Trump says Google "manipulates" votes after leak of internal documents

President Donald Trump claimed on Twitter that Google had "manipulated" the votes in the 2016 election, which would have given him an even greater lead over his opponent and that the company "should be pursued ".

Trump's tweet seems to refer to documents leaked to the conservative group Project Veritas, but the documents do not seem to contain any outright allegations of vote manipulation or attempt to skew the election. Zachary Vorhies, who identifies himself online as a former senior software engineer at Google, recently released his allegations in a Project Veritas video after initially anonymously disclosing to the group documents that claimed to be biased in how Google displays search results.

The leak gives ammunition to conservative lawmakers such as Senator Ted Cruz, R-Tex., Who have already accused high-tech companies, including Google, of having suppressed conservative voices through biased algorithms .

Vorhies told Project Veritas that they had collected the documents "because I had seen something dark and bad for society and I realized that it would not only alter the elections, but also use them to overthrow the states. -United. "

The documents published by Project Veritas appear to include internal discussions and lists indicating how Google determines whether news sources are credible or contain hate speech and how to deal with them. It also includes an explanatory guide on what is called the "framework for twiddler", which seems to be a technology for formulating "ranking recommendations" on search queries. Google declined to answer a question about the content shared by Vorhies with Project Veritas.

Trump's tweet also claimed that Google had manipulated 2.6 million votes for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, probably referring to a number derived from psychology researcher Robert Epstein. Epstein, who works for the American Institute of Behavioral Research and Technology, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in June: "The skewed search results generated by Google's search algorithm have probably affected undecided voters in a way that gave Hillary Clinton at least 2.6 million votes (which I supported), "according to the prepared remarks.

Commenting on Epstein's claims, a spokesman for Google said: "The inaccurate claim of this researcher has been refuted since its launch in 2016. As we said at the time, we never reorganized or modified the search results to manipulate political feelings, our goal is to always provide people with access to relevant and high quality information for their queries, regardless of the political point of view. "

After seeing the report, Epstein told the conservative Breitbart press conference that the documents leaked gave credibility to his research. Epstein said that the documents show that Google executives "perjured themselves in front of Congress" because they refused the use of blacklists and the return of search results.

"They re-record search results according to their needs, political or otherwise.This is what is called the" Twiddler "system," Epstein told Breitbart. "One of the documents, called the Twiddler Quick Start Guide, explains how various teams have access to highly specialized software that allows them to change how certain types of content are ranked in search results … They rebroadcast literally the research results to achieve their goals, needs are constantly changing, and some of these needs are political needs. "

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