Google has been putting its thumb on the scale to help Democratic candidates win the presidency in the last four election cycles during which it censored Republicans, according to a right-leaning media watchdog.
The Media Research Center published a report alleging 41 instances of “election interference” by the search engine since 2008.
The MRC published a report accusing Google of having “utilized its power to help push to electoral victory the most liberal candidates…while targeting their opponents for censorship.”
The report comes weeks after AllSides conducted an analysis which found that news aggregator Google News skewed even more off the charts in 2023.
Google has also come under fire after its Gemini AI image generator produced “woke”-inspired and historically inaccurate images such as black Vikings, female pope and Native Americans among the Founding Fathers.
Google has denied the claims made by MRC.
Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO and X owner, chimed in on the subject with a post on his social media platform.
Musk wrote that Google “interferes to help Democrats thousands of times every election season.”
“This is to be expected when their censorship (aka ‘Trust & Safety’) teams are have far left political views,” Musk wrote.
Musk was responding to a post that included a screenshot of The Post’s article about MRC’s report.
In 2008, MRC alleged that Google threw its support behind then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) as he faced off against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
According to the MRC report, Google “targeted support for Hillary Clinton for censorship” by “suspending the accounts of writers who wrote blogs critical of Obama during his primary race against Clinton.”
Four years later, Google, which “once again favored Obama over Mitt Romney,” refused to correct a “Google bomb” that smeared GOP primary candidate Rick Santorum, according to the report.
The MRC study cited data from Dr. Robert Epstein, who told Congress that Google’s search algorithm “shifted at least 2.5 million votes” to Clinton in her failed race against the eventual winner, Donald Trump.
Epstein claimed to have conducted “dozens of controlled experiments” that uncovered the impact of Google’s bias.
But a source close to the company pushed back, citing flaws in Epstein’s methodology which produced claims that were “widely debunked.”
In 2020, Google “targeted” Tulsi Gabbard, the Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who was running for the party’s nomination for president, by “disabling Gabbard’s Ads account just as she became the most searched candidate following the first Democratic Party primary debate,” the MRC alleged.
A source close to Google refuted the claim, saying that the company’s automated systems flagged unusual activity due to large spending changes in an effort to prevent fraud.
The matter was resolved within six hours, according to the source, who noted that Gabbard’s subsequent lawsuit against the company was dismissed.
The nonprofit went on to accuse Google of having “suppressed news sources critical of [Joe] Biden.”
The MRC also alleged that Google’s left-leaning bias impacted the 2022 Georgia Senate race between former football great and Republican Herschel Walker and the eventual winner, the Democrat Raphael Warnock.
According to the report, Google’s search results “favored [the] incumbent” Warnock “in the swing precinct where greater proportions of undecided voters likely reside.”
A source close to Google told The Post that third parties who have looked at our results and “found no evidence to support claims of political bias.”
“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 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.”
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