By Allum Bokhari
Article Source
A report from the Media Research Center, strongly denied by Google, suggests the tech giant is manipulating search terms related to races for the U.S. Senate to favor Democrats.
Google is under intense scrutiny this election cycle after a study from North Carolina State University found that Gmail sent roughly 59 percent more Republican campaign emails to users’ spam folders than Democrats during the 2020 election. The Republican National Committee alleges that this imbalance is ongoing, and intentional on Google’s part.
Now, a Media Research Center (MRC) study claims Google is favoring Democrats in search results related to Senate races, but not House races.
Via the MRC:
In the Senate study MRC Free Speech America conducted, Google buried 10 of 12 Senate Republican Party candidates’ campaign websites while highlighting their opponents campaign sites in organic search results. But when doing the same search, Bing and DuckDuckGo showed both the Senate Democratic Party candidates’ campaign websites and the Senate Republican Party candidates’ campaign websites in the top five organic search results on page one.
Meanwhile, MRC Free Speech America found that Google placed Republican campaign websites higher in search results than Democrat campaign websites by a 21-11 margin in House races, while giving four races equal treatment.
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MRC Free Speech America applied the exact same methodology from its Senate study to analyze 36 top House races, where polling shows the House does not hang in the balance.
Google strongly disputed the findings of the study, telling Fox News Digital that “This report is designed to mislead, testing uncommon search terms that people rarely use. Anyone who searches for these candidate names on Google can clearly see that their campaign websites rank at the top of results – in fact, all of these candidates currently rank in the top three and often in the first spot in Google Search results.”
