Election Interference: Google Purges Breitbart from Search Results. By Allum Bokhari.
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 Trump’s victory, comparing Trump voters to “extremists,” and discussing their desire to make the 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 President 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. …
Breitbart’s visibility in Google searches fell off a cliff in early 2017:
Click to enlarge.
Google has nearly eliminated Breitbart content from its search results.
No criticism of Joe Biden is allowed by Google:
After Google’s May core search update on or about May 5, 2020, Google search impressions and search traffic to Breitbart for “Joe Biden” and other Biden-related search terms has gone to zero. Zero. … The sheer fact that there are thousands of pages of Breitbart content that reference Biden that were ranking before May 6, that now have no rank or impressions on search is a sign of manipulation, not algorithmic devaluing. …
Google is steering its searchers away from all right wing websites:
“For news websites large and small, Google – in combination with its YouTube offshoot — typically drives between 30 and 50 percent of the traffic to those sites,” Dr. Epstein told Breitbart News via email. “For the New York Times, the percentage is currently 39.3.” At the moment, Google is responsible for just 9 percent of Breitbart’s traffic, and YouTube is sending a negligible amount, if any.” …
“Those are the lists that Google denies having — even under oath in Congressional hearings — even though two of those blacklists were leaked from the company last year by whistleblower Zach Vorhies.”
Dr. Epstein recently told Breitbart News’ Alex Marlow that Google is likely to shift 10 percent of voters away from Trump to fulfill its executives’ stated goal of avoiding a repeat of 2016.
The psychologist has previously explained how Google’s search bias can affect undecided voters by offering them selective information about political candidates. This is because voters are not inclined to suspect search results of bias in the same way that they might suspect a CNN or New York Times report to be biased. …
Google’s How-To-Vote card:
Fraction of website traffic from Google, via Alexa web rankings (1.0 = 100%). Red = media sources with conservative or libertarian-leaning editorial stances. Data is a six-month average as of July 7, 2020.
Alexa data shows that the percentage of traffic to conservative websites that come from Google is far lower than that of corporate media sites. …
All ten of the top-ranked sites, with the arguable exception of heavy.com, are from the corporate, liberal-leaning, or leftist media. Far-left Vox.com is placed third.
It’s been getting worse since then:
Last week, several conservatives on social media recently noticed that their articles were not appearing at all in Google search. Breitbart News was similarly affected. Google claimed to have investigated the issue, which the company has attributed to an error, and conservative journalists and websites have reported their search results returning.
That was just an experiment or accident where Google turned the “suppress the right” button all the way up for a few hours. Getting ready for October.
