Billionaire X owner Elon Musk said Google “interferes to help Democrats thousands of times every election season” after The Post detailed a watchdog group’s claims that the search giant allegedly boosts Dems while censoring Republicans.
As The Post reported, a right-leaning watchdog called the Media Research Center (MRC) published a analysis detailing what it described as 41 alleged instances of “election interference” at the online search giant since 2008.
Musk quote-tweeted a screenshot of the article and asserted that it “understates the magnitude of the problem.”
“Google interferes to help Democrats thousands of times every election season!” Musk wrote on X. “This is to be expected when their censorship (aka ‘Trust & Safety’) teams are have [sic] far left political views.”
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Musk’s tweet.
Critics have recently accused Google of injecting its Gemini AI chatbot with political bias after it began generating ahistorical and factually inaccurate “diverse” images. Scrutiny accelerated after tweets in which Gemini’s product lead espoused far-left viewpoints went viral on X.
In its report, the MRC accused Google of using “its power to help push to electoral victory the most liberal candidates…while targeting their opponents for censorship.”
The watchdog cited a 2008 incident in which Google purportedly purportedly helped then-Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) candidacy during his showdown Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The 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.”
During the 2012 election, the watchdog group said 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.
The MRC also pointed to data from Dr. Robert Epstein, who once 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.”
A source close to the company said Epstein’s research has been “widely debunked.”
The media watchdog’s report also cited several other alleged examples of interference or bias, including a 2020 instance in which it alleged “targeted” the presidential campaign of former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and its alleged suppression of “news sources critical of [Joe] Biden.”
Google pushed back on the MRC’s report.
“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 said that “numerous conservatives have been particularly successful in using our platforms to spread their message to a wide audience.”
