Google’s election interference is just getting warmed up as we head into 2024.
MRC Free Speech America researchers searched Google for “presidential campaign websites,” but the search engine did not display a single Republican candidate on its first page of results the day before the first Republican Party presidential primary debate on Wednesday. President Joe Biden’s campaign website, of course, showed up as the second search result along with a Democratic Party challenger Marianne Williamson’s campaign website, which came up as the fifth result.
Google even displayed results for past failed Democratic Party presidential candidates who aren’t even running this cycle, including: Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) website, which showed up as the ninth result; Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) campaign website, which came in twelfth; and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign website, which appeared twenty-ninth in the results.
Notably, 2024 Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., did not appear in Google’s search results even though he is, at present, the biggest threat to President Joe Biden's nomination.
“Google has erased every threat to Joe Biden,” said MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider. “We know that Google pulled out all the stops to put Hillary Clinton in the White House, and it has continued to interfere in our elections ever since. Compared to other social media platforms, it is harder to document what Google does in secret, but we at MRC Free Speech America have caught them red-handed again.”
Schneider continued, “Google has consistently stood apart from all other search engines, and not in a good way. We have repeatedly seen Google and Big Tech social media platforms treat Republican candidates harshly compared to their Democrat opponents.”
Google’s election interference, shilling for Democrat candidates at the onset of the 2024 presidential election season, is unsurprising.
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 Aug. 22 Google search results of presidential campaign websites. MRC Free Speech America created an algorithm to automate this process in a clean environment. A “clean environment” allows for organic search to populate results without the influence of prior search history and tracking cookies.
MRC Free Speech America researchers searched the innocuous words “presidential campaign websites" using the algorithm. To determine bias, our researchers looked at Google’s results and recorded the rank(s) of each candidate’s campaign website on the first page of results.
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