Politics

Google Alleged To Put Finger On Electoral Scale

[Rayanshomes, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons]

According to a new alarming report, Google has been using its power to shape web searches and determine spam emails to help Democratic candidates win the presidency.  

A new research report has revealed that the tech giant helped Barack Obama defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary and has spent nearly a decade and a half censoring Republicans who challenged Democrats for the White House.

The Media Research Center conducted an investigation that revealed that between 2008 and February 2024, Google wielded its influence to support the electoral success of the most progressive candidates, regardless of their political affiliation, while simultaneously censoring their adversaries.

“MRC researchers have found 41 times where Google interfered in elections over the last 16 years, and its impact has surged dramatically, making it evermore harmful to democracy. In every case, Google harmed the candidates – regardless of party – who threatened its left-wing candidate of choice,” MRC Free Speech America vice president Dan Schneider and editor Gabriela Pariseau wrote in a summary of their findings, according to Fox News. 

“From the mouths of Google executives, the tech giant let slip what was never meant to be made public: That Google uses its “great strength and resources and reach” to advance its leftist values,” they continued. “Google’s outsized influence on information technology, the body politic and American elections became evident in 2008. After failing to prevent then-candidate for president Donald Trump from being inaugurated following the 2016 election, Google has since made clear to any discerning observer that it has been — and will continue — interfering in America’s elections.”

Examples include appearing to favor Barack Obama over John McCain in 2008, favoring Obama over Mitt Romney in 2012, refusing to correct a “Google bomb” that “smeared” then-leading GOP primary candidate for president Rick Santorum, using its algorithm to exclude autofill results that were potentially damaging to Hilly Clinton in 2016, “not doing the same for then-candidates Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders,” and working with partners to help likely pro-Clinton Latino voters go to the polls that same year, according to MRC Free Speech America. 

Other examples cited by the MRC include disabling Tulsi Gabbard’s Ads account just as she became the most searched candidate following the first Democratic Party primary debate in 2020, suppressing news critical of Biden, concealing most Republican campaign websites for the 12 competitive Senate races in 2022, and aiding Biden in 2024 by “burying in its search results the campaign websites of every one of his significant opponents.”

Google denied any wrongdoing. “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 New York Post.

“Politicians on the left have a long history of making similar claims, too,” the company rep said, adding: “We have a clear business incentive to keep everyone using our products, so we have no desire to make them biased or inaccurate and have safeguards in place to ensure this.”

The Google spokesperson said that “numerous conservatives have been particularly successful in using our platforms to spread their message to a wide audience.”

The MRC report echos a study from 2022 that “Google’s Gmail cost Republican candidates over $2 billion in donations since 2019 by flagging most fundraising emails as spam, according to research shared exclusively with Fox News Digital by the Republican National Committee, National Republican Congressional Committee, National Republican Senate Committee. 

The Republicans based their conclusions on a North Carolina State University study that found Gmail allows the vast majority of emails from Democratic to land in the user’s inbox while more than two-thirds of messages from conservative candidates are marked as spam. 

Gmail “retained the majority of left-wing candidate emails in inbox (< 10.12% marked as spam) while sent the majority of right-wing candidate emails to the spam folder (up to 77.2% marked as spam),” the study found

“Big Tech has been silencing conservative voices and actively working against Republicans for multiple cycles. Google’s email suppression – which affects the GOP’s fundraising and GOTV efforts – is another egregious example. Silicon Valley oligarchs are suppressing free political speech.” – RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, NRSC Chairman Senator Rick Scott and NRCC Chairman Congressman Tom Emmer said at the time. 

Republicans would go on to struggle with the midterms that year. 

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