Trump vs. Google, and Why the Corporate State Media Sucks

Yet it appears to be totally uninterested in getting to the bottom of the most fundamental and important question of our time, like: is this whole Democracy™ thing a sham?

Via Reuters (emphasis added):

Former U.S. President Donald Trump, who is the Republican presidential candidate, said on Friday he will seek the prosecution of Google if he wins the Nov. 5 election, claiming that the company only displays "bad stories" about him.

Trump, in his post on Truth Social, gave no evidence for his assertion about Google.

"It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about" Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, Trump said.

"This is an illegal activity, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant interference of elections," Trump said. "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."

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump made a similar claim about Google in 2019, according to the Washington Post. He alleged in a series of posts on Twitter, now known as X, that Google favored negative news stories about him in the 2016 presidential election, according to the Post. Google dismissed the claims at the time.

Google said they’re innocent back in 2016, which Reuters dutifully reprints uncritically, while refusing to comment on a current story.

Hence… another “conspiracy theory” debunked!

Case closed!

Related: Elite Media Propagandist Cries at Davos: ‘We Owned the News’

For the record, the evidence that manipulated search engine results — and the auto-fill suggestions that Google provides in real time, and the news articles it curates and presents to users, and all of the money it funnels to Democrats and RINOs — can easily influence voting behavior is well-documented.

Via Psychological and Cognitive Sciences (emphasis added):

Companies could affect—and perhaps are already affecting—the outcomes of close elections worldwide. Restricting search ranking manipulations to voters who have been identified as undecided while also donating money to favored candidates would be an especially subtle, effective, and efficient way of wielding influence.

Although voters are subjected to a wide variety of influences during political campaigns, we believe that the manipulation of search rankings might exert a disproportionately large influence over voters for four reasons:

First, as we noted, the process by which search rankings affect voter preferences might interact synergistically with the process by which voter preferences affect search rankings, thus creating a sort of digital bandwagon effect that magnifies the potential impact of even minor search ranking manipulations.

Second, campaign influence is usually explicit, but search ranking manipulations are not. Such manipulations are difficult to detect, and most people are relatively powerless when trying to resist sources of influence they cannot see (66 –68). Of greater concern in the present context, when people are unaware they are being manipulated, they tend to believe they have adopted their new thinking voluntarily (69, 70).

Third, candidates normally have equal access to voters, but this need not be the case with search engine manipulations. Because the majority of people in most democracies use a search engine provided by just one company, if that company chose to manipulate rankings to favor particular candidates or parties, opponents would have no way to counteract those manipulations. Perhaps worse still, if that company left election-related search rankings to market forces, the search algorithm itself might determine the outcomes of many close elections.

Finally, with the attention of voters shifting rapidly toward the Internet and away from traditional sources of information (12, 61, 62), the potential impact of search engine rankings on voter preferences will inevitably grow over time, as will the influence of people who have the power to control such rankings.

We conjecture, therefore, that unregulated election-related search rankings could pose a significant threat to the democratic system of government.

Related: Quantitative Analysis Shows Google Steered 6 Million Votes to Biden in 2020

So, here I am doing Reuters’ job for it — for, I might add, far less money or social credit. It turns out life as a sellout weasel shilling lies is far more lucrative than as an honest person trying his best to tell the truth. 

Renowned Google researcher Robert Epstein’s recent testimony to Congress is excerpted below, in which he cites hard, quantitative evidence of how Google systematically manipulates election outcomes by controlling what information it allows users to access.

Via American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (emphasis added):

If you were to examine the data I have been collecting over the past 6-and-a-half years, every one of you would put partisanship aside and collaborate to reign in the extraordinary power that Google and Facebook now wield with unabashed arrogance. 

Here are five disturbing findings from my research, which adheres, I believe, to the highest possible scientific standards in all respects: 

1. In 2016, biased search results generated by Google’s search algorithm likely impacted undecided voters in a way that gave at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton (whom I supported). I know this because I preserved more than 13,000 election-related searches conducted by a diverse group of Americans on Google, Bing, and Yahoo in the weeks leading up to the election, and Google search results – which dominate search in the U.S. and worldwide – were significantly biased in favor of Secretary Clinton in all 10 positions on the first page of search results in both blue states and red states…

2. On Election Day in 2018, the “Go Vote” reminder Google displayed on its home page gave one political party between 800,000 and 4.6 million more votes than it gave the other party. Those numbers might seem impossible, but I published my analysis in January 2019 (https://is.gd/WCdslm) (Epstein, 2019a), and it is quite conservative…

3. In the weeks leading up to the 2018 election, bias in Google’s search results may have shifted upwards of 78.2 million votes to the candidates of one political party (spread across hundreds of local and regional races). This number is based on data captured by my 2018 monitoring system, which preserved more than 47,000 election-related searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, along with the nearly 400,000 web pages to which the search results linked. Strong political bias toward one party was evident, once again, in Google searches (Epstein & Williams, 2019). 

4. My recent research demonstrates that Google’s “autocomplete” search suggestions can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split without people's awareness (http://bit.ly/2EcYnYI) (Epstein, Mohr, & Martinez, 2018). A growing body of evidence suggests that Google is manipulating people’s thinking and behavior from the very first character people type into the search box. 

5. Google has likely been determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the national elections worldwide since at least 2015. This is because many races are very close and because Google’s persuasive technologies are very powerful (Epstein & Robertson, 2015a).

Finally, we have what I may dare call a smoking gun: a recorded and leaked 2016 meeting in the immediate aftermath of the greatest political upset in modern American history in which the corporation’s top executives vowed in explicit terms to thwart any future Trump — or “populist,” for that matter, the definition of which presumably means “anything that we perceive as a political threat” — campaign.

Via Breitbart, 2018 (emphasis added):

A video recorded by Google shortly after the 2016 presidential election reveals an atmosphere of panic and dismay amongst the tech giant’s leadership, coupled with a determination to thwart both the Trump agenda and the broader populist movement emerging around the globe…

The video is a full recording of Google’s first all-hands meeting following the 2016 election (these weekly meetings are known inside the company as “TGIF” or “Thank God It’s Friday” meetings). Sent to Breitbart News by an anonymous source, it features co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, VPs Kent Walker and Eileen Naughton, CFO Ruth Porat, and CEO Sundar Pichai…

These individuals, who preside over a company with unrivaled influence over the flow of information, can be seen disparaging the motivations of Trump voters and plotting ways to use their vast resources to thwart the Trump agenda.

Co-founder Sergey Brin can be heard comparing Trump supporters to fascists and extremists. Brin argues that like other extremists, Trump voters were motivated by “boredom,” which he says in the past led to fascism and communism.

The Google co-founder then asks his company to consider what it can do to ensure a “better quality of governance and decision-making.”

VP for Global Affairs Kent Walker argues that supporters of populist causes like the Trump campaign are motivated by “fear, xenophobia, hatred, and a desire for answers that may or may not be there.”

Later, Walker says that Google should fight to ensure the populist movement – not just in the U.S. but around the world – is merely a “blip” and a “hiccup” in a historical arc that “bends toward progress.”

CEO Sundar Pichai states that the company will develop machine learning and A.I. to combat what an employee described as “misinformation” shared by “low-information voters.”

But, on the other hand, Google said they didn’t do it. So… what is Reuters supposed to do, investigate?