Dear Editor:
Much has been said and written about the integrity of our elections. The discussion has centered on issues like voting machines, absentee ballots, delays in counting votes, etc. These areas continue to be worthy of our oversight but little has actually been proven about whether and how these influenced the outcome of elections. On the other hand, there is now mounting evidence that biased social media and journalistic practices do in fact influence election outcomes.
As an example, in the summer and fall of 2020, the FBI and the news media had detailed and tangible evidence of corruption in the Biden family surrounding Hunter Biden’s activities in China and elsewhere. But the news media collectively decided to squelch the story until after the November elections. This is a matter of opinion and needs more scientific research to determine the answer of whether and how much this influenced the outcome of the 2020 elections. But in view of the narrow margins of victories in swing states, there is a good likelihood it did.
There is more scientific evidence that Google’s biased practices did influence the outcome of elections in 2018, 2020 and 2022. This took several forms.
Google consistently favored Democratic candidates and themes in responding to users’ search requests. This is called Search Engine Manipulation. In the presidential election year 2016, a detailed study of 13,207 online election-related searches, and the 98,044 web pages Google returned, favored Hillary Clinton in all 10 positions on the first page of search results. This was so flagrant, the European Union fined Google $2.7 billion for having biased search results.
In 2008 and 2012, Google’s Eric Schmidt helped supervise Obama’s tech teams and later funded a secretive operation called “The Groundwork” to assist Clinton’s campaign. Clinton’s Chief Technology Officer was Stephanie Hannon, a former Google executive. More than 95% of Google’s political contributions have gone to Democratic candidates.
Beginning with election day 2018, Google’s “GO Vote” reminder was directed at a much higher percentage of left-leaning users based on Google’s extensive data from users’ previous Google interactions. In other words, the reminder to “GO VOTE” was sent to predominantly Democrats. This was presented by Google as a public service but it was actually voter manipulation. And we in Georgia gave Stacy Abrams credit for getting out the Democratic vote!
There is bountiful evidence that Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. have acted to influence our elections. It has not been acted upon by a Democrat-controlled Congress.
Perhaps a Republican-controlled Congress will take it up for what it really is and indict these companies and their executives for Treason.
Gerry Giesler, Greensboro