanted to better understand how firms may have violated the law by silencing and intimidating Americans for speaking their minds. AllSides focused only on portions of the feeds curated by humans rather than algorithms, a narrower window that still pointed to a strong tilt in what millions of users were seeing.
AllSides, which uses a panel of experts with two members from the left, two from the center and two from the right to rate media outlets, framed the findings as a warning about how people encounter news on the largest platforms. Julie Mastrine said one-sided media can prevent Americans from considering multiple views and thinking independently, while noting that these aggregators have massive reach in the tens of millions of users. Mark Grabowski said the numbers make it hard to take claims of neutrality seriously, adding that there is no shortage of credible right-leaning journalism out there. Dan Schneider went further, arguing that about half of Americans now get their news from these tech companies and that most do not realize the information is algorithmically skewed to push a liberal narrative.
The friction point is not whether the platforms carry conservative content at all, but how little of it appears when users land on the sections meant to be neutral starting points. Google News, Apple News, Bing News and Yahoo News all rely on curation that shapes what readers see first, and AllSides’ data suggests that the first pass is still doing most of the political sorting. For users who treat those feeds as a shortcut to the day’s news, the question now is whether a tool designed to broaden choice is instead narrowing it before they ever start scrolling.
