“Distorting results for political purposes would
harm our business and go against our mission
of providing helpful content to all of our users,”
Google spokeswoman Julie Tarallo said.
Here’s where these claims emerged and what’s
known about them.
ELECTION INTERFERENCE
On Aug. 6, Trump implicitly suggested that
Google had favored Clinton’s 2016 campaign
over his and that the company planned to
“illegally subvert” the 2020 election as well.
He made the first part explicit, referencing an
unspecified study that, he claimed, showed that
“Google manipulated from 2.6 million to 16
million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 Election.”
Trump won the presidency with an Electoral
College majority but lost the popular tally to
Clinton by almost 2.9 million votes. Trump has
falsely insisted for years that he actually won
the popular vote.
The president’s campaign Twitter feed
suggested that Trump referenced a 2017 study
by psychologist Robert Epstein that found
Google showed more pro-Clinton results to
undecided voters than pro-Trump results.
Google and others have questioned the
methodology of the study, which was not peer
reviewed by other researchers.
In its final paragraph, the four-page study
extrapolated experimental findings from a
small group of 21 undecided voters to the
electorate as a whole using mathematical
models Epstein reported in an earlier paper.
Reached by phone, Epstein said his results
only showed that search results were biased
toward Clinton, not that Google was doing so
intentionally to sway elections.