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Elon Musk Says Google ‘Interferes to Help Democrats Thousands of Times Every Election Season’
By: Ilana Siyance
Billionaire business magnate and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Google “interferes to help Democrats thousands of times every election season”. The comment is in line with reports by the NY Post in which a watchdog group has alleged that the internet giant boosts Democrats while censoring Republicans.
This article understates the magnitude of the problem – Google interferes to help Democrats thousands of times every election season!
This is to be expected when their censorship (aka “Trust & Safety”) teams are have far left political views. https://t.co/y36yzdzIUQ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 18, 2024
A detailed analysis was published by the conservative watchdog named the Media Research Center (MRC), detailing 41 alleged instances of “election interference” at the online search giant since 2008.
Musk, 52, who owns social media giant X, quote-tweeted a screenshot of the NY Post article and asserted that the ’41 times’ stated “understates the magnitude of the problem.” “Google interferes to help Democrats thousands of times every election season!” Musk wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “This is to be expected when their censorship (aka ‘Trust & Safety’) teams are have [sic] far left political views.”
Of late, critics have accused Google of injecting its Gemini AI chatbot with political bias, saying that it has recently started generating ahistorical and factually inaccurate “diverse” images. Scrutiny accelerated after far-left and woke tweets by the top Google executive went viral on X. The politically charged tweets by Jack Krawczyk, 40, the senior director of product for Gemini Chatbot Experiences, were subsequently deleted and his account was made private.
The MRC report accuses Google of using “its power to help push to electoral victory the most liberal candidates…while targeting their opponents for censorship.” The watchdog gives an example, noting a 2008 incident when Google allegedly helped then-Sen. Barack Obama’s candidacy when he was up against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic ticket in the presidential race. MRC alleged that Google “targeted support for Hillary Clinton for censorship” by “suspending the accounts of writers who wrote blogs critical of Obama during his primary race against Clinton.” The watchdog group also said that in the 2012 election, Google had “once again favored Obama” over Republican nominee Mitt Romney. The company allegedly refused to correct a “Google bomb” targeting GOP primary candidate Rick Santorum, the report said.
Per the Post, The MRC report also pointed to data from Dr. Robert Epstein, who had testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that “biased search resulted generated by Google’s search algorithm” shifted “at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton.” Epstein’s research has since been “widely debunked,” said a source close to the company. MRC also listed several other examples, including Google’s alleged suppression of “news sources critical of [Joe] Biden” in 2020.
Google did not immediately respond to the Post’s request for comment on Musk’s tweet. Google did comment to refute MRC’s reporting.
“There is absolutely nothing new here — just a recycled list of baseless, inaccurate complaints that have been debunked by third parties and many that failed in the courts,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “Politicians on the left have a long history of making similar claims, too,” the company rep added. “We have a clear business incentive to keep everyone using our products, so we have no desire to make them biased or inaccurate and have safeguards in place to ensure this.” The Google spokesperson added that “numerous conservatives have been particularly successful in using our platforms to spread their message to a wide audience.”
