A study has found that Google is hiding former President Donald Trump’s campaign website under stories written by liberal news outlets while searches of Vice President Kamala Harris display flattering results and her campaign website more prominently.
The Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, analyzed searches for both candidates on Sept. 6 and found “Donald Trump presidential race 2024” produced negative news from liberal media outlets at the top of the search results. Mr. Trump’s campaign website appeared sixth in results, underneath stories from The New York Times, Politico and The Washington Post.
Ms. Harris’ campaign website was much easier to find, the MRC study discovered. It showed up much higher in the Google search, and nearly all the news stories above it were favorable and written by left-leaning outlets.
Dan Schneider, vice president of the Media Research Center’s Free Speech America program, said the search engine previously made it even more difficult to find Mr. Trump’s campaign website but has shifted tactics and is now placing it below liberal news reports about the former president, which tend to be negative.
“The big difference now is that Google puts a series of newspaper articles above search results, and for Donald Trump, all those newspaper articles, or media articles, are from left-wing outlets, and all those stories are harsh about Donald Trump,” Mr. Schneider said. “All the articles that Google produces above Kamala Harris’ website are puff pieces about her.”
Google did not immediately respond to an inquiry about the MRC study. The company told Fox News that the study “looked at a single, rare search term, on a single day, several weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites ranked in the top results on Google.”
For years, the tech giant has been accused of favoring Democrats over Republicans, and critics point to employee campaign donations to support their claims.
According to the data company Quiver Quantitative, Google ranked first among the top 20 donors to the Harris campaign as of September, spending $1.46 million on her bid. Microsoft ranked second in Harris donations, spending $743,045 on her campaign.
Neither Google nor Microsoft appears on the list of top 20 donors to the Trump campaign.
“Google & Microsoft very disproportionately donate to the Democratic Party,” X owner Elon Musk posted earlier this week. “Between them, they control close to 100% of web browsers and search. Even with the best of intentions, they can’t help but introduce bias.”
Separate Google searches performed by The Washington Times on Thursday for “Donald Trump” and “Kamala Harris” showed different treatments for the two candidates.
The search for Mr. Trump’s name showed his campaign website buried under a block of unflattering photos and news stories.
A search of Ms. Harris’ name immediately returned ActBlue’s “Official Harris 2024 Website,” a fundraising site paid for by the Harris Victory Fund political action committee, as the top result. ActBlue is the Democratic Party’s online fundraising machine.
No. 2 result was her campaign website and a block of flattering photos and biographical information. The next result was Ms. Harris’ official White House page, followed by news stories about Ms. Harris’ meeting Thursday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. A succession of her social media pages appear underneath the news stories.
The results for a search of Mr. Trump’s name produced starkly different results. There was no sign of WinRed, the Republicans’ online fundraising tool. Mr. Trump’s official campaign website could be found only after scrolling past several smirking photos of the former president and unfriendly opinion pieces, including a New York Times column headlined “The Dangers of Donald Trump, From Those Who Know Him” and the Esquire magazine headline “I Feel Compelled to Point Out That Donald Trump Sounds Absolutely Insane.”
By midafternoon, the Trump search results had shifted to include a story on Ms. Harris leading Mr. Trump in several polls, a CNN story on Mr. Trump “icing out Zelenskyy,” and a New Republic magazine piece titled “Trump’s Newest Grift Just Dropped — and It’s Hideous.”
No Republican or Trump fundraising pages appeared anywhere in the search.
A search for the Republican Party’s WinRed site instead returned a top result of an ActBlue page sponsored by the Democratic Party to raise funds for Senate Democratic candidates.
It was followed by the WinRed “directory” page, a series of WinRed posts on X, and an Al Jazeera news headline that WinRed “misleads U.S. consumers into recurring donations” and several other unflattering pieces about the fundraising site.
A search of ActBlue turned up the ActBlue page as the top result, and no reference to WinRed. Near the bottom of the search page was a link to a press release from the Texas attorney general’s office about an investigation into whether ActBlue is complying with laws governing credit card donations.
Google has been accused of manipulating its algorithm in a way that disfavors Mr. Trump.
In July, after the first attempted assassination of Mr. Trump, users noticed Google’s autocomplete feature would fill in President Harry Truman’s name after “assassination attempt on Trum…”
In other searches, users found that in searches of “President Donald Trump,” the autocomplete feature would fill in “President Donald Duck,” or former Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, who served in the 1980s.
Google has also faced criticism over its AI feature and was forced to roll it back when users discovered, among other flaws, that it could not create images of White people.
In July, Mr. Trump slammed Google and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, for initially censoring the now-iconic photo of him pumping his fist in the air after the assassination attempt at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in which a bullet grazed and bloodied his right ear.
“Both are facing BIG BACKLASH OVER CENSORSHIP CLAIMS. Here we go again, another attempt at RIGGING THE ELECTION!!! GO AFTER META AND GOOGLE. LET THEM KNOW WE ARE ALL WISE TO THEM, WILL BE MUCH TOUGHER THIS TIME. MAGA2024!” Mr. Trump posted on his Truth Social media site.
Facebook said the photo censoring was an error. Google said the autocomplete problem with Mr. Trump’s name was a glitch that was corrected.
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.
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