by WorldTribune Staff, October 1, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump vowed that Google will face criminal prosecution “at maximum levels” for “illegal activity” through its bias against him in search results.
In a post on Truth Social, the former president said Google “has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump” while simultaneously “only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris.”
The post continues, “This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections. If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election, and become President of the United States!”
A recent Media Research Center (MRC) study revealed there is no doubt that Google is “padding” its results in favor of Harris.
“In the past, Google buried the campaign websites of Republican candidates. Now the search giant very clearly pads its search results about political candidates with leftist legacy news articles, many of which are hostile to Republicans and either neutral or favorable toward Democrats. Readers will have to sift through the biased news before they even see the organic results of their searches, let alone a candidate’s website,” the MRC said.
MRC Free Speech America researchers conducted searches on Sept. 6 for “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024” to determine where Google Search would position each candidate’s presidential campaign website.
“In both searches, news from leftist-biased legacy outlets like CNN and The New York Times populated the top of the search results,” the MRC said.
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“Former President Donald Trump’s campaign website appeared sixth in search results for “donald trump presidential race 2024.” But before reaching Trump’s website, readers would see options to click on seven articles from left-wing sources. The New York Times, Politico and The Washington Post were listed under the “Top Stories” panel.
A June study by MRC found that Google was burying Donald Trump’s campaign site while pushing then-candidate Joe Biden’s site to the top of searches.
The MRC conducted the study days before the debate which prompted high profile Democrats to force Biden out of the race.
The June study “revealed stark differences in how Google presents search results for various candidates,” the MRC said. When searching for a candidate’s name along with “presidential race 2024,” researchers found that Biden’s campaign website appeared as the top result, while former Trump’s website was notably absent from the first page of results.
Google also censored search results related to the assassination attempt at Trump’s July rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Breitbart’s Lucas Nolan noted that Google “attempted to play this censorship off as an innocent mistake.”
Breitbart News previously reported that users noted that when typing “assassination attempt on” into Google’s search bar, the auto-complete function did not suggest the recent incident involving Trump. Instead, it offered suggestions related to historical figures such as former President Ronald Reagan and musician Bob Marley.
In response to these allegations, a Google spokesperson provided clarification to Fortune magazine. The company stated that no “manual action” was taken on the auto-complete predictions and that they are “working on improvements” to the feature. Regarding the absence of suggestions related to the assassination attempt, Google explained that their systems have “protections against Auto-complete predictions associated with political violence,” which were functioning as intended prior to the recent event.