Google erased Project Veritas from search results, once again hiding information from the American public.
Project Veritas released a video that allegedly showed Pfizer’s Director of Research and Development claiming the company is considering mutating COVID-19 to “preemptively develop new vaccines.” The video has been viewed 20 million times according to James O’Keefe founder and CEO of Project Veritas.
MRC Free Speech America researchers analyzed Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo search results for “Pfizer Project Veritas” — commonly searched keywords — and found that Google buried Project Veritas’s website and its social media pages sharing the video on page one of search results. But links to both the organization’s website and its Twitter post appear in Bing’s and DuckDuckGo’s top four search results on page one.
O’Keefe called Google’s bias “an indication of the coziness between powerful organizations through the reciprocity of their shared interests.”
None of Google’s page one search results lead users to Project Veritas’s original report on the video or its social media accounts. Instead, the search giant showed results for an absurd combination of news reports. Google displays in its search results news reporting from The Hill’s morning show “Rising,” Indian news outlets like CNN-News18 and OpIndia and a link to the Soros-funded Poynter Institute’s summary of a Georgian fact-check.
For a search engine that claims to present “the most relevant, useful results,” it sure missed the mark.
MRC Free Speech America researchers found that Bing and DuckDuckGo produced results that users might expect to see. Project Veritas’s tweet of the full ten-minute video showed up as DuckDuckGo’s first result and Bing’s third result on page one. A link to Project Veritas’s reporting of the undercover journalism appeared as DuckDuckGo’s third result and Bing’s fourth result on page one.
BREAKING: @Pfizer Exploring "Mutating" COVID-19 Virus For New Vaccines
— Project Veritas (@Project_Veritas) January 26, 2023
"Don't tell anyone this...There is a risk...have to be very controlled to make sure this virus you mutate doesn't create something...the way that the virus started in Wuhan, to be honest."#DirectedEvolution pic.twitter.com/xaRvlD5qTo
This isn’t the first time MRC Free Speech America has caught Google exhibiting blatant search bias.
The day before the National March for Life, Planned Parenthood was Google’s first result for the innocuous word “pregnancy.”
Google also hid search results for Republican candidates just before the 2022 midterm elections. MRC Free Speech America researchers analyzed Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo search results for 12 Senate races and found that Google buried 10 of 12 Senate Republican Party candidates’ campaign websites while highlighting their opponent's campaign sites. This bias did not carry over 36 top House races, which did not hang in the balance. Google even went after its fiercest critics in Congress, burying all 10 Republican Party Big Tech critics that MRC Free Speech America researchers analyzed.
The search giant again favored the Democratic candidate in the December Georgia senate run-off election. Google’s search results favored Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) in a swing precinct, where greater proportions of undecided voters likely reside.
Methodology
For this report, MRC Free Speech America analyzed the Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo search results for the words “pfizer project veritas” on January 27, 2023, two days after Project Veritas released its viral video.
MRC Free Speech America created an algorithm to automate this process in a clean environment. A “clean environment” allows for an organic search to populate results without the influence of prior search history and tracking cookies.
MRC Free Speech America researchers searched the words “pfizer project veritas” using the algorithm. To determine bias, our researchers looked at each search engine’s results and recorded the rank(s) of the results observed.
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