Google faces an investigation by Missouri’s attorney general for allegedly “manipulating search results” and showing anti-conservative bias ahead of the 2024 election.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said he will issue the subpoena to “get to the bottom of what appears to be election interference by Google,” a spokesman for the Republican told The Post on Friday.
Bailey will seek information about the black-box algorithm that powers Google search — which has come under fire from Donald Trump leading up to the election for delivering mostly negative articles about the Republican presidential candidate.
“Evidence has come to light that Google is depriving conservative speech or content — such as placing conservative reporting on Page 11 rather than Page 1 — by manipulating search results,” the spokesperson said.
“Google is America’s largest search engine and has an obligation to consumers to use fair business practices,” the spokesperson added. “We will subpoena information on Google’s algorithms and other systems to determine whether they are censoring conservative speech.”
Bailey accused Google of “fighting the democratic process” in an X after announcing the investigation on Thursday.
“I am launching an investigation into Google — America’s largest search engine — for censoring conservative speech during the most important election in our nation’s history,” Bailey wrote.
A Google spokesperson said “the Missouri attorney general’s claims are completely false.”
“Independent studies have confirmed that Google Search is unbiased,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Search serves all of our users, and our business relies on showing useful information to everyone — no matter what their political beliefs.”
Trump and other Republicans have claimed for years that Google suppresses conservative voices. Scrutiny increased after Google’s search engine’s autofill function appeared to turn up no results related to the attempted assassination of Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13.
In August, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee requested information from Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about whether their platforms suppressed information related to the incident.
The panel also sought information about the inner workings of Google’s search algorithm.
Chairman of the Supervisory Committee Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) asked Pichai to elaborate on how the search tool’s autocomplete feature covers important events and whether it tries to “avoid query results that Google wants to limit or exclude because sees them as harmful or dangerous”.
Google denied wrongdoing and said information about Trump’s assassination was not initially displayed because of “built-in protections related to political violence” that were out of date.
Trump directly accused Google of bias in September. 27 posted on Truth Social — and indicated that he would seek to prosecute the company if he takes office.
Trump posted a day after the Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog, released an analysis claiming that search results for Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign website were placed more prominently than Trump’s official website.
The group also alleged that Google placed articles with a “leftist bias” at the top of search results for Trump.
“It has been determined that Google illegally used a system to only detect and display bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some fabricated for that purpose, while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about friend Kamala Harris,” Trump wrote. at that time.
“This is illegal activity and we hope the Department of Justice will prosecute them for this blatant election interference,” Trump said. “If not, and subject to the laws of our country, I will seek to pursue them, at the highest levels, when I win the election and become president of the United States.”
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