Too big to rig was a common refrain those of us supporting Donald Trump heard in the days and weeks leading up to the 2024 election. With the results in, we can now assert the 2024 election result was indeed too big to rig. Just like with the 2016 and 2020 elections, attempts were made to rig this election. However, before you start saying I am a delusional conspiracy theorist, not rigged in the traditional sense that Donald Trump and some supporters may use. Rigged with big tech companies such as Facebook and Google’s election interference by putting their fingers on the scale.
Google’s Election Interference
We’ve seen numerous instances throughout Donald Trump’s campaigns of a concerted effort by Google to engage in election interference. Let’s start with the most recent example on election day 2024. On election day if you had typed in where to vote for Kamala Harris, it gave you a poll location where you could go and cast your ballot. However, if you typed where to vote for Trump, you received standard Trump news articles. Google claims this was not election interference but was a glitch in their system.
I could believe this assertion if it were not for the fact that the glitch always seems to be something against Trump and benefiting Democrats. It may even be valid that this is not Google as a company doing this, but overzealous employees desperate to see Donald Trump fail by any means necessary.
We need only look at the mental breakdown of the Washington Post editorial staff after the decision came from above not to endorse a candidate or Twitter staff after it was bought by Elon Musk to see how zealots can affect a company’s actions. If the glitches or inaccuracies affected both parties/candidates equally, it would be easier to be forgiving when these issues arise.
Unfortunately, the list goes on with Google’s election interference.
In the aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt, Google admitted to limiting searches regarding the Trump assassination attempt. James Lynch from the National Review Online wrote,
“An attorney for Google’s parent company admitted that the autocomplete tool for its search function did not include the assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump. The admission came after the apparent search issues drew controversy online.”
The search autocomplete tool is a valuable function in Google as it directs the user to things they might want to search for. You would believe in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of a major party political candidate that this should be one of the first searches that Google would lead you to. However, the media was desperate to downplay the attempted assassination of Trump lest it create any sympathy for a supposed “threat to democracy” and to this Google played along.
Once again Google’s response to this election interference issue was that it was a bug in their system that they were working to correct.
How about another story? Many users have voiced complaints that when searching for news stories about President Trump, they were given stories on Kamala Harris. This would appear to be a deliberate attempt to influence the election by pointing the searcher to stories flattering to Kamala Harris. When brought to Google’s attention, they claimed it was an algorithmic error.
Why does the error always seem to be a negative for Trump?
I don’t know, I’m just asking the questions you can be the judge.
Google is far from the only big tech platform that may have engaged in election interference, equally disturbing are some of the allegations against Meta.
Meta’s engagement in election interference
In addition to Google possibly suppressing information on the Trump assassination attempt, Meta engaged in similar behavior. Meta provided a fact-check warning on Facebook to the now iconic photograph of Trump with his fist in the air after taking a bullet to the ear. Anyone who watched this happen on television knows there was nothing to fact-check about.
Meta eventually admitted its mistake and chalked it up to an overzealous moderator even going so far as to Mark Zuckerberg calling President Trump personally to apologize. Again, this sounds plausible enough and goes back to my above theory that it may not be necessarily the company’s directive to engage in election interference but partisan zealots in their ranks.
The above is certainly not the only time that Meta flirted with election interference. In 2020, Facebook censored the Hunter Biden laptop story based on pressure from a corrupt FBI. Every layperson knows that the story was credible but in the desperate attempt to stick Biden in the White House fifty current and former intelligence officials concocted a story that the laptop was Russian disinformation.
Some of their wonderful arguments for Russian disinformation were “Doesn’t the name Bobulinski (Tony) sound made up.” These are the best and brightest that our country can produce? No wonder our intelligence agencies thought Ukraine would be overrun in 3 days and are consistently wrong on nearly every major geo-political estimate.
Russian disinformation is the new useful buzzword to discredit anything that goes against your political beliefs. In reality, this was Biden disinformation as transcripts from the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees show that the Biden campaign helped to spur the writing of this letter. Mark Zuckerberg would later express regret caving to demands to censor the laptop story but this is too little too late. Would it have changed the course of the election? Maybe not but the public had the right to discuss a legitimate news story.
The Hunter Biden laptop story is far from the only content flagged as misinformation on Facebook. Numerous reports existed in 2020 of fact-checking efforts that disproportionately targeted pro-Trump content. They would label or downrank posts that were favorable to Trump or that were critical of Joe Biden even when the information was not incorrect.
For example, in the Summer of 2020, Trump would often use Meta to refer to Antifa as a violent left-wing extremist group. Some of these posts were labeled as false information or promoting violence. Anyone who remembers the Summer of 2020 would think otherwise as Antifa regularly took over city streets, created an autonomous zone, and destroyed public property. Yet here we have Meta fact-checking this claim.
Why do I have a strong suspicion that any discourse labeling the proud boys as violent was not met with a false information label. This is just one example of countless where conservative or pro-Trump stories were flagged and left-leaning posts left alone. Does this mean that Zuckerberg and Meta had a policy of election interference from the top down or were lower-level staff engaging in election interference? I can’t tell you I have the answer to that question but I’m just asking the question.
Takeaways
While Trump’s claim of rigging the election in the traditional sense may not be true there appears to be a concerted effort in big tech towards election interference. We see the same theme play out over and over across the various tech platforms where it is always a glitch but yet somehow the glitch never positively impacts Trump or the Republicans.
While sites like the Daily Wire, Young Turks, or National Review have no obligation to cater to both parties or both platforms, big tech has essentially become the modern-day town square and should have a duty to ensure the public gets a fair representation. Big tech is essentially a content curator rather than a creator and it should not be putting its thumb on the scale in favor of one party or the other.
Regardless of big tech (and the media’s) bias though, Trump’s 2024 resounding triumph was indeed too big to rig as large swathes of the country became redder seemingly overnight. Are all of these accusations of election interference from big tech and collusion with the Democrat party Google and Meta’s company policies or are they the result of liberal leaning silicon valley staffers. I’m not sure but we need to keep asking the questions.
Do you think big tech engages in election interference or do their explanations sound plausible? Let us know what you think. Also, if you liked article check out Allan Lichtman Failed: 5 Major Reasons his Keys were Biased for Harris.
