President Donald Trump continues to confound academics as they try to explain possible correlations between Google searches and electoral victory. The conclusion? It’s all up for grabs!
Psychology Today’s report concluded that Trump is once again the chaos candidate. The article’s main observation suggested: “The polls might be way off, again.” In past elections, there has been a correlation between a candidate’s popularity in Google search and his electoral victory. The study “Google Search Predicts Big Surprise in November Election,” clarified that “in 2016, search interest in Trump actually did accurately predict the election result.” Even so, the article mused that “Google search data may not have the same predictive power as in previous elections.”
The study made clear that “Trump has generated by far the most search interest both nationally, and in each and every state.” The study also hedged this observation by making careful note that: “One could argue that Trump is an anomaly, because, as a controversial character, he generates lots of extra interest apart from people's voting preferences.”
However, for unexplained reasons, Trump’s opponent, Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden appears to have been competitive at times: “But in March of this year, search interest in the two candidates was roughly equivalent, suggesting that Biden is capable of generating search interest comparable to Trump.”
The article’s conclusion determined that this election appears to be a complete toss-up:
“Despite the power of large numbers embodied in Google search results, the only really safe prediction at this point is: accurate prediction will be as difficult as everything else this year.” [Bolding added.]
The question remains as to Google’s role not just as a platform for searches, but as a means of steering information to its own political objectives and biases.
Liberal Google critic Dr. Robert Epstein wrote that Google gave at least 2.6 million votes to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 and speculated that it could coerce “upward of 15 million votes” in the Democrats’ favor in 2020.
Donald Trump, Jr. accused Google of “election interference” after the search engine giant reportedly demonetized skeptic news website ZeroHedge and sent a warning that it would take similar action against The Federalist. NBC News alleged that “A Google spokesperson said in an email on Monday that it demonetized the websites after determining they violated its policies on content related to race.”
Google also flip-flopped on its ad policies after intense criticism by liberals who complained that Google could specifically benefit the Trump campaign. Guerilla journalism group Project Veritas published an infamous video showing Google Responsible Innovation Head Jen Gennai caution that “breaking up Google” would not “prevent the next Trump situation.” She also mused how changes in Google’s secret algorithms could have prevented Trump’s election from happening in the first place.
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