For years, the Media Research Center has been waging a unfair and distorted partisan war against Google. Unsurprisingly, that war has continued during the 2024 presidential election. Luis Cornelio complained in a June 28 post:
Google News overwhelmingly propped up leftist media outlets in the aftermath of the CNN debate between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, MRC Free Speech America can confirm.
MRC researchers conducted a clean search query for “Biden,” “Trump,” and “Presidential Debate” in Google News tabs on Friday. The results, while unsurprising, revealed that the tech giant significantly boosted leftist media outlets a day after polls showed that Trump dominated Biden in the first presidential debate ahead of the 2024 general election.
Key Findings:
- Out of the 12 spots in the Google News tab, the Media Research Center found that only one right-leaning outlet was highlighted when searching for “Biden.”
- When searching for “Trump,” only leftist outlets were exclusively highlighted.
- Similarly, when searching for “Presidential Debate,” Google News barely spotlighted Fox News, while prominently featuring 16 leftist outlets.
Google Highlights Leftist Outlets by an 11 to 1 Ratio in Search for “Biden” in News Tab
The CNN debate has been widely described as a Biden “bloodbath,” but do not expect Google to show right-leaning outlets using similar language.
Analysis completed by MRC researchers shows that Google News results for the “Biden” and “Trump” queries almost completely excluded right-leaning media outlets, based on a media list provided by AllSides.
By an 11 to 1 ratio, Google highlighted leftist media outlets while censoring reports from right-leaning media outlets as categorized by AllSides.
Instead, the tech giant prominently featured media outlets such as CNN, The Washington Post, NBC News, Politico and The Associated Press, all of which are dubbed as left-leaning media by AllSides.
Other media outlets included The Hill, Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, which are considered center-leaning by AllSides.
We’ve documented how right-leaning AllSides’ labeling is highly dubious and subjective — indeed, it’s laughable for AllSides and the MRC to portray mainstream outlets like CNN, The Washington Post, NBC News, Politico and the Associated Press as “leftist.” Further, no evaluation was performed on any of the articles from those outlets for their individual bias, so Cornelio can’t possibly know if any bias actually exists.
Gabriela Pariseau spent an Aug. 1 post complaining that Google assumed searchers would want to know about Donald Trump’s opponent when searching for Trump:
Google is redirecting users searching for former President Donald Trump’s name toward news about Vice President Kamala Harris in what appears to be another search term switcheroo, an MRC Free Speech America search found.
The MRC findings corroborate reports from X owner Elon Musk and others who noted that when users search for “donald trump” or “trump rally,” the banner with news results listed Harris’s name.
When MRC researchers searched for the terms “donald trump” on Tuesday, Google displayed what is described as a “knowledge panel” about the former president including his name and fomer title. The search giant followed up with a news panel labeled “News about Harris·Trump” banner.
“Harris keeps calling Trump and Vance ‘weird.’ Here’s why,” read a headline by the Associated Press piece shown second. As if that was not enough, Google highlighted a Washington Post headlined, “Trump, with a history of sexist attacks, again faces a female opponent” in the third result.
A Wednesday search for the term “trump rally” prompted news panels favorable to Trump’s opponent. “Kamala Harris rally in Atlanta,” reads the title of the first news panel.
When MRC researchers searched for the terms “kamala harris,” Google results showed a knowledge panel of her name and the fact that she is the vice president of the United States followed by a news panel labeled “Kamala Harris visit to Georgia.” Trump’s name is not mentioned in either the first or second Google news panels in the resulting search.
“Google is reliably shameless,” MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider said of the anti-Trump censorship. “It consistently manipulates data to achieve its political goals. Yet again it appears to be altering its algorithms to feed the American people a positive narrative about one candidate while disseminating terrible accusations against the other.”
Pariseau didn’t explain why Google must censor information about Harris in a Trump-related search.
Pariseau made a similar baseless assumption about deliberate Google bias in an Aug. 7 post:
Google is still redirecting users to news about Vice President Kamala Harris even when they search for a completely different name, an MRC Free Speech America search found.
Now that the Democratic Party nominee has picked her running mate, Tim Walz, MRC decided to put Google once again to the test. Researchers conducted a comparison of Google’s search results when searching for “j d vance rally” and “tim walz rally,” and in both cases, Google referenced Harris. But in the case of Vance, Google referenced Harris even before Vance.
When MRC researchers searched for the terms “j d vance rally” on Tuesday, Google displayed a news panel labeled “Top Stories Kamala Harris and JD Vance.” All of the top six news results referred to Vance, four of the six stories referred to Harris as well.
But when MRC researchers searched for Harris’s own vice presidential pick (“tim walz rally”) Google showed Walz’s name first. “Top Stories Tim Walz ᐧ Kamala Harris,” the news panel read. A USA Today story noted an upcoming Philadelphia rally, CNN noted Harris’s recent decision to choose Walz as her running mate and a third article noted that Trump blasted Walz as a “West Coast wannabe.”
Again, Pariseau offered no evidence to back up her assumption of deliberate bias — she’s simply parroting her employer’s narrative. She further parroted her preferred presidential candidate making a similar argument in a July 30 post:
Trump took to Truth Social to revel in Facebook and Google getting called out for censoring search terms and an iconic image related to the attempt on his life.
“Facebook has just admitted that it wrongly censored the Trump ‘attempted assassination photo,’ and got caught. Same thing for Google,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They made it virtually impossible to find pictures or anything about this heinous act. Both are facing BIG BACKLASH OVER CENSORSHIP CLAIMS.” The former president added, “Here we go again, another attempt at RIGGING THE ELECTION!!! GO AFTER META AND GOOGLE. LET THEM KNOW WE ARE ALL WISE TO THEM, WILL BE MUCH TOUGHER THIS TIME. MAGA2024!”
The Daily Mail drew attention to Google’s search suppression in a July 28 report. Users who typed the words “assassination attempt on” were given autocomplete search suggestions finishing the search that did not include former President Donald Trump. Instead, Google finished the search with the names: “truman,” “reagan,” “ronald reagan,” “george wallace,” “lenin,” “gerald ford,” “franklin roosevelt,” “andrew johnson,” “fdr,” and “seward.”
Notably missing was the most recent assassination attempt against a former president just 15 days prior.
In Google’s explanation of how its search autocomplete feature works it claims: “To determine what predictions to show, our systems look for common queries that match what someone starts to enter into the search box.” The search giant alleged that it also considers factors such as the language, location and trending interest of the query as well as the user’s past searches.
However, Google Trends showed that the number of searches for “assassination attempt on trump” was significantly higher than “assassination attempt on truman” and “assassination attempt on reagan.” That was true for searches in the state of Virginia (where MRC researchers conducted the search), for searches conducted in the United States and also for searches conducted worldwide. Researchers also examined searches over the last 24 hours (July 28 and 29), the last 30 days, and the last 20 years.
[…]Google Communications responded to the backlash in an X post claiming, “There was no manual action taken. Our systems have protections against Autocomplete predictions associated with political violence, which were working as intended prior to this horrific event. We’re working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up to date.”
Defending itself, the company downplayed the issue. “Of course, Autocomplete is just a tool to help people save time, and they can still search for anything they want to. Following this terrible act, people turned to Google to find high-quality information – we connected them with helpful results, and will continue to do so,” Google added
MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider, however, called Google out for its lackluster response. “Note how Google says ‘no manual action take[n],’ admitting that its algorithm is designed to silence info about Trump.”
Mild inconvenience due to a certain term not appearing in autofill is not “search suppression” — indeed, neither Pariseau nor Schneider offered any evidence that any actual searches on the Trump assassination attempt were blocked. Still, Catherine Salgado spent an Aug. 7 post repeating this narrative and hyping right-wing lawmakers accusing Google of “erasing” the Trump assassination attempt from the internet — despite the fact that, again, nobody was actually blocked from searching for it — and claiming that not including certain things in autofill is “election interference.”