Georgia voters searching for information on “Donald Trump” may not get the results they’re looking for. For the second time in as many weeks, Google has been caught once again improperly manipulating American elections.
Originally reported on X, the Media Research Center has confirmed that searches for the phrase “Donald Trump” or “trump rally” yielded results featuring Kamala Harris’s name. The same research showed that searches for “Kamala Harris” or related topics only showed search results with the Vice President’s name, omitting results featuring Trump.
The search results also featured more information regarding Harris in Google’s “knowledge panel.”
“Google is reliably shameless,” said MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider. “It consistently manipulates data to achieve its political goals.”
This new finding comes shortly after watchdog groups pointed out that Google’s search tool was suppressing search results about the assassination attempt against former President Trump. Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) has pledged to investigate the tech giant for “censorship against conservative voices” and “willful discrimination against President Trump and users of your search engine.”
After online backlash, Google appears to have altered its algorithm as of August 1st.
Only days later, a federal judge ruled that Google and parent company Alphabet, maintained an illegal monopoly on search and text advertising. Google / Alphabet has been the subject of bipartisan lawsuits filed by the Department of Justice and 38 states in 2020 claiming that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act outlawing monopolies.
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in the decision.
Even tech giant Microsoft testified against Google during the case.
Google has repeatedly come under fire for political bias. In 2022 US Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) called out the search engine for censorship in its academic search tools and election interference via its Gmail spam filtering algorithm.
“Gmail marked emails as spam because of the ‘political affiliation of the sender,’ not because of the content of the email,” Hawley said in a letter dated April 27, 2022.
Google was also the subject of investigations for discrimination against employees for their political views.
