It's hard to believe it's been six years, but in 2018 I covered a story that nearly broke the internet. The headline: "96 Percent of My Google Search Results for 'Trump' News Were from Liberal Media Outlets."
When I did a search in August of that election year for "Trump" on Google News, here's what happened:
Not a single right-leaning site appeared on the first page of search results.
But it got much, much worse when I analyzed the first 100 items that Google returned in a search for news on “Trump.”
CNN, by a wide margin, appeared most frequently, with nearly twice as many results returned as the second-place finisher, The Washington Post. Other left-leaning outlets also fared well, including NBC, CNBC, The Atlantic, and Politico. The only right-leaning sites to appear in the top 100 were The Wall Street Journal and Fox News with 3 and 2 results respectively.
PJ Media did not appear in the first 100 results, nor did National Review, The Weekly Standard, Breitbart, The Blaze, The Daily Wire, Hot Air, Townhall, Red State, or any other conservative-leaning sites except the two listed above.
I noted: "I performed the search a multiple times using different computers (registered to different users) and Google returned similar results. While not scientific, the results suggest a pattern of bias against right-leaning content." The late Lou Dobbs tweeted it, and Trump retweeted him.
And then all hell broke loose.
The fact-checkers came at me with a vengeance, mocking me, defaming me, and denying that there was any bias in Google's algorithms. Even now, all these years later, when I do a search for "Paula Bolyard, Trump, Google," nearly every result on the first page is from a fact-checker calling me a dangerous moron or whatever. Today I had to scroll to page 5 before I reached my story. They've buried it into oblivion.
We all know this is not by accident.
We also know that it's still happening. Everyone from Elon Musk to Donald Trump Jr. to Greta van Susteren has been posting what happens when they try to search for information about Trump rallies or the assassination attempt.
Just did a search for “Trump rally” on Google and Kamala was the top result! pic.twitter.com/WuklbVytq2
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 31, 2024
.@elonmusk caught this first ! It seemed totally absurd but he is correct. Google should explain this pic.twitter.com/oN18jlzq5b
— Greta Van Susteren (@greta) July 31, 2024
Google also tried to get away with censoring information about the assassination attempt on Trump via its autocomplete feature.
Wow, Google has a search ban on President Donald Trump!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 29, 2024
Election interference? pic.twitter.com/dJzgVAAFZA
But a funny thing happened. Google got caught and actually admitted it was happening but then gave this excuse yesterday:
Autocomplete wasn’t providing predictions for queries about the assassination attempt against former President Trump. That’s because it has built-in protections related to political violence — and those systems were out of date.
After the horrific events in Butler, PA, those predicted queries should have appeared but didn’t. Once the issue was flagged, we started working on improvements, and they’re already rolling out. You can see many relevant predictions now.
Well, isn't that nice of them to allow Americans to find information about the biggest news story of the year? I hope you're all grateful to your Big-Tech overlords!
The Associated Press was quick to come out with a "fact" check saying there's nothing to see here:
Search engine experts told the AP that they don’t see evidence of suspicious activities on Google’s part and that there are plenty of other reasons to explain why there have been a lack of autocomplete predictions about Trump.
“It’s very plausible that there’s nothing nefarious here, that it’s other systems that are set up for neutral or good purposes that are causing these query suggestions to not show up,” said Michael Ekstrand, an assistant professor at Drexel University who studies AI-powered information access systems. “I don’t have a reason not to believe Google’s claim that this is just normal systems for other purposes, particularly around political violence.”
A Pew Research poll in late 2023 found that a whopping 71% of Americans get their news "often" or "sometimes" from search engines like Google—and Google absolutely crushes all competition:
Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Search Engine Market Share
And it's not just Google. Facebook just got caught altering reality, as my colleague Rick Moran reported:
This might be one of the more egregious recent examples of a deliberate effort by a social media site to put its thumb on the political scale favoring Democrats over Republicans. Facebook is admitting that labeling the iconic photo of a blood-streaked Trump raising his fist in defiance after the attempt on his life as "misinformation" as "an error."
“Yes, this was an error,” Dani Lever of Meta wrote on X. Her post was in response to Charlie Kirk's observation that Facebook was not allowing users to share the photo, the New York Post reported.
“This fact check was initially applied to a doctored photo showing the secret service agents smiling, and in some cases our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo. This has been fixed and we apologize for the mistake.”
Grok, X's AI, summarized the issues with Google this way:
Elon Musk and other users on a social media platform have accused Google of election interference, claiming that a search for 'Trump rally' on Google returned results related to a Kamala Harris rally instead. This has sparked discussions and concerns about the integrity of search results and potential manipulation in the upcoming election. Users are calling for investigations and expressing frustration over perceived bias in search engine results, with some suggesting alternative search engines to avoid potential interference.
And that's the problem — it's election interference. You know, that thing Democrats always accuse Republicans of. They did it in 2020 and they're continuing to do it today. The fact-checkers mocked me then for reporting on this and they'll no doubt mock me again and accuse me of spreading "disinformation," when it's actually the lefties in Silicon Valley who are the ones spreading fake news.
Our friend John Hinderaker over at Power Line wrote this week about his frustration with the alleged "fact" checkers from Newsguard, who have been a ROYAL pain in my backside as well because they have been successfully convincing advertisers to avoid sites like ours that don't go along with the preferred narrative.
So now, my curiosity is piqued. I retired from the litigation business some years ago, but I have a constitutional right to represent myself. I just want to find out what NewsGuard has said about me or about Power Line, and if appropriate, I can sue them for defamation. I could then hire an expert accountant who could calculate the damages that we at Power Line have suffered over the years (within the statute of limitation, of course) as a result of NewsGuard’s lies about us. It could be remunerative, and it certainly would be fun.
It's incredibly frustrating for those of us on the media front lines. We have information that needs to get into the hands of voters, yet we're attacked at every turn by the Big Tech censors who want us to just shut up and take it. As regular PJ Media readers know, we will not back down—despite the defamation, the financial damages, and the mockery. We're committed to the truth.
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