(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Media Research Center revealed that Google has “interfered” with major elections in the United States 41 times over the last 16 years.
“[Google’s] impact has surged dramatically, making it evermore harmful to democracy,” MRC Free Speech America vice president Dan Schneider and editor Gabriela Pariseau wrote.
The company pushed back by saying that it has a “clear business incentive” to keep both political sides happy and that safeguards ensure non-biased and accurate search results, according to Fox News.
The most recent example was recorded after Google AI Gemini “refused to answer questions damaging” to Joe Biden, MRC Free Speech America, a division of the conservative MRC, said.
“[From 2008 through February 2024,] Google has utilized its power to help push to electoral victory the most liberal candidates, regardless of party, while targeting their opponents for censorship,” the group said.
Favoring Barack Obama over John McCain in 2008 and over Mitt Romney in 2012 and refusing to correct a “Google bomb” that “smeared” then-leading GOP primary candidate for president Rick Santorum were examples of the interference.
Other examples included using its algorithm to exclude autofill results that were potentially damaging to Hillary Clinton in 2016 but “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.
In addition to that, the organization discovered that Google was 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 helping Biden in 2024 by “burying in its search results the campaign websites of every one of his significant opponents.”
“Utilizing the many tools in its arsenal, Google aided those who most closely aligned with its leftist values from election cycle to election cycle since as far back as the 2008 presidential election. Meanwhile, it targeted for censorship those candidates who posed the most serious threat,” Schneider and Pariseau said.
