“Google is a Crooked, Election Interference Machine. Totally Illegal, they will pay a big price for what they are doing!” said former President Donald Trump in a Saturday Truth Social post.
Why is the GOP’s presidential candidate criticizing the tech giant that runs what is often used as a default search engine? Well, earlier in the week Trump also posted this: “Kamala Harris team, and Google, caught manipulating headlines and stories, creating FAKE NEWS. This is not legal!!!”
He was referring to Vice President Kamala Harris, who is the presumptive Democratic candidate running against Trump for the Oval Office.
According to a Tuesday article from Axios, Harris’ campaign “has been editing news headlines and descriptions within Google search ads that make it appear as if the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News and other major publishers are on her side.”
Per the outlet, this approach is a common practice in advertising and it doesn’t violate Google’s policies. However, Axios said the Trump campaign is not running the same type of ads, citing the Google ad transparency center. Furthermore, it said the Harris ads “mimic real news results from Search closely enough that they have news outlets caught off guard.”
“While we understand why an organization might wish to align itself with the Guardian’s trusted brand, we need to ensure it is being used appropriately and with our permission. We’ll be reaching out to Google for more information about this practice,” a Guardian spokesperson said.
Axios also reported that a technical glitch in Google’s Ad Library made it appear as though some ads lacked the necessary disclosures Google requires when they ran. A spokesperson from Google said the glitch was under investigation.
“A source familiar with the Harris campaign's ads team said the campaign buys search ads with news links to give voters searching for information about Vice President Harris more context,” said Axios.
After the report came out, U.S. Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) sent a letter to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, asking for the company to answer questions about the ads. In particular, he asked what protocols Google has to make sure people can easily differentiate advertisements from news content.
“Trump has a long history of accusing major technology companies, including Google, Facebook and Amazon, of being politically bias against him,” said a report from Newsweek. “This intensified after he was banned from major social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, after hundreds of his supporters stormed Congress on January 6, 2021 in a bid to prevent Joe Biden’s presidential election victory from being certified,” due to Trump’s unfounded claims about election fraud.
Earlier this week, POLITICO reported the “Google Threat Analysis Group wrote Wednesday that APT42, a hacking group associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, had targeted ‘the personal email accounts of roughly a dozen individuals affiliated with President Biden and with former President Trump,’” and that it was monitoring the situation. Last week, the Trump campaign claimed that documents leaked from POLITICO were connected to this hacking threat.