A few days after the 2016 election, at an internal meeting later leaked to Breitbart News, top Google executives, including Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, and Kent Walker, lamented President Trump’s victory, comparing Trump voters to “extremists” and discussing their desire to make Trump’s election and the populist movement a “blip” in history.
True to their word, four years later, Google is deliberately working to interfere with the reelection of Trump in 2020.
There are several ways in which Google is interfering in the 2020 election, but this article will focus primarily on one of them: political search bias.
Google Has Been Purging Breitbart Content from Search Results Since the 2016 Election
Search visibility is a key industry measure of how findable a publisher’s content is in Google search. New data shows that Google has suppressed Breitbart’s search visibility by 99.7 percent since 2016.
On April 4, 2016, Breitbart ranked in the top ten search positions (i.e., on the first page of Google search results) for 355 key search terms; but now, as of July 20, 2020, Breitbart ranks in the top ten search positions for only one search term. And, on April 4, 2016, Breitbart ranked in the top 100 search positions for 16,820 key search terms; but now, as of July 20, 2020, Breitbart ranks in the top ten search positions for only 55 search terms.
Moreover, organic Google search traffic to Breitbart (measured by unique visitors) is down 63 percent when comparing the first half of 2016 with the first half of 2020.
The following chart shows the visibility of Breitbart content in the Google search engine since 2011. It shows that Google has nearly eliminated Breitbart content from its search results.
Read More HERE…
But it’s not just Breitbart.com that is being censored. Google has also purged The Gateway Pundit from its search results.
Why is this important?
In early 2017 both Harvard University (in a study funded by the Soros Open Society Foundation) and Columbia Journalism Review listed Breitbart as THE TOP conservative social media influencer — BY FAR! The Gateway Pundit at the time was listed as the 3rd-5th most influential conservative platform.
Today Breitbart and The Gateway Pundit are still two of the largest conservative websites in the country.
It is clear today that Google, Facebook and Twitter are using their own political blacklists to censor and diminish traffic to prominent conservative publishers and their supporters.
If you search Google for prominent conservative voices including: Mike Cernovich, Joe diGenova, Jack Posobiec or Gateway Pundit you will see hit pieces and biased attacks.
Read More HERE…
Daily Caller editor-in-chief Geoffrey Ingersoll has said that the conservative news website has experienced Google search suppression similar to that reported by Breitbart News yesterday. Based on Google’s defense that it manually blacklists “violent extremism,” Ingersoll pointed out: “We are not ISIS.”
“Specifically we struggled with search slowly dwindling until May 4 exactly. We broke down the analytics. The May 4 flat line is clearly the result of the human hand in the process,” said Ingersoll in a series of tweets.
The idea that we ended up on some blacklist because of some compliance partnership with law enforcement to stop extremism or election interference is just absurd.
We have accredited personnel all over Washington, DC. We are not ISIS. https://t.co/AAAzfeHBgC
— Geoffrey Ingersoll (@GPIngersoll) July 29, 2020
Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai was grilled about Google’s search bias at the antitrust committee earlier today, with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) pressing the CEO to explain leaks revealing that the Daily Caller and other sites were added to search blacklists.
Pichai responded by saying that sites were sometimes added to manual blacklists, to comply with law enforcement and tackle election interference and “violent extremism.”
“In order to comply with the law in every country we operate in, for example there might be an actor or a website identified as ‘interfering in elections’, and we then have to put that site on a list so that [it] doesn’t appear in our search results… other examples would be violent extremism…”
Pichai neither confirmed nor denied that the Daily Caller and other conservative news sites added to Google blacklists are considered by Google to fall under these categories.
“The idea that we ended up on some blacklist because of some compliance partnership with law enforcement to stop extremism or election interference is just absurd. We have accredited personnel all over Washington, DC. We are not ISIS.” said Ingersoll.
The Daily Caller editor revealed that like Breitbart News, the Gateway Pundit, and other conservative websites, Google searches for the headlines of original articles frequently failed to return results from the site.
“There were even instances in which we broke national news, and would not show up in the first page of search results for that particular topic,” said Ingersoll. “In fact not in the second, third, fourth or fifth. Meanwhile, outlets that aggregated or syndicated our work did.” (Source)
