Tech giant Google has “interfered” in elections in the United States 41 times since 2008 to censor speech and boost certain Democrats, according to a right-of-center watchdog group.
Researchers found repeated examples in which Google “utilized its power to help push to electoral victory the most liberal candidates … while targeting their opponents for censorship,” according to a Media Research Center report published Monday. The influential subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., sought to prop up failed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton through its search algorithm in 2016, according to the report, though the pattern of Google’s interference efforts “can be traced back to 2008,” the group alleged in the report.
“Google’s massive and deliberate efforts to interfere in U.S. elections for the past 16 years is unacceptable and the biggest threat to American democracy today,” Media Research Center President Brent Bozell said in a statement.
The release of the report comes as Republicans continue to raise concerns over content moderation efforts by social media platforms, particularly their efforts in 2020, and the U.S. government’s communications with companies on removing disfavored speech. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Monday for Murthy v. Missouri, a landmark case brought by GOP state attorneys general accusing the Biden administration of pressuring social media companies to censor speech on elections, COVID-19, and other matters.
Moreover, the report’s release comes ahead of the 2024 elections, as Republicans rally around former President Donald Trump, against President Joe Biden, and also spend large sums on congressional races. This election cycle, employees at Google have already donated at least $317,000 to Biden’s campaign and joint fundraising committee combined, according to Federal Election Commission filings reviewed by the Washington Examiner.
In 2008, Google set out to censor bloggers supporting then-candidate Clinton to boost Barack Obama, who went on to become the next president, according to the Media Research Center’s report. The group’s report, for instance, cited a 2008 New York Times story on anti-Obama bloggers seeing their work labeled by Google as “spam,” though the company dubbed the situation an accident at the time.
Then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt later endorsed Obama in 2008 and 2012, with the billionaire and his staff repeatedly visiting the Obama White House and being “intimately involved in building Obama’s voter-targeting operation in 2012, recruiting digital talent, choosing technology and coaching campaign manager Jim Messina on campaign infrastructure,” according to a 2016 report by the Tech Transparency Project, a project of the left-wing Campaign for Accountability nonprofit group, and also the Intercept.
When it came to the 2016 election, Google hid search terms from users, including “Hillary Clinton crime reform” and “Hillary Clinton crisis,” according to the Media Research Center report. The watchdog cited 2019 congressional testimony from data scientist and research psychologist Robert Epstein, who said Google’s censorious search algorithm likely earned Clinton 2.6 million votes. Epstein’s methodology allegedly involved the preservation of 13,000 election-related searches before Election Day and “dozens of controlled experiments” on search results being biased against Trump.
In 2020, Google then censored Republicans online with the intent of preventing the reelection of Trump, according to the Media Research Center report. After Biden took office, his administration remained in close contact with Google and other social media companies about thwarting alleged “disinformation,” including on vaccines, according to documents unearthed through Murthy v. Missouri.
In late 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google manually blacklisted “right-wing publications,” while other reporting has detailed the company’s targeting of the advertising revenue of ZeroHedge and the Federalist. The Federalist, a conservative website, is suing the Biden State Department for funding an unconstitutional “censorship scheme” based on a Washington Examiner investigation.
“Google keeps proving, over and over again, that of all the Big Tech companies it presents the most dangerous threat to democracy,” Dan Schneider, vice president for the Media Research Center’s Free Speech Alliance group, told the Washington Examiner.
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“It has gargantuan power and has pledged to use it to achieve its warped culture agenda, starting with our elections,” Schneider said.
Google did not return a request for comment. The Media Research Center’s 19-page report can be viewed here.