The Media Research Center constantly launches bogus partisan attacks on Google in order to intimidate it into giving right-wing lies and misinformation a pass. That’s pretty much what a March 18 report by Gabriela Pariseau and Dan Schneider — largely a rehash of its previous bogus attacks — is about, complete with dubious research and inflated numbers:
Google has been getting away with election interference for at least 16 years, and it is showing no signs of stopping.
MRC Free Speech America researchers compiled 41 times Google was caught interfering in U.S. elections, beginning in 2008, intensifying in 2016 and continuing into 2024. MRC researchers found carefully crafted studies and numerous reports (from 2008 through February 2024) that have consistently demonstrated the tech behemoth’s election meddling.
MRC founder and President Brent Bozell highlighted just how dangerous Google’s election interference is. “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,” said Bozell.
Over the years, Google has repeatedly used its power to help push the most liberal candidates to electoral victory while targeting their opponents. In 2008, the company used a light touch helping then-Senator Barack Hussein Obama (D-IL), its favored primary candidate, and undermining his opponent, then-Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY).
But after Democrats took a devastating loss in the 2016 election, evidence collected by MRC shows that election interference became part of its mission. As one Google executive let slip in a secretly recorded interview, the company was working to actively “prevent[] the next Trump situation.”
After Donald Trump became president, the tech behemoth’s election interference went from making an appearance every four years to rearing its ugly head every two years. Each time it attempted to dismiss the issue and downplay its nefarious actions. But when viewed together as a historical whole, Google’s election interference has been consistent and has only grown more and more expansive.
Pariseau don’t explain why they felt the need to use Obama’s middle name, something conservatives have been periodically obsessed with. This kind of gratuitous partisanship exists throughout their so-called report — and they appear not to realize that doing so destroys any credibility the report might have outside their right-wing bubble. Their first example was an obscure one:
- In 2008, Google endorsed the radical, young Sen. Obama and censored support for Sen. Clinton. Journalist Simon Owens reported at the time that the tech giant suspended the accounts of writers who wrote pro-Clinton blogs critical of Obama. “[N]early all of [the censored bloggers] had three things in common,” Owens wrote. “Most were pro-Hillary Clinton blogs, all were anti-Barack Obama, and several were listed on justsaynodeal.com, an anti-Obama website.”
In fact, this temporary blockage was caused by a reaction by spam detection tools to spam emails referencing the “Just Say No Deal” campaign that affected only blogs using Google’s Blogger tool, not all internet content — something Pariseau and Schneider don’t make clear. They also offer no evidence whatsoever that this was done deliberately; this sort of evidence-free inference of malicious intent would continue throughout the report.
The report also rehashed claims by “data scientist and research psychologist Robert Epstein” regarding “2.6 million votes that Google shifted in 2016,” which censored the fact that Epstein’s work has been discredited since it relied on just 21 undecided voters.
Another claimed the report hyped:
Researchers uncovered clear evidence of election interference in 2018. Research showed Google’s “significant pro-liberal bias” would be “enough, quite easily, to have flipped all three congressional districts in Orange County from Republican to Democrat.” Indeed, all three flipped blue. That same election cycle, Google labeled “Nazism” as one of the California GOP’s ideologies when users searched for the political party. AllSides, a firm that rates news outlets for political bias, found that just five percent of the stories that Google linked on its Google News homepage came from right-leaning media outlets. In turn, the platform pushed 15 times as much content from media outlets that AllSides identifies as left-leaning.
This is another Robert Epstein work, so it’s dubious at best, and it ignores the fact that Google actually rewards reputable reporting instead of explicitly “left-leaning” outlets.
The report rehashed a claim that Google was “accused of blocking GOP fundraising emails from reaching users’ inboxes and sending out “go vote” reminders only to Democrats” — but Pariseau and Schneider censored the fact that the researchers the MRC had cited as the basis of this claim pointed out that user preferences eliminate the bias they claim exists.
Pariseau and Schneider rehashed yet another bogus claim:
In 2022, Google placed its thumb on the scale by censoring candidates in key races, and it continued censoring media. An MRC Free Speech America study found that Google buried 83 percent of the Republican campaign websites for the most competitive Senate races. Ten of the 12 candidates did not make the top 6 search results and 7 did not appear on the first page of search results at all. In similar searches, MRC Free Speech America examined how Google treated 10 politicians known for criticizing Big Tech, either legislatively or vocally. Researchers found that Google buried the campaign websites of all 10 politicians and seven of them did not appear at all on the first page of the results. MRC Free Speech America analyzed searches conducted in Georgia during the 2022 Senate run-off race between Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) and Herschel Walker (R). In a very telling revelation, Google’s results favored Warnock in a swing precinct where greater proportions of undecided voters likely reside. The platform scrubbed Walker’s website from the first page of results altogether. AllSides also once again found Google News bias in 2020. The firm found that 61 percent of the stories included on the Google News homepage linked to leftist media outlets. Meanwhile, only three percent linked to right-leaning media outlets–a 20 to 1 disparity.
As we’ve documented, the MRC used search terms no normal human would use — suggesting an effort to game the search results for partisan purposes — and have refused to publicly release the results they generated.
Despite their flawed and blatantly partisan work, Pariseau and Schneider demanded that right-wing legislators harass Google to punish them:
Given the consistent nature of Google’s election interference and censorship prowess, the Big Tech giant must be made to come to heel. MRC Free Speech America recommends that Congress, State legislatures and American citizens take action to investigate Google and begin curbing its power to interfere in American democracy.
Because this the MRC we’re talking about, the truth doesn’t matter — only advancing the narrative does, and we know the right-wing media bubble doesn’t care that much about the truth if the narrative works. Indeed, both WorldNetDaily and Newsmax did their own stories regurgitating the MRC’s biased work.
When Google responded to the MRC’s attack on it, Luis Cornelio penned a sneering response in a March 18 post:
Big Tech censorship giant and chronic election meddler Google issued a pathetic response to an MRC Free Speech America report exposing its 16-year scheme manipulating U.S. elections to benefit the most liberal candidates.
After Fox News reported on the Media Research Center’s findings, a Google spokesperson claimed that there was “absolutely nothing new” in the report. The tech giant described the findings as a “recycled list of baseless” and “inaccurate complaints,” but cited scant evidence to dispute them. Nice try, Google.
In response to Google’s claims, MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider declared: “Google has censored every candidate, from both sides of the aisle, seeking to replace Joe Biden a whopping 112 times, but it has not censored Biden a single time. And now Google wants us to believe that the same company that manipulated search prompts to create a black George Washington or an Asian Adolph Hitler does not manipulate its search results. Google used to get away with this obfuscation, but the American public is now wise to its ways. Nobody is buying Google’s claims anymore.”
[…]Google told Fox News that it has an “incentive” to keep the whole political spectrum of users happy. “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 spokesperson claimed.
Yet Google’s assertions directly contradict growing evidence demonstrating that the tech company has indeed manipulated its products to be used as weapons favoring the most liberal candidates and ideals.
Again, Cornelio offered no actual proof that Google did any of the things the MRC has accused it of doing deliberately — more shoddy research. Also, the MRC report served up largely rehashed attacks that Google has presumably responded to already, so there is little reason to make new comments about old, discredited work.