The Google Files, Part IV
As I’ve mentioned on my About Us page everyone is welcome on this site: conservative, liberal, libertarian, and even anyone on the far-left and far-right who doesn’t want to shut down the speech of those who don’t agree with them.
That said, this post and the next few posts are going to be more for the conservatives among us (although the liberals and far-left may be interested in what I have to say a few posts down).
We all remember how strange the 2020 election was. We were all locked in our homes. Let’s put aside for a moment all the strangeness that happened with state executives and legislatures using COVID to change the rules to allow for mass voting by mail, or about the strangeness of Mark Zuckerberg spending millions of dollars to install drop boxes in inner cities, or even about water main breaks and election officials covering up windows with black paper.
Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a citizen trying to decide whether to vote for Joe Biden or for Donald Trump the week before Tuesday, November 3, 2020. Election Day.
If you were a typical citizen, you didn’t follow politics every day. But you probably heard stories—passing comments by co-workers, a headline you scanned on a newstand on the way to work, a news story you overheard playing in an airport.
If we had a responsible media, we’d be having normal, rational debates about Trump’s policies as President. Were his economic policies prior to COVID helpful or harmful to the economy? Were his policies on tariffs successful in creating more diverse supply chains? Was his implementation of Project Warp Speed during COVID successful given the “fog of war”? Were the Abraham Accords a step towards lasting peace in the Middle East?
Instead, here’s what the media told us about Trump. He was a Russian agent who won the 2016 election solely due to Russia buying Facebook ads. He praised white nationalists and Nazis as “Fine People”. He told the American people to drink bleach to cure COVID. The Russians created a fake laptop that supposedly belonged to Hunter Biden to help Trump win in 2020.
Cartoonist Scott Adams put together a list of these “Trump Hoaxes”. These were narratives that many, if not most, Americans came to believe about Donald Trump. Every one of them over time have been proven to be either outright false or a gross exaggeration.
Just for fun, let’s look to see what would have happened if you’d turned to Google for information on some of these things before Election Day 2020.
“Russian Collusion”
Since the day after election day 2016, Hillary Clinton was accusing Trump of being an “illegitimate president” because of “Russian Collusion”. In May 2023, the Durham Report was finally released, completely exonerating the Trump campaign of wrongdoing (seven years after the fact).
Think back to the week before Election Day 2020. Here are the results you would have seen ranking in Google organic search if you typed “russian collusion” (and thousands of people did). I’ve included the original URL, as well as a link to the Internet Wayback Machine so you can see what the page looked like that week.
- FactCheck.org – Russian Collusion was real
- Washington Post – Russian Collusion was real
- Wikipedia – Russian Collusion was real
- New York Times – Russian Collusion was real
- Cato Institute – Russian Collusion did not happen
- Politico – Russian Collusion was real
- CNN – Russian Collusion was real
- CNN – Russian Collusion was real
- The Moscow Project – Russian Collusion was real
- Center for American Progress – Russian Collusion was real
No need to bother to check who’s ranking #11, because practically no one clicks past page one of any Google search.
Of the top 10 results for “russian collusion”, NINE of them either state outright that Trump was absolutely guilty of Russian collusion, or overwhelm the reader with “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” content strongly implying that the Trump administration was compromised by Russia.
If you were an undecided voter in 2020, and you turned to Google for “objective search results”, what would your conclusion be?
You’d probably think Trump was absolutely guilty of cheating in the 2016 election in collaboration with support from Russia. Or, maybe you were smart enough to understand that Trump didn’t collude with the Russians—but with all the Russian connections he must have done SOMETHING.
Now let’s look at this same search just a few years earlier, when Google’s results were much more “objective”.
- Washington Examiner – Russian Collusion did not happen
- Bloomberg – Russian Collusion likely did not happen
- CNN – Russian Collusion likely did not happen
- Real Clear Politics – Russian Collusion likely did not happen
- Washington Times – Russian Collusion did not happen
- Weekly Standard – Russian Collusion likely did not happen
- The Blaze – Russian Collusion did not happen
- USA Today – Russian Collusion did not happen
- Business Insider – Russian Collusion did not happen
- Daily Caller – Russian Collusion did not happen
The same search in mid-2017 (when the Russian collusion accusations first came to light) yielded vastly different results.
Back then, 5 of the 10 Web sites were right-leaning sites. Not fringe far-right sites, but trusted sites like the Washington Times, The Blaze, the Weekly Standard, and the Daily Caller. With the exception of RealClearPolitics, the rest of the sites are left-leaning. But even most of them were stories about how claims of Russian interference were preposterous.
Of course, we now know the truth. Russia, like China and probably dozens of other countries (including the USA), have foreign influence operations. The goal of Russian operatives wasn’t to get a particular candidate elected, it was to sow chao in the US electoral process. Laughably, they ended up spending $300,000 of Facebook ads during the 2016 election cycle, and when you examine the ads they created they’re laughable. For comparison, the Trump and Clinton campaigns spent $81,000,000 in Facebook ads during that same time.
But the Clinton campaign (again, convinced that Hillary could not have lost on her own), stirred up the “Russian collusion” narrative so that we spent the next five years talking about how dangerous Russian influence is to the United States. And during that time, China launched a site called TikTok, to thunderous applause of Congress, the media, and 67% of all American youth aged 18-25.
The classical liberal Google in 2017 would have helped the nation realize right away what was finally concluded in 2023—that there was no “Russian Collusion”. How many millions of dollars of American taxpayer money went into chasing this lie? What problems could we have solved together as a nation if all of our attention weren’t spent on chasing down this lie?
Let’s look at another hoax: that Donald Trump told the American people to drink bleach to cure COVID-19.
“Trump Drink Bleach”
I remember watching Trump’s press conference in April 2020.
If you remember back to April 2020, the lockdown was in place, people were dying of coronavirus, and scientists were working hard on finding ways to treat it.
Bill Bryan of DHS had just presented findings on the effect of sunlight, humidity, and temperature on coronavirus (which explained fewer cases in summertime). He also mentioned—separately—how coronavirus was effectively killed on surfaces by household cleaners.
If you put yourself in the shoes of the President of the United States, you can imagine how Trump felt obligated to try to bring more hope to the American people during a time when there was almost no information about this virus. While inartful, he used this opportunity to bring up research that other scientists were doing on using UV light within the body to kill the coronavirus, speculating out loud whether these treatments might have the effect of treating the infection.
But of course, Aaron Rupar twisted Trump’s words, saying he had told everyone to “inject bleach”, Biden had amplified it, and sensationalist news headlines around the world resulted in companies like Lysol publishing statements denouncing Trump and news outlets irresponsibly spreading stories of individuals ostensibly injecting themselves with bleach.
If you were a voter in 2020—six months after this happened—here’s what you would have seen.
- A news story by the BBC which, while presenting the actual events of that day accurately, led with a sensationalist headline: “Coronavirus: Outcry after Trump suggests injecting disinfectant as treatment” followed by commentary discussing how he was “lambasted by the medical community”.
- Various news articles that quoted Politifact’s “Fact Check” of Biden’s comments that “Trump Told People To Drink Bleach” as “mostly false”. Or as an undecided voter would interpret that phrase, “a little bit true”.
- A YouTube video by NBC with the wildly misleading headline “President Trump Suggests ‘Injecting’ Disinfectant as Coronavirus Cure”
- Incredibly misleading articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post and The Guardian that reinforced the false suggestion that Trump suggested to use “disinfectants to treat coronavirus”, complete with stock photos of supermarket shelves stocked with Lysol and Clorox.
- Commentary from a former Obama official in the Washington Post deliberately lying by saying that Trump suggested “injecting patients with bleach or household disinfectants”.
I remember left-leaning news outlets even citing stories of lunatics injecting aquarium cleaner into their veins and blaming it on Trump—the irony being that assuming this really happened, the people doing these things would have gotten the idea from the media’s incessant pounding of Trump with inaccurate reporting and not Trump himself, who just delivered what he probably thought was a throw-away line talking about UV light treatment.
All the while, conservative and centrist news outlets were giving a more measured, factual account. But no one was hearing them.
Do you think that maybe this might have affected one or two undecided voters?
By the way, less than a year later, multiple peer-reviewed studies including this one and this one showed that yes, various UV light treatments were effective in combating COVID-19.
“Very fine people”
During the “Unite the Right” Rally in Charlottesville in 2017 (or as it’d be called today, “the FBI Convention”), Trump tried to quell the tension by stating that there were “fine people” on both sides of the debate on whether to topple a statue of Robert E. Lee.
By the 2020 election cycle, social and traditional media were hammering home the suggestion that Trump had called Neo-Nazi’s “fine people” in an interview, despite the fact that Trump in the very same interview emphatically stated “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazi’s and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally”.
If you Googled this phrase before Election Day 2020, here’s what you would have seen.
- The first result was, surprisingly, a page by Politifact that didn’t deal with burning pants or Pinocchio noses, but just a transcript of Trump’s comments in their full context. Or what we used to call “unbiased journalism”.
- Of course those were the exceptions. Among the top 10 are far-left outlets like The Atlantic and VOX who aren’t shy about parroting the myth—again, debunked in the very same interview—that he was praising white supremacists.
- And then there’s the Washington Post, USA Today, and ABC News. Their “fact checks” of whether Trump said that he supported neo-Nazis were based on whataboutism (“Trump didn’t condemn the Proud Boys, who is (supposedly) a white supremacy group”) and contortion (“There were only neo-Nazis in the crowd, so even though Trump said the words that he didn’t support neo-Nazis he didn’t mean them”).
- The Roanoke Times, ranking in the top 10 of Google, came up with similar contorted logic, adding that because 0% of the protesters were art historians, Trump was supporting Neo-Nazis. Seriously.
- FactCheck.org has a fair, albeit long-winded, article responding to candidate Joe Biden’s repeated accusations that Trump never condemned neo-Nazis, despite Trump’s very words stating that he did.
- Last, and least, Google allowed the actual transcript from the White House of the day’s remarks to be shown—in position 10.
The truth is, of course, that while the “Unite the Right” rally was indeed organized by extremists, there were indeed many citizens of Charlotte that did not agree with the decision by the Charlottesville City Council to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee, nor to rename Lee Park to “Emancipation Park”. Those citizens were caught between those on the extreme right and those on the extreme left who came to blows. It was those citizens that Trump was trying to defend.
But someone Googling this phrase the week of the election would only have seen a picture of Trump as someone who supports “white supremacy”. And if you’re reading this and you still believe that a man who has a Jewish daughter and grandchildren and who loves and is loved by the great Don King, you’ve been brainwashed.
It wasn’t until June 20, 2024—2,501 days after Trump’s speech—that Snopes.com finally put out a “fact check” that debunked this hoax.
Why did Snopes wait seven years to correct this? It’s simple. The lie went around the world countless times to the point where it’s done its job. Now, Snopes wants to be able to say, “yes, we corrected the record” so that it can build back some of the credibility it lost when it turned from an unbiased site to a left-leaning one.
Want to see the Google data for any other search term? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see if I can pull it for you.
At one point, we could trust Google to provide us with objective information that reflected a broad spectrum of opinions, and we could be trusted to go through all the information and come up with our own conclusions. Maybe that’s still true if you’re shopping for a smartphone, or for flowers, or for a local pizza store. But that’s not true for any topic that involves politics or public policy.
So what really happened between 2017 and 2020? Stay tuned for Part V: What Really Happened to Google Organic Search from 2017-2020?
