Google has long been accused of censorship, from manipulating its search engines to de-prioritize conservative news websites and content to coordinating with Apple to remove conservative apps from its store.
In April, a North Carolina State University study found that Google’s Gmail marked 59.3 percent more emails from right-leaning candidates as spam compared to left-leaning candidates.
Breaking Digest recently reported that the RNC has sued Google for labeling millions of its get-out-the-vote emails as spam, resulting in significant financial loss.
Now, The Media Research Center (MRC), a conservative content analysis group, has called out Google for manipulating its search engine results to bury Republican candidates running in critical Senate states.
The MRC has publicly asked Google to “stop its war on democracy” and “provide algorithmic transparency” after they discovered that the campaign websites of 10 Republicans appeared on search result pages significantly lower down than their Democratic opponent’s sites.
Seven of these Republican websites weren’t even on the first page of Google search results.
The races analyzed by the MRC included 12 states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin.
The MRC commented on these findings, saying, “Google’s bias is undeniable when shown in comparison to other search engines. Bing and DuckDuckGo both show, with one exception, all 12 Democrat and Republican senate candidate’s websites within the top five organic search results.”
More from The MRC:
“Google must be investigated for its un-American efforts to sway the election,” said L. Brent Bozell, founder and president of the Media Research Center. “First, researchers caught Google red-handed by proving Republican campaign emails were sent to spam. Now we’ve uncovered Google manipulating search results to hide Republican campaign websites while promoting Democratic ones. This is all an effort by Google to help Democrats and interfere in the democratic process.”
MRC Free Speech America has analyzed Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo search results for the 12 Senate races identified by RealClearPolitics as the most important to watch. Our researchers caught Google burying 10 of 12 Senate Republican Party candidates’ campaign websites while highlighting their opponents campaign sites in organic search results. This stands in stark contrast to Bing and DuckDuckGo whose search results treated Republican and Democrat campaign websites more neutrally than Google.
Google must stop its war against Democracy. The first step it must take to begin to rebuild trust with conservatives is to:
Provide Transparency: We need detailed information so everyone can see if liberal groups and users are being treated the same as those on the right. Social media companies operate in a black-box environment, only releasing anecdotes about reports on content and users when they think it necessary. This needs to change. The companies need to design open systems so that they can be held accountable, while giving weight to privacy concerns;
Members of Congress must also take action to protect Americans’ free speech liberties. Congress should fully investigate this search result bias and all efforts by Google to influence the outcome of the midterm elections.
