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.”
Earlier this year, Gemini, Google’s AI bot, repeatedly refused to generate images of white people when prompted. For example, when asked to produce images of popes it reportedly produced images of an Asian female pope. The bot also reportedly portrayed U.S. revolutionary soldiers as Asian women and Vikings as black.
Kris Ruby, AI researcher and CEO of Ruby Media Group, told Fox News host Jon Scott on Fox Report that AI algorithms are given parameters and rules of what it is and is not allowed to produce in order to eliminate information deemed “toxic.”
“"So the issue with the outputs is the input rules and when people are saying make me this photo, draw me this photo, what they don’t see is the parameters and the rules that dictate what is allowed to be made and what isn’t,” Ruby said.
“After a baseline for toxicity is defined, technology companies use safety labels, filters, and internal scoring to shape the digital world,” Ruby told Fox News Digital. "When it comes to AI censorship, whoever controls the definition of toxicity controls the outcome. Every model action (generative AI output) will fundamentally stem from how toxicity is defined. Your version of toxicity shapes the world around you.”
It appears Google changed the results it produced for searches of “trump rally” on August 1 after backlash on social media.
Earlier this week, Google appeared to change its algorithm after it was called out for not including Trump’s name in it’s autocomplete options in searches beginning with “assassination attempt on.”
Methodology
MRC researchers searched for “donald trump” and “kamala harris” using an algorithm to automate the 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 searched “trump rally” in a private window using Google search without being logged into a Google account. To determine bias, our researchers analyzed Google’s search results for inconsistencies.
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