Twitter is the Silicon Valley company where progressive bias is most apparent, but Google is the company where it is most dangerous. If Google decides that it doesn’t want web users to find something, it would be very difficult to stop them—or even to find out they did anything in the first place. That’s probably why, out of all the Silicon Valley companies accused of bias, it was Google’s that Donald Trump addressed directly.
The occasion that led him to address it was the release of an explosive video showing bias in Google’s search results. In the video, tech channel SourceFed demonstrated that searches for Hillary Clinton did not autocomplete to words that were popular searches if they reflected negatively on the Democratic candidate. For example “Hillary Clinton cri” did not autocomplete to the popular search term “Hillary Clinton criminal.” This contrasted with the competing, though far less influential Bing and Yahoo search engines, where all search terms autocompleted correctly.49
Google denied altering its search recommendations to favor Clinton, saying it does not autocomplete terms that are “offensive or disparaging when displayed in conjunction with a person’s name.” But a later experiment from prominent psychologist Robert Epstein found it easy to get Google to display negative search terms for Clinton’s primary opponent, Bernie Sanders… and for Donald Trump.
Eric Schmidt, CEO of the company that owns Google, is very much in the mold of Tim Cook, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg. But unlike those three, his involvement in politics suggests a direct link between his work and his support for left-wing politicians. Schmidt founded The Groundwork, a campaign organization with the sole purpose of putting Hillary Clinton in the White House, by putting Silicon Valley’s technological prowess at the campaign’s disposal.
WikiLeaks confirmed Schmidt’s involvement with the Clinton campaign in an email leak, which included a Democratic staffer acknowledging that Schmidt’s group was working “directly and indirectly” with the Clinton team.50 A leaked email sent from Schmidt himself suggested the creation of a voter database that regularly aggregates “all that is known” about individual voters.51 Creating such a database is Orwellian in the extreme and sounds daunting, but Google, with its vast quantities of user data, could pull it off with frightening efficiency.
It’s not just Clinton, either. A report from The Intercept in April 2016 revealed just how close Google’s relationship with the Obama administration was.52 The report showed that Google representatives attended meetings at the White House “more than once a week, on average, from the beginning of Obama’s presidency through October 2015.”
The Intercept’s report also showed how Google operated a “revolving door” with the White House, with employees frequently moving between both. They noted 55 instances of employees leaving Google for federal government jobs during the Obama years; 29 of them went to work directly in the White House. Additionally, 127 government employees left their jobs to work at Google.
With such a close relationship, it’s little wonder Eric Schmidt fought so hard to elect Hillary Clinton, the Obama continuity candidate.
One of Robert Epstein’s earlier experiments found that manipulation of search results can convince undecided voters to back a candidate with frightening efficiency.53 In some demographics, Epstein found that the conversion rate was up to 80%.
If conservatives thought mainstream media bias was bad, just wait until they see the effects of search engine bias.
Some might consider conservatives fortunate that tech companies didn’t use all the powers at their disposal to influence the election. Google could, if they wanted to, ban all links to Breitbart, as could Twitter and Facebook. Ultimately, such a bold move would be a bad business decision—in the current climate, conservatives feel just safe enough on social media not to flock to competing platforms. There is growing awareness that the companies that serve as conduits for speech on the web are no longer politically neutral, but not enough to trigger a mass exodus. Yet.
CONSERVATIVES MUST TAKE ON SILICON VALLEY
Given the high-tech forces ranged against him, it’s nothing short of a miracle that Donald Trump won the presidency. In 2020, when social media and search engines are likely to wield even more power, he may not be so lucky. If conservatives want to keep winning, they need to get serious about Silicon Valley, and it needs to happen fast.
Aside from rare exceptions like Peter Thiel, almost everyone in the world of tech absolutely hates conservatives. Jack Dorsey is in bed, cuddling with Black Lives Matter. He has brought censorious feminists into Twitter to advise the company on who it should ban from the platform.
Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, is an ardent globalist who believes the United States should “follow Germany’s lead on immigration.”
Eric Schmidt is less vocal, but as we saw above, potentially far more dangerous. He already worked to put Hillary Clinton in the White House. Who knows what he learned from her loss, or what he will do to sabotage Trump over the course of his presidency?
The biggest advantage conservatives have on the web is Drudge Report, an incredibly well trafficked news aggregator run by conservative media pioneer Matt Drudge. The site can instantly make a story go viral, and has been a constant thorn in the side of progressives seeking dominance of the web. But it’s not a social platform. Social media continues to advance, and we cannot allow progressives to monopolize it without a fight.
Social media bias is far more dangerous to conservatives than mainstream media bias. Users believe they’re choosing information sources themselves, and are more trusting as a result. If conservatives—including President Trump—want to avoid disaster, they need to get serious about pressuring Silicon Valley to stay honest. They should raise the specter of antitrust, media regulation, and all the other regulatory demons feared by America’s social media companies, who have many legal and financial reasons for wanting to remain classified by the courts as politically neutral platforms, even though everyone knows they’re not.
Republicans need to get aggressive, they need to constantly scrutinize and investigate social media companies, keeping them under the spotlight at all times. They need to organize around and encourage competitors. It may be difficult for 60-year-old politicians who still need their grandkids to unlock their phones for them, but it’s their own political future at stake. Hire an intern, gramps.