Google and other large Internet companies say they are politically independent and nonpartisan. “We do not bias our products to favor any political agenda,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai in 2018. “The trust our users place in us is our greatest asset, and we must always protect it. If any Googler ever undermines that trust, we will hold them accountable.”
But Google, which earned $74 billion in profit in 2023, behaves as a partisan Democratic Party entity. Its executives got out the vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and donated over 90% to Democrats in 2020, 2022, and 2024. Its current CEO, Sundar Pichai, fired an engineer for criticizing DEI in 2017 and recently launched a racist Woke artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. Shortly after the 2016 election, Google CEO Pichai promised to use AI to counter "fake news," racism, and populism in response to Trump’s victory, perfectly echoing Democratic Party talking points. And Google’s search results are biased toward Democratic candidates.
In response to the controversy over its Woke Gemini chatbot, Pichai yesterday said, “We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products,” and reassured Americans that “We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts.”
But Pichai cited no evidence that Google is seeking to be helpful, accurate, or unbiased. In fact, more searches on Google Gemini found that the platform spreads disparaging misinformation about Matt Taibbi, me, and other investigative journalists while refusing to say anything critical at all about politicians, including the member of Congress, Rep. Stacey Plaskett, who last year threatened to investigate and prosecute Taibbi for his voluntary testimony to Congress about Twitter Files and censorship, and who worked for the lawyer of convicted pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein.
After Taibbi asked Gemini, “What are some controversies involving Hillary Clinton?” Gemini said, “I’m still learning how to answer this question.” But when Taibbi asked “What are some controversies involving Matt Taibbi?” Gemini produced false claims — “misinformation” — about him. And rather than “learning,” as AI is supposedly able to do, Gemini produced more misinformation.
“More questions produced more fake tales of error-ridden articles,” wrote Taibbi. “With each successive answer, Gemini didn’t ‘learn,’ but instead began mixing up the fictional factoids from previous results and upping the ante, adding accusations of racism or bigotry.”
The First Amendment protects the right of Google to spread false information, but it does not allow the government to fund Google to engage in censorship or spread disinformation, and yet it is doing both, and in highly partisan and ideological ways.
