Google/Clinton Conspiracy

About

The Google/Clinton Conspiracy refers to a theory that prominent search engine site Google blocks negative autocomplete searches for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton while autocompleting the same searches for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Origin

The conspiracy began with a video by SourceFed^[1] posted on June 9th, 2016 (shown below) that suggested Google was actively helping the Clinton campaign by blocking negative autocomplete searches. For example, they noticed searching "Hillary Clinton Cri" did not autocomplete to "Hillary Clinton Criminal Investigation" like it did on competing search engine sites Yahoo and Bing, and extrapolated on this observation to suggest Google was in cahoots with the Clinton campaign.

Spread

Google's Vice President of Product Management Tamar Yehoshua responded to the video the following day in a blogpost^[2] that clarified Google's autocomplete feature had been tailored to filter out offensive queries, and that the feature applies to searches for all people. Vox^[3] also thoroughly debunked the theory.

Donald Trump Claims

On September 28th, 2016, Donald Trump cited the conspiracy while talking about his standing in the polls. "A new post-debate poll, the Google poll, has us leading Hillary Clinton by two points nationwide," he said. "And that's despite the fact that Google search engine was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton. How about that."

Trump's comments prompted stories from several news outlets, including The Daily Dot,^[4] CNN,^[5] and The Verge,^[6] who each covered the fact the theory was debunked months earlier.

Search Interest

External References