Did Google Manipulate Search Results to
Help Hillary Clinton?
With Hillary Clinton
now facing Donald Trump directly in the general presidential election in the
Fall, the campaigns of both candidates have swung into high gear in their
efforts to impugn, tarnish and smear their respective opponents. Both campaigns
are making maximum use of their respective allies in order to advance their
cause.
In the case of Hillary
Clinton, many of her largest donors and supporters are drawn from Silicon
Valley, and in particular, looming large among their ranks is search engine
giant Google.
At a journalism forum
in Moscow recently, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange made the extraordinary
charge that “[Google] is directly engaged in Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
Assange went on to say
that Google’s Chairman, Eric Schmidt, established a company expressly for the
purpose of running “the digital component” of the Democratic candidate’s
efforts. The company Assange is referring to is known as The Groundwork, and it
indeed was set up by Schmidt in 2015.
If one goes to the
website for The Groundwork, the only page visible features a textless backdrop
logo image with no visible buttons or interface. However, behind the scenes,
there is much more to this company than a wordless backdrop.
The foundations of The
Groundwork are based on efforts Schmidt and other Silicon Valley insiders made
to enable the success of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Specifically, one can
go back to the reelection campaign of Obama in 2012 to understand the influence
of Schmidt and Google on the president’s victory that fall.
Former Obama campaign
staffer Elan Kriegel, who now heads up analytics for Hillary Clinton’s
campaign, says, in reflecting on the 2012 race, that technology was responsible
for at least half of Obama’s margin of victory.
On the night of the
election, Chairman Schmidt could be found at Obama’s national campaign office
in Chicago, running the president’s intricate voter-turnout machinery.
For Google, Obama’s
victory was sweet, as the company benefitted from new “Net Neutrality” laws
eventually passed by the FCC in 2015 after its lobbyists met with White House
staffers over 200 times.
As the chairman of
Google, Schmidt likely knows more than a little about promoting viral content
and reaching people. Julian Assange claims that in a number of Hillary
Clinton’s leaked emails, names of prominent Google employees and officers
appear, including that of Jared Cohen, the president of Google Ideas (now known
as Jigsaw), a company “think tank.”
It was Schmidt who
approached Cohen, a young senior fellow (he was 29 at the time) on the Council
on Foreign Relations (CFR) — coincidentally, where Schmidt’s romantic partner
Lisa Shields is a vice president — to run Jigsaw in 2010.
Cohen was known as a
social media whiz, who had worked extensively for both former Secretaries of
State Condoleeza Rice and Clinton. In his previous role, Cohen had leveraged
his knowledge of this new channel into a tool for counter-radicalization of
despotic regimes such as Afghanistan, Iran and Syria.
Together, Schmidt and
Cohen have authored a book entitled “The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future
of People, Nations and Business,” which attempts to foresee the role that
technology will play in effecting or combating war, terrorism, foreign
relations, identity theft and/or other issues.
Although a significant
percentage of the Earth’s population is still “non-wired,” it’s the opinion of
both Schmidt and Cohen (and others including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg) that
technology will be the defining factor in many of these actions. The entity
that controls these tools essentially will have “the keys to the kingdom” in
many such cases.
Assange is only one
critic of hundreds who have argued that the power and influence of tech
super-companies like Google are growing faster than the ability of governments
to regulate or limit them.
When Cohen was still
working in the State Department, he was able to use his authority to persuade
Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey to delay a new release of the
company’s platform in order to help anti-government forces in Iran in 2009.
Schmidt and Cohen’s
book was born out of an article the pair co-authored in the CFR’s journal
Foreign Affairs that claimed Silicon Valley could be used as a weapon in the
U.S.’s foreign policy arsenal and that states that were aligned politically
could also take advantage their citizens’ cross-border online connections.
In the meantime,
Assange’s Wikileaks has discovered that Cohen’s Jigsaw has gone beyond just
providing ideas for Google. Wikileaks claims that Cohen has actively taken
roles in the digital elements of U.S.-fomented political actions and uprisings
in Egypt, Isreal and Turkey under the guise of Google “projects” or “studies.”
It’s now clear that
many of these projects and studies were either directed or explicitly sponsored
by the State Department and/or the White House. In one leaked email, a State
Department official claimed that “[Google] is doing things the CIA cannot do.”
Both Schmidt and Cohen
have their hands deep in Hillary Clinton’s campaign using all the tools of
political propaganda and influence at their disposal — including those normally
used for effecting changes in regimes outside the United States — to effect
changes in federal and state governments within the United States.
It could be argued
that as officers of Google, both Schmidt and Cohen have an agenda that seeks to
empower a political party that is favorable to their interests. But whether
they’re seen as mere tools by the former leader of the State Department or as
people who are significantly more powerful than that is in the eye of the
beholder.
Certainly, annual
conferences thrown by Jigsaw have had as attendees representatives of some of
the biggest military contractors and corporations in the country — firms that
have business subject to State Department and White House sanction and
approval.
As an older generation
of statesmen grays, a newer generation is beginning to realize that the gatekeepers
of true political power are turning out to be the same IT managers and software
gurus that are currently responsible for the promotion of mass digital content
(and, in some cases, the leaking of the contents).
Whether the forces of
Hillary Clinton’s campaign or the embodiments of the technological army it
employs are to be feared more is open for debate.
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