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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