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The Media Research Center accuses Google of hiding GOP candidates in searches

According to the watchdog organization, the websites of several conservative candidates did not appear in the first page of results.

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Published by
Israel Duro

Just days after being denounced by the Republican Party for censoring its emails, Google was once again embroiled in censorship controversy. The Media Research Center (MRC) claims the tech giant is hiding the websites of Republican candidates from the top of its searches in the run-up to the midterms.

MRC found that, when performing a Google search on the election, Republican candidates appeared significantly below their Democratic rivals. This was evident when searching for the 12 closest Senate races. In 10 of these searches, the conservative candidates' website was positioned much lower. In fact, seven of these Republicans' sites were not even displayed on the first page of results, while their Democratic counterparts each appeared in the top five.

Google's bias

MRC told Fox News that "Google’s bias is undeniable when shown in comparison to other search engines. Bing and DuckDuckGo both show, with on exception, all 12 Democrat and Republican senate candidate’s websites within the top five organic search results."

Given this data, "the Media Research Center is calling upon Google to stop its war on democracy. To regain the trust of conservatives it must provide algorithmic transparency to show that liberal groups and candidates are treated the same way as conservatives." In addition, the organization demanded that Congress "take actions protecting Americans' free speech liberties," even calling for an official investigation: "Congress should investigate Google’s search bias and its results on the midterm elections."

Google denies allegations

The technology company issued a statement denying the facts and accusing MRC of conducting searches with "unusual" terms.

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.
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