The Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway highlighted the ways Big Tech disseminates propaganda to an extent that would make even George Orwell blush.
Hemingway discussed the dire implications of Big Tech’s intrinsic biases in the June 19 episode of the You’re Wrong podcast with Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi. She stressed that Big Tech’s decision to tip the scales of political discourse is a major threat to a free society, the implications of which dwarf the other forms of election interference.
“Well, first of all I think violations of First Amendment rights are actually…I think that’s worse than election interference as bad as election interference is,” Hemingway said. “It’s all related to self-government, right? Like if we don’t have the ability to seek truth and argue for truth and convince other people of truth, it’s the same thing as election interference where you don’t have the right to pick your own people.”
Hemingway stressed that common manipulations tactics employed by Big Tech, like biased search algorithms, have the ability to dramatically shift public opinion, ensuring that competing narratives are suffocated before they can be deliberated upon by the public.
“It affects the way people think about every issue,” Hemingway argued. “Take something like trans issues. Polling shows that even the vast majority of Democrats are like ‘No, I don’t believe men should be able to play on girls’ teams,’ and yet you watch the media and you do the Google search, and everything will be like fed to you like you’re the crazy person for thinking that men shouldn’t be on girls’ sports teams and, you know, that affects who you vote for and what you think gets normalized.”
Hemingway also stressed the effectiveness of Google’s suppression of true but ideologically inconvenient narratives, which the tech giant hides by burying in the search results.
“You remember that old saying about how Osama Bin Laden was hard to find and that they finally found him on the second page of Google results?” Hemingway asked. “Like, the joke being, that’s an impossible place to find anything. Well, try the 20th page of Google results, you know, where the first page is this left-wing site and that left-wing site and everything is like pushing it. And then that becomes what Wikipedia says, and that’s what feeds into the AI systems so … it’s just overwhelming.”
Google has received criticism for its handling of election related search results, specifically regarding the 2024 elections. In one study, MRC Free Speech America found that Google’s search results were burying the campaign websites of prominent Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley while promoting the website of obscure candidate Will Hurd.
Google was also promoting the websites of President Joe Biden and Marianne Williamson while burying the website of Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In a separate study, MRC found that Google was hiding Trump’s website in the wake of his conviction on 34 felony counts in New York City.
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