Google faces an investigation by the Missouri attorney general’s office for allegedly “manipulating search results” and exhibiting anti-conservative bias ahead of the 2024 election.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said he will issue subpoenas to “get to the bottom of what appears to be election interference by Google,” a spokesperson for the Republican told The Post on Friday.
Bailey will be seeking information about the black-box algorithm that powers Google search — which has come under fire from Donald Trump leading up to the election for yielding mostly negative articles about the Republican presidential candidate.
“Evidence has come to light that Google is deemphasizing conservative speech or content — such as putting conservative reporting on Page 11 rather than Page 1 – by manipulating search results,” the spokesperson said.
“Google is the largest search engine in America and has an obligation to consumers to utilize fair business practice,” the spokesperson added. “We will be subpoenaing information on Google’s algorithms and other systems to determine whether they are censoring conservative speech.”
Bailey accused Google of “waging war on the democratic process” in an X post announcing the probe on Thursday.
“I am launching an investigation into Google — the biggest search engine in America — for censoring conservative speech during the most consequential election in our nation’s history,” Bailey wrote.
A Google spokesperson said the Missouri attorney general’s “claims are totally false.”
“Independent studies have confirmed that Google Search is nonpartisan,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Search serves all our users, and our business rests on showing useful information to everyone – no matter what their political beliefs are.”
Trump and other Republicans have alleged for years that Google suppresses conservative voices. Scrutiny ramped up after the “autofill” feature of Google’s search engine appeared to omit results related to the attempted assassination of Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13.
In August, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee demanded information from Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg regarding whether their platforms had suppressed information about the incident.
The panel also sought information about the inner workings of Google’s search algorithm.
Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) asked Pichai to provide details on how the search tool’s autocomplete feature incorporates newsworthy events and whether it tries to “avoid query results that Google desires to limit or preclude because it views them to be harmful or dangerous.”
Google denied wrongdoing and said information about the Trump assassination attempt did not initially appear because of “built-in protections related to political violence” that were out of date.
Trump directly accused Google of bias in a Sept. 27 post on Truth Social – and indicated he would seek to prosecute the company if he takes office.
Trump posted one day after the Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog, published an analysis asserting that search results for Harris’s campaign website were placed in more prominent location than the official site for Trump.
The group also claimed that Google placed articles with a “leftist bias” atop search results for Trump.
“It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris,” Trump wrote at the time.
“This is an illegal activity, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant interference of elections,” Trump said. “If not, and subject to the laws of our country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the election, and become president of the United States.”
