by WorldTribune Staff, March 20, 2024
Google since 2008 has been interfering in elections to benefit Democrat candidates, a media watchdog group reported.
In the last four presidential election cycles, the Big Tech behemoth has “utilized its power to help push to electoral victory the most liberal candidates…while targeting their opponents for censorship,” The Media Research Center (MRC) reported on Monday.
The report detailed 41 instances of “election interference” by Google since 2008.
In 2008, the report notes, Google threw its support behind then-Sen. Barack Obama as he faced off against Hillary Clinton for the Democrat nomination.
According to the MRC report, Google “targeted support for Hillary Clinton for censorship” by “suspending the accounts of writers who wrote blogs critical of Obama during his primary race against Clinton.”
Four years later, Google, which “once again favored Obama over Mitt Romney,” refused to correct a “Google bomb” that smeared GOP primary candidate Rick Santorum, according to the report.
But it was Donald Trump's victory over Clinton in 2016 that most devastated the leftists running the show at Google.
The MRC said that evidence it collected shows that election interference became part of its mission after Trump's victory. As one Google executive let slip in a secretly recorded interview, the company was working to actively “prevent the next Trump situation.”
After Trump became president, Google's election interference "went from making an appearance every four years to rearing its ugly head every two years," the report said. "Each time it attempted to dismiss the issue and downplay its nefarious actions. But when viewed together as a historical whole, Google’s election interference has been consistent and has only grown more and more expansive."
Among the MRC's findings:
• In 2018, research showed Google’s “significant pro-liberal bias” would be “enough, quite easily, to have flipped all three congressional districts in Orange County from Republican to Democrat.” Indeed, all three flipped blue. That same election cycle, Google labeled “Nazism” as one of the California GOP’s ideologies when users searched for the political party. AllSides, a firm that rates news outlets for political bias, found that just five percent of the stories that Google linked on its Google News homepage came from right-leaning media outlets. In turn, the platform pushed 15 times as much content from media outlets that AllSides identifies as left-leaning. Similarly, a search in the News tab for “Trump” displayed more than seven times as much content from media outlets that AllSides labels as left than those it deems as from the right on the first page of results.
• In 2020, Google “targeted” Tulsi Gabbard, the Democrat congresswoman from Hawaii who was running for the party’s nomination for president, by disabling Gabbard’s Ads account just as she became the most searched candidate following the first Democrat Party primary debate.
• In 2022, Google placed its thumb on the scale by censoring candidates in key races, and it continued censoring media. An MRC Free Speech America study found that Google buried 83 percent of the Republican campaign websites for the most competitive Senate races. Ten of the 12 candidates did not make the top 6 search results and 7 did not appear on the first page of search results at all. MRC Free Speech America analyzed searches conducted in Georgia during the 2022 Senate run-off race between Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) and Herschel Walker (R). In a very telling revelation, Google’s results favored Warnock in a swing precinct where greater proportions of undecided voters likely reside. The platform scrubbed Walker’s website from the first page of results altogether.
• Google has already begun interfering in the 2024 election. MRC Free Speech America found that Google buried the campaign websites for every significant opponent of Joe Biden (RFK, Jr. plus 15 Republican candidates). When searching for “Republican presidential campaign websites,” Google returned Democrat Mariane Williamson, but not former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and others. Additionally, Google's artificial intelligence Gemini (formerly Bard) has refused to answer prompts questioning two of Biden’s biggest weaknesses: the president’s mental health and the ongoing border crisis.
