Fox Business’s Mornings with Maria and Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends provided extensive coverage of MRC Free Speech America’s latest study digging up Google’s election interference efforts over the last 16 years. Guests on both shows lambasted the leftist tech giant and called for it to finally be held accountable.
MRC researchers found 41 examples revealing Google’s election interference efforts between 2008 and 2024 to benefit the most liberal candidates including former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden. Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo and her guests discussed whether Google should have to disclose its apparent in-kind donations to the political candidates it appears to favor. Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt and guest commentator Kurt “The Cyberguy” Knuttsson stressed the significance of Google’s autofill search suggestions that seemed to favor one candidate.
“A Media Research Center study finds Google interfered with U.S. Elections 41 times of the last 16 years,” Bartiromo said. “MRC finding that from 2008 to February 2024 Google, quote, utilized its power to help push to electoral victory the most liberal candidate while targeting their opponents for censorship.”
Bartiromo also noted that Google’s response to MRC’s report “pushing back, saying it has [a] business incentive to keep both sides happy and safeguards ensure non-biased and accurate search results,” despite evidence to the contrary.
New York City Council Minority Leader Joe Borelli reacted to the story and found Google’s response laughable. “You really have to be in a hole or a cave to think that social media companies, tech platforms aren't biased towards the left. We saw this happen in real-time,” Borelli said.
Borelli went on to suggest that Big Tech companies should be required to disclose their contributions to campaigns given in the form of online technological advantages. “If any one of these companies, just for an example, put up a giant billboard on their headquarters and said ‘Vote for Joe Biden,’ they would have to file a campaign disclosure, they’d have to say they're doing some sort of campaign expense to help a certain candidate. They are doing that,” Borelli said, referring to Big Tech companies that aid political candidates behind the scenes.
“They're doing it on their tech platforms, and yet they're not required to do any of that disclosure. This is something that I think needs significant, significant investigation and oversight,” he continued.
Over at Fox & Friends, Knuttsson told Earhardt that the algorithms unfairly curate the flow of information. “This is just another example of why algorithms like the one that operates the Big Tech beast, Google, should be transparent,” he said. “It should be not left up to one group to control what we see, when we see it, and they're just passing around the megaphone to whoever they choose and that is how this works. It’s not fair to everybody.”
Knuttsson also noted the significance of Google autofill filtering. “That autofill thing is very important,” he said. “You and I go, we start searching and you know how it completes it for us? Well it might complete it in a way that steers our mind in a completely different direction.”
In its recent study, MRC Free Speech America noted instances of election interference every presidential election cycle since 2008, impacting candidates from both political parties:
- 2008: Google suspended the accounts of bloggers who supported Hillary Clinton and later its CEO endorsed Obama.
- 2012: Inconsistent with its stated policy, the tech giant refused to correct a “Google bomb” that smeared then-leading GOP primary candidate for president Rick Santorum. The platform had previously fixed the same issue when it impacted Obama years earlier.
- 2016: Google used its algorithm to exclude autofill results potentially damaging to Clinton while not doing the same for then-candidates Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders.
- 2018: Researchers accurately predicted that Google’s “significant pro-liberal bias” would be “enough, quite easily, to have flipped all three congressional districts in Orange County California from Republican to Democrat.”
- 2020: Google targeted then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) when it disabled her Ads account just as she became the most searched candidate following the first Democratic Party primary debate. The tech giant also suppressed news sources critical of Biden and reportedly blocked GOP fundraising emails from reaching users’ inboxes.
- 2022: Google buried most Republican campaign websites for 12 of the most competitive Senate races (10 of 12 did not make the top 6 search results and 7 did not even make the first page of search results).
- 2024: Google has been aiding Biden’s reelection campaign by burying in its search results the campaign websites of every one of his significant opponents (including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump and every other Republican polling at or above 1%. When searching for “Republican presidential campaign websites,” Google returned Democrat Marianne Williamson, but not Trump, DeSantis, Haley, etc.).
You can read the full report here:
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