Vice President Kamala Harris was just busted for attempting to manipulate Google search results for legacy media outlets through her misleading campaign ads over the last week.
The Biden-Harris administration has been repeatedly caught coordinating with Big Tech to censor Americans’ free speech under the guise of protecting viewers from so-called “misinformation.” But this apparent leftist virtue only carries so far it seems. Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign was caught attempting to manipulate Google search results by turning fake news headlines into sponsored campaign ads, first discovered and later reported by AllSides Tuesday.
Seemingly responding to the left’s ever-present crusade against free speech that runs afoul of their narrative, The Free Press editor Bari Weiss responded to the Axios exposé by asking, “Will this count as misinformation? Or nah?”
The Google Ads Transparency Center, which AllSides cited, shows that Harris paid to link fake headlines with popular news sites. “Some of the Google ads display pro-Harris slogans while linking to articles mostly from news sources AllSides rates as Lean Left, such as AP, PBS, and CNN and some Center-rated sources such as Reuters,” AllSides reported. Other outlets that the campaign used included NPR, The Independent, Time and The Guardian.
One fake headline the Harris campaign misleadingly attributed to the “Lean Left” media outlet The Guardian read, “VP Harris = Repro Leader.” It was paired with the summary: “VP Harris is a champion for reproductive freedom and will stop Trump's abortion bans.” Another headline misleadingly attributed to Reuters flatly claimed, “Inflation Is Down” with a summary that read, “Under the Biden-Harris Administration ‘The U.S. is winning the inflation fight.’”
Harris’s campaign ads didn’t simply rewrite article summaries and headlines to favorably frame her policies. It also created headlines to make Trump look bad.
AllSides tested its research by conducting real Google searches in one of the places where the Harris campaign targeted these fake news ads. AllSides found that a search on Google for “donald trump patriot” returned an article from the left-leaning UK outlet Independent, with Harris’s ad presenting the fake news headline: “Trump Defends Jan 6 Comments | VP Harris Protects Democracy.” Yet, according to AllSides, the corresponding Independent headline on the piece read, “Kamala Harris warns of ‘all-out attack’ on voting rights by Trump and Republicans.”
The Harris campaign targeted these ads at users in crucial swing states including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to the Google Ads Transparency Center. The Google tool also showed that Harris’s campaign has spent $878,000 for text-based ads in Google Search (which includes but is not limited to ads with fake news headlines).
AllSides CEO John Gable emphasized the impact of this search manipulation in a statement Wednesday. “"The Harris campaign is running Google ads that blur the line between campaign content and news reporting,” he said. “These ads are misleading, misrepresent the original news content, give the appearance of support for her candidacy, and create an impression of bias on the part of the outlets whose content is being promoted. These types of ads should be disallowed from Google.”
Statement from AllSides CEO on Harris campaign's misleading Google ads@Google @KamalaHQ @KamalaHarris pic.twitter.com/Uk52Y0SCPB
— AllSides (@AllSidesNow) August 14, 2024
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