Election interference: Google buries Trump site in search results
Google has buried the Trump campaign’s official website deep in its search results while propping up Biden’s, raising concerns about election interference.
What the research shows
A study conducted by the Media Research Center (MRC) on Wednesday analyzed the search rankings for the three presidential nominees in the 2024 race: Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Using a clean search environment free from cookies or search history that could influence the results, the researchers examined three combinations of phrases for each candidate ending with the words “presidential race 2024.”
They found that for the searches relevant to Trump, the Trump campaign website did not even make the first 100 search results. When the equivalent search was done for Biden, however, the Biden campaign website appeared as the first result. In a similar search, Robert F Kennedy, Jr’s campaign site took the fourth spot.
The Gold Report has confirmed that a search for “Biden campaign presidential race 2024” displays the Biden campaign website on the first page of search results, while a search for “Trump campaign presidential race 2024” appears on the third.
‘More sinister behavior at Google’
“Other left-wing media outlets and platforms are taking a pause from their anti-Trump tactics, but not Google,” said MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider. “The search giant has doubled down on its anti-American, election interference strategies.”
“People who often do political searches on their computers will likely get different results since Google tracks their search history,” he continued. “But this study reflects a much darker, more sinister behavior at Google. It is through this kind of data manipulation that Google swayed millions of votes in the 2020 election. It must not be allowed to corrupt our democracy.”
A history of interference
Google executives have been open about their hostility toward Trump. Shortly after Trump’s victory in 2016, Google founder Sergey Brin told employees: "As an immigrant and refugee, I certainly find this election deeply offensive, and I'm sure many of you do too." [Like Brin, Melania Trump is also an immigrant.]
Around the same time, Google CFO Ruth Porat promised employees that the corporation would use its “great strength and resources and reach” to push Leftist ideologies.
This year Google launched its AI flagship chatbot, Gemini, which drew heavy backlash for its woke biases. In addition to depicting America’s Founding Fathers as Black men, for example, Gemini engaged in criticism of Trump while refusing to do the same about Biden.
Although the tech giant continues to deny that it engages in election interference, analyses have shown otherwise. A study from MRC earlier this year found that Google has interfered in US elections 41 times over the last 16 years, beginning with the 2008 general election that saw the rise of Barack Obama.
