Conservative watchdog group Media Research Center (MRC) released a damning report on Monday alleging that Google has engaged in rampant election interference for the last 16 years, with 41 known instances since 2008—each time benefitting the Democratic Party.
According to the MRC’s 19-page report, Google’s meddling was first detected during the 2008 election, then intensified in 2016, continuing on to the present 2024 election cycle. In that time, the tech company has “utilized its power to help push to electoral victory the most liberal candidates, regardless of party, while targeting their opponents for censorship.”
“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,” wrote MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider and editor Gabriela Pariseau. The remark in question was made public by Project Veritas in mid-2019 when Google executive Jen Gennai was caught on an undercover video describing the company’s imperative to “prevent the next Trump situation in 2020.”
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“Google’s outsized influence on information technology, the body politic and American elections became evident in 2008,” Schneider and Pariseau continued. “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.”
Quoting from MRC founder and President Brent Bozell, the report describes Google’s nearly two decades of election interference efforts as “unacceptable and the biggest threat to American democracy today.”
The report indicates that the political meddling began during the 2008 Democratic primary election, when “Google appeared to select the radical, young Barack Obama to help spur to victory over John McCain; meanwhile, it targeted support for Hillary Clinton for censorship, suspending the accounts of writers who wrote blogs critical of Obama during his primary race against Clinton.”
Later, in 2012, Google again supported Obama, refusing to correct a “Google bomb” smearing Republican primary candidate Rick Santorum.
By 2016, Clinton managed to become Google’s preferred candidate, and “Google pushed Clinton, using its algorithm to exclude potentially damaging autofill results while not doing the same for then-candidates Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders.”
Following Trump’s victory in 2016, Google’s election interference timetable was increased from every four years to every two, with midterm elections now becoming a priority as well. In 2018, Google helped to flip three Congressional districts in Orange County from Republican to Democrat. In 2020, Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard was censored in favor of Joe Biden.
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Other examples include burying Republican campaign websites during the 2022 midterms, giving preferential treatment to left-wing news sources, and, just this year, suppressing search results for Biden’s challengers, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump.
The most recent example MRC cites is Google’s AI program Gemini (formerly Bard) refusing to answer questions that reflect negatively on Biden. Last month, Gemini created a separate headache for the company after refusing to generate images of White people.
“In many of the cases listed above, Google either admitted that it had made errors or attempted to downplay studies and reports critical of its actions,” MRC concluded. “But neither defense explains why Google’s election interference always seems to go in one direction: favoring the radical left at the expense of the right.”
The center recommended that House Speaker Mike Johnson launch a congressional investigation into Google, and also called for internet users to switch to alternative search engines to divest from Google entirely.
In a response to the report published by the New York Post, Google described it as “a list of baseless, inaccurate complaints that have been debunked by third parties and many that failed in the courts.”
“Politicians on the left have a long history of making similar claims, too,” the company continued. “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 full report from Media Research Center can be read below:
MRC-Google-Election-Interference-Report.pdf-1710439680476Download
Connor Walcott is a staff writer for Valuetainment.com. Follow Connor on X and look for him on VT’s “The Unusual Suspects.”
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