It has now been more than five months since Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States, but the conspiracy theories about the various ways the election was stolen from Donald Trump keep on comin’. The latest comes courtesy of kooky Colorado congressman Ken Buck, who doesn’t seem to know how elections or algorithms work, which is a pity, given that he’s the House Antitrust Committee’s top Republican. As Mediaite reports, Buck is now pointing the finger at Google as the reason Trump got fewer votes than Biden. Yes, you read that correctly: Google! As he explains it:
“Google, by the way, changed its algorithm in May of 2020 to disadvantage Donald Trump and to advantage Joe Biden. [It] changed its algorithm! And when you ask them about this, and I know people that own newspapers, and I asked them about it, and they say, ‘Oh, well that’s just a technical thing. We don’t know what the result was. We just know that we did, that a technical person did this.’ Nonsense! They chose the winner… The estimates are they moved 15 million votes. Because every time you ask for an article on Donald Trump or every time you Google Donald Trump—and people here obviously Google in a more sophisticated way—but people out there that were hearing about Donald Trump and they’re wondering, you know, ‘Donald Trump, Hunter Biden.’”
https://twitter.com/lawindsor/status/1413141816686243851?s=20
If only Google had an algorithm to decipher what the hell Buck is talking about!
When asked to better explain what he was talking about, and how a search engine “flipped” 15 million votes to Joe Biden, Buck briefly stammered before giving his response:
“Well, what I’ve heard from, you know, sort of the academics on this issue is that by, by changing the algorithm, you can flip 15 million votes. You can influence 15 million people to move one direction or another, in that situation… So you talk to people, you know, at conservative publications and what they’ll tell you is the day after that algorithm went into effect, their readership went down. So if you were looking for something on The Washington Examiner or The Washington Times, or the conservative newspapers in this area, you would have to go further down. You’d have to go to page two or three to find the story you were looking for.”
We won’t bore you with the details of how Google algorithm tweaks affect the traffic of pretty much all media outlets (including this one!)—not just the conservative ones—but in July 2020 it was revealed that there was some sort of glitch which caused Google to block search results for conservative sites like Breitbart, and that it was quickly rectified.
Which is all to say that of all the people, places, and things that have been blamed for Trump being less popular than Biden, Google might be the wildest culprit yet.
(Via Mediaite)