It is election day, and Google is still unrepentantly pushing leftist and legacy media on voters searching for the presidential race.
Throughout October, every time MRC researchers searched the terms “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024,” Google rigged the results to bury right-leaning media outlet articles. Election Day is no different.
Utilizing the media list provided by AllSides, which classifies publications based on their “right” to “left” bias, MRC Free Speech America found that while search giant Google did finally show one right-leaning media article on the first page of results in its “Top stories” section, it continues to bury right-leaning media outlets in its actual search results. In a study conducted Nov. 5, MRC researchers discovered Google burying the first U.S.-based right-leaning news search result for the Trump prompt on the 12th page as the seventh result. Meanwhile, Google buried the first right-leaning news search result for the Harris prompt as the 10th result on the ninth page.
“Google has shown itself to be radically anti-American,” said MRC Free Speech America Director Michael Morris. “To say that the results of this mini study are just par for the course for Google would be an understatement. The search giant has made its preference known as MRC research continues to make clear. It has chosen to side against America’s first principles and in favor of elevating the left’s ideology above all else.”
The vastness of Google’s influence underscores the danger of its manipulation of search results. Google is uniquely positioned to have a significant impact on the most users. Despite the existence of competitors such as Luxxle, DuckDuckGo and Microsoft’s Bing, Alphabet subsidiaries Google and YouTube account for 90 percent of daily internet searches.
Offering voters an overwhelming number of left-of-center media to choose from, while burying right-of-center media outlets has serious consequences. A November 2023 Pew Research survey showed that more and more Americans prefer using search engines to get their news, with 15 percent of adults preferring them—up from 13 percent in 2022 and 11 percent in 2011.
How is Google using this tremendous power? Google chose to prominently display leftist and legacy media sources such as CBS News, USA Today, NPR, CNN and Politico in its search results. The search giant even prominently and repeatedly featured an outlet whose editorial board endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, The New York Times.
In fact, only two U.S.-based right-of-center results appeared in the first fifteen pages for the Trump prompt, two out of nearly 150 results. For the Harris prompt, there were five such results in the first fifteen pages.
This is far from the first time Google has placed its finger on the scale to manipulate search results on the presidential race. Successive studies on Oct. 30, Oct. 22, Oct. 15, Oct. 9 and Oct. 1 all showed that Google was burying right-of-center media outlets in its search results. For example, on Oct. 9 Google buried the first U.S.-based right-of-center result for the Trump prompt (a Fox News video) on page 23. Google did not show a single U.S.-based right-of-center news article anywhere on Oct. 9 as the results ran out at 26 pages.
Google’s election interference was also exposed by a September study showing that the search giant buried former president Donald Trump’s campaign website beneath a deluge of leftist news articles.
MRC Free Speech America has kept track of how censorship like this by Google has negatively impacted publications such as the New York Post, Fox News and others, alongside 238 other examples of Google censorship in our exclusive CensorTrack.org database.
Methodology
For this report, MRC Free Speech America analyzed the Nov. 5 Google search results of the innocuous words “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024.” 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. MRC Free Speech America also utilized the AllSides media bias chart as a gauge to determine which outlets are “right” and “lean right.” AllSides notes it has a “patent on rating bias and use[s] multiple methodologies,” not a homogenous group or an algorithm. “Our methods are: Blind Bias Surveys of Americans, Editorial Reviews by a multipartisan team of panelists who look for common types of media bias, independent reviews, and third-party data.”
Readers should be aware that this report only uses the AllSides list to analyze ratings of outlets considered by AllSides to be “right” and “lean right” and does not necessarily reflect MRC’s characterizations of these outlets.
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
