Google Denies Election Interference After Report Cites Dozens Of Instances Helping Dems, Censoring Republicans
Google has denied a new report by the right-leaning Media Research Center (MRC) alleging 41 instances of "election interference" since 2008.
According to the report, Google has "utilized its power to help push to electoral victory the most liberal candidates…while targeting their opponents for censorship."
This article understates the magnitude of the problem – Google interferes to help Democrats thousands of times every election season!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 18, 2024
This is to be expected when their censorship (aka “Trust & Safety”) teams are have far left political views. https://t.co/y36yzdzIUQ
MRC also claims that 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."
In 2008, MRC alleged that Google threw its support behind then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) as he faced off against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. -NY Post
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, the report reads.
In 2019, 950 pages of Google's internal documents were leaked, revealing evidence of Google utilizing blacklists and machine learning algorithms to censor Republicans, conservatives, and populists.https://t.co/AAbichiMpg
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 18, 2024
According to Dr. Robert Epstein, who is cited in MRC's report and has conducted "dozens of controlled experiments" to uncover bias, Google's search algorithm "shifted at least 2.5 million votes" to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US election.
In 2018, President Donald Trump accused the search giant of rigging search results to display only left-wing and negative stories about him.
"Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD, Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal," Trump said in a now-deleted post on X.
In response, Google claimed "Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology."
Google denies
A company source told the NY Post that Epstein's claims have been "widely debunked." In one instance cited by the MRC report, Google is alleged to have "targeted" then-Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (HI), by "disabling Gabbard’s Ads account just as she became the most searched candidate following the first Democratic Party primary debate."
Google's source told the Post that the company's automated systems flagged 'unusual activity' due to large spending changes in an effort to prevent fraud - and the issue was resolved within six hours, per the source, who noted that Gabbard's subsequent lawsuit against the company was dismissed.
The MRC also alleged that Google’s left-leaning bias impacted the 2022 Georgia Senate race between former football great and Republican Herschel Walker and the eventual winner, the Democrat Raphael Warnock.
According to the report, Google’s search results “favored [the] incumbent” Warnock “in the swing precinct where greater proportions of undecided voters likely reside.”
A source close to Google told The Post that third parties who have looked at our results and “found no evidence to support claims of political bias.” -NY Post
"There is absolutely nothing new here — just a recycled list of baseless, inaccurate complaints that have been debunked by third parties and many that failed in the courts," a Google spokesperson told the outlet.
Of course, one can't help but be skeptical considering that just before the 2016 presidential election, among the many leaks published by Wikileaks as part of its Podesta email leak was Google's "strategic plan" to help democrats win the election and track voters.
Google head Eric Schmidt's secret strategic plan for the US election #PodestaEmails https://t.co/LskJODXyXn
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 31, 2016
More: https://t.co/ZUfh7WDAT5 pic.twitter.com/llq5G9kp5V