FIRST ON MRC: MRC Free Speech America has peered under the sheets to catch Google seemingly cuddling up to President Joe Biden to attack The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, just weeks before he exited the 2024 race. As always, the Media Research Center has the receipts to prove it.
When Biden directed his 38 million X followers to “Google Project 2025” last week, MRC researchers took him up on his advice. MRC found that Google, the Democrats’ good old friend, exclusively promoted the scandal-plagued president’s website in searches for “Project 2025.”
The new findings reinforce previous MRC reports exposing how Google has backed the scandal-plagued president until the days of his humiliating ouster from the Democratic ticket. Despite this, Google appears to have a new pal – the unpopular Vice President Kamala Harris.
Backdrop: Over the past several months, the Democratic Party has deceptively labeled Project 2025 as Trump’s plan to upend the federal government and to transform the country just to conservatives’ liking.
“Google Project 2025,” Biden wrote in a July 9 X post, reaching over 37 million views. Biden’s call to action followed his now-defunct campaign’s (@BidenHQ) month-long reliance on Google to draw attention to Project 2025. The X page now goes under Harris’s moniker, @KamalaHQ.
The Findings, Explained: Conducted on July 10, a clean environment search showed that Google placed Biden’s Project 2025 landing page — https://joebiden.com/project2025/ — at the top of the search results. This website was filled with grossly misconstrued and even demonstrably false information about Heritage’s project.
Tellingly, Google omitted Project 2025’s official website in all 106 results reviewed by MRC’s researchers. This means the tech giant barred curious Americans from learning about the initiative’s intent and proposals in its own words, rather than through the partisan lens of the Biden-Harris campaign.
Google linked to news articles from the left-leaning BBC and CBS News as the second and third results, respectively, before linking to a PDF copy of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise as the fourth result.
The tech giant also shared Wikipedia’s Project 2025 page, where it is characterized as an“authoritarian, Christian nationalist plan to steer the U.S. toward autocracy.” Only then did Google show a Heritage Foundation-owned page related to Project 2025 which offered only a brief introduction to the initiative. Again, Google did not show Project 2025’s official website — https://www.project2025.org/ — in any of the results.
In response to these findings, MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider suggested Google is making an in-kind contribution to the Biden campaign. “MRC has been sounding the alarm for years that Google is fighting tooth and nail to keep Democrats in the White House. What’s disturbing is that they’re doing it right before our own eyes,” Schneider said.
A Google spokesperson did not immediately respond to MRC’s questions about potential coordination with the Biden campaign (now Harris’s) before the president mandated Americans to “Google Project 2025.” The tech giant frequently refuses to answer MRC’s questions.
What Exactly Is Project 2025 and Why Biden Attacks It: Launched in response to conservative unpreparedness during the 2016 election, Project 2025 is an initiative led by Heritage promoting pro-freedom and conservative principles in the next administration. The non-partisan initiative is not affiliated with President Donald Trump or his campaign.
Trump himself has clarified he is not involved in Project 2025. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they're saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” the Republican candidate wrote on Truth Social earlier this month.
This has not stopped Biden nor Harris from attempting to draw negative attention by suggesting it would mark a Trump-led arrival of the antichrist and the end of so-called democracy. This, of course, is demonstrably false as Biden has grossly misrepresented what the project is about. Fortunately, the attacks have been thus far unsuccessful.
Enter Google.
Biden’s negative characterization of Project 2025 is evident by the page of his campaign website highlighted by Google. “Project 2025 is the plan by Donald Trump’s MAGA Republican allies to give Trump more power over your daily life, gut democratic checks and balances…,” the site falsely claimed.
Google’s Election Meddling Pattern: It isn’t immediately clear why the Harris campaign would appear first in the Google results. However, it adds yet another layer of controversy to the tech giant, as previous MRC studies have revealed that it has buried the campaign websites of Republicans while promoting those of Democrats.
On Wednesday, amid the 2024 Republican National Convention, MRC released a study revealing that Google searches for Trump and Biden along with the words “presidential race 2024” resulted in blatant favoritism: Google did not show Trump’s campaign website in the first 100 results but listed the Biden-Harris’s as the very first result.
This study followed an earlier MRC report showing Google buried Trump’s campaign ahead of the CNN presidential debate, where millions of Americans witnessed Biden’s cognitive decline, culminating in growing calls for him to step down from the 2024 race.
Following the debate, MRC released a third study that revealed Google News overwhelmingly featured leftist media outlets a day after the “bloodbath” debate. (Click here for a complete list of MRC studies on censorship and Big Tech bias).
Methodology: For this report, MRC Free Speech America analyzed the June 10 Google Search results for “Project 2025.”
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.
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