On Monday, SEO expert Rand Fishkin reported in SparkToro that he had obtained thousands of pages of leaked documents from Google’s Search Division, showing that the tech company engages in whitelists for election-related searches.
The documents provided evidence of many search manipulations that Google had denied implementing over the years, including using click-centric user signals, the existence of a “NavBoost” system for ranking quality, and whitelists for COVID-19 and election-related searches. Erfan Azimi, the source of the leaks, hopes to increase transparency and hold Google accountable for its actions.
Update: Google Search Doc Leak Reveals “Election Authority” Whitelist
The documents detail how certain flags are used to label different sites, affecting how highly they rank in searches. One of these flags was “isElectionAuthority,” which alludes to Google’s manipulation of search results for election matters.
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The question of what websites should be considered election authorities strikes at the heart of political divides. The validity of the 2020 presidential election has been called into question by Donald Trump, as many world leaders throughout history have called into question their own elections.
Silicon Valley tech companies have often been criticized by conservatives for influencing elections. According to a CNBC report in 2020, 88 percent of political donations by Google employees went to Democrats. Critics point to the overwhelmingly liberal bias in tech companies as a motive for their manipulation of their platforms for political reasons. The full scale of this whitelist is still unknown to the public, but Google’s left-wing tilt suggests it would promote left-wing authorities.
Some critics claim that the actions by Google and others may violate campaign finance law. The Federal Election Committee (FEC) explains that “an in-kind contribution is a non-monetary contribution. Goods or services offered free or at a less than the usual charge result in an in-kind contribution.” By law, these contributions must be reported to the FEC. Google regularly offers preferred search rankings in the form of ads, which is the company’s primary source of revenue.
Related: Google Has Interfered in US Elections 41 Times Since 2008
In 2022, Google launched a similar whitelist which would keep US political candidates campaign emails out of receivers spam folders. A North Carolina State study found that the email spam filtering by gmail was biased towards left-wing candidates, even more so than Outlook or Yahoo.
There are currently no reports of the FEC or DOJ investigating Google for the potential in-kind contribution violations.
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