Michael Morris
Michael B. Morris, Esq. has been MRC Free Speech America & MRC Business Director since November 2022.
Gabriela Pariseau
Gabriela is an Assistant Editor in the Media Research Center’s Free Speech America division. She is a graduate of Christendom College where she earned a B.A. in History.
Google is still at it. Just two days before the widely anticipated presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, the tech giant buried Trump’s campaign website in its search results. But Biden’s appears at the very top for voters looking for information about him.
“Google is blatantly interfering in the 2024 election,” said MRC President Brent Bozell.
MRC Free Speech America uncovered proof of Google’s bias and censorship through two separate sets of search queries. First, MRC researchers analyzed the Google Search results for the six presidential candidates still in the race Tuesday. When searching for a candidate’s name and the words “presidential race 2024,” Google completely buried Trump and elevated Biden as the first search result. In fact, the tech giant excluded the only two major pro-life candidates from the top-three search results, singling out Trump and Constitution Party candidate for president Randall Terry. Every other candidate appeared in the top-three results. But the tech giant’s censorship didn’t end there. Google again buried Trump’s campaign website as the 39th result, while elevating Biden’s to the very top in a separate set of searches for “republican party presidential campaign websites” and “democratic party presidential campaign websites” respectively.
This comes a little over three weeks after MRC revealed Google suppressing the Trump campaign website following a Manhattan, New York jury’s guilty verdict in the dubious case filed by George Soros-backed prosecutor Alvin Bragg.
MRC Vice President Dan Schneider echoed Bozell’s remark about Google’s election interference: “Google has all but declared Joe Biden as the only major candidate running for president, or at least that’s what its search results suggest. Pushing Biden to the top of search results, while burying Trump just before one of the most consequential debates in our nation’s history is just the tip of the iceberg of this tech behemoth’s history of election-interfering censorship.”
Google Buries Trump Campaign Website, Elevating Biden’s to First Result
For the first set of search queries, Google shut out entirely Trump’s presidential campaign website, while pushing Biden’s up to number one on the results page in respective searches.
But there’s more. The only two major pro-life candidates still in the race were excluded from the top search results entirely. Trump and Terry’s campaign websites were completely buried while all other candidates still in the 2024 race appeared in the top-three Google Search results.
The campaign websites of Biden, Independent candidate Cornel West and Green Party candidate Jill Stein each appeared as the first result for their respective searches. Meanwhile, Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver each appeared as the third result.
Google Buries Trump Campaign Site Again in Second Set of Queries Focusing on Dems vs. GOP Candidates
MRC researchers focused on the parties of the two leading presidential contenders for the second set of Google Search queries.
In a search for “republican party presidential campaign websites,” Google buried Trump’s campaign website as the 39th out of 40 results shown. MRC Researchers found it just beneath the website link to democrats.org, which boasts of funds donated to Democrats being “put to use strengthening our efforts to defeat MAGA Republicans.” No other top Republican Party candidate’s campaign websites appeared in the search results, but a familiar face did appear in the top-10 results. GOP presidential candidate drop-out Will Hurd’s name-sake website appears as the sixth result, 33 spots above Trump’s campaign website.
MRC researchers also analyzed the Google Search results for “democratic party presidential campaign websites.” Google Search results predictably elevated Biden’s campaign website to the top of the heap, making it the first result after the same democrats.org website link that appeared above Trump’s campaign website in the other search query. Google also posted a second link to the official Biden campaign website as the 19th result out of 40.
One other Democratic Party candidate campaign website also appeared in the results. Marianne Williamson’s “Official Campaign Website” appeared as the sixth result.
Unlike the search for “republican party presidential campaign websites,” when MRC researchers searched for “democratic party presidential campaign websites” not a single link appeared with their chief opposition party’s name in the headlines.
The importance of where a link ranks in Google Search cannot be overstated. Google is the most used search engine worldwide with a global market share of nearly 92 percent. But even more pointedly, the higher a search result appears in Google Search results, the more likely it is that a user will click on a particular result, according to search engine optimization expert Brian Dean.
Dean conducted a study analyzing how often users click on various rankings of Google search results. His blog, Backlinko, reported in May 2023 that “The #1 Result In Google Gets 27.6% of All Clicks” and it has a “10x higher [Click Through Rate] compared to the #10 result.”
A similar study by FirstPageSage showed that “Search Position 1” in Google Search results enjoys a 39.8 percent Click-Through Rate, while “Search Position 2” (18.7%) and “Search Position 3” (10.2%) show a precipitous dropoff that only worsens as you scroll down the results.
Google Has Been Up to the Election-Interfering Censorship Game for a While Now
This is by no means the first time Google has been involved in election-interfering censorship activities. Time and again Google has elevated its favored liberal candidate while suppressing the opposition. MRC Free Speech America compiled 41 times Google was caught interfering in U.S. elections, beginning in 2008, intensifying in 2016 and continuing into 2024. MRC researchers found carefully crafted studies and numerous reports (from 2008 through February 2024) that have consistently demonstrated the tech behemoth’s election meddling. At the time of that MRC study’s release, MRC founder and President Brent Bozell said of Google, The tech giant’s “massive and deliberate efforts to interfere in U.S. elections for the past 16 years is unacceptable and the biggest threat to American democracy today.”
Methodology
For this report, MRC Free Speech America analyzed the June 25 Google Search results for two separate queries.
For the first query, researchers searched “joe biden presidential race 2024,” “donald trump presidential race 2024,” “robert f. kennedy jr. presidential race 2024,” “jill stein presidential race 2024,” “cornel west presidential race 2024,” “randall terry presidential race 2024,” and “chase oliver presidential race 2024.”
For the second query, researchers searched “republican party presidential campaign websites,” and “democratic party presidential campaign websites.” To determine bias, our researchers looked at Google’s results and recorded the rank(s) of each candidate’s campaign website.
MRC Free Speech America created an algorithm to automate this process in a clean environment. A “clean environment” allows for organic search to populate results without the influence of prior search history and tracking cookies.
To determine bias, our researchers looked at Google’s results and recorded the rank(s) of each candidate’s campaign website on the first page of results.
This article was originally published by MRCNewsBusters.
