Google buries websites of Trump, RFK Jr, Republican challengers – report

Searching ‘presidential campaign websites’ returned incumbent Joe Biden’s webpage and several inactive Democrats

Google is suppressing the 2024 campaign websites of all serious challengers to Democratic incumbent President Joe Biden, a report from the Media Research Center claimed on Thursday.

Searching the web for ‘presidential campaign websites’ using Google returned results that did not include a single Republican candidate on the first page the day before the first Republican primary debate of the 2024 season, according to the MRC. 

Not even former US President Donald Trump, who is polling neck-and-neck with Biden, appeared in the first few pages of results, the media watchdog observed. 

Read more

Nor did Democratic challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the chief threat to Biden’s candidacy from within his own party, appear in the results at all, even though a recent poll had him at nearly 20% in a matchup against Biden. 

Indeed, the only non-Biden Democrat to feature on the first page was lifestyle guru Marianne Williamson, who has never polled above the low single digits.

However, the websites of prominent Democrats who are not running for president in 2024, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, were more prominently featured at 29th, 12th, and 9th place in the results, respectively.

“Google has erased every threat to Joe Biden,” MRC Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider said on Thursday, recalling how Google had “pulled out all the stops to put Hillary Clinton in the White House” and “has continued to interfere in our elections ever since.” 

As of Saturday, the phenomenon appeared to have actually worsened. While Biden’s site was the fourth listed on the search engine and Williamson’s the fifth, Sanders remained at 12th, while Clinton had actually moved up to 13th.

Former Vice President Mike Pence’s site was the highest-ranked Republican in a search run on Saturday morning – though even his page was listed several places behind an Atlantic article informing the casual browser that 1996 Republican candidate and now-deceased former Senator Bob Dole’s campaign website “is still online.” 

Kennedy has been widely disparaged by the media establishment and online factcheckers for his work on vaccine safety. He sued Google earlier this month for violating his First Amendment rights, arguing its subsidiary YouTube had blocked his content on orders from the Biden administration. 

Trump also sued Google in 2021 for infringing on his free speech after he was deplatformed from YouTube along with most other mainstream social media platforms following the January 6 Capitol riot. 

Over a dozen government agencies were found to be issuing content-based censorship orders to social media platforms last year in Missouri v. Biden, leading a judge to issue a restraining order forbidding the administration from contacting the platforms.