Normally, it’s conservatives you’ll find complaining about Google’s high-tech censorship, since it falls against right-wing opinion and thought 99% of the time. But in a turnabout this week, 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard is filing a $50 million lawsuit against the search engine giant, claiming that Google suspended her campaign’s ad account during what might have been the most important hours of her candidacy.
According to the lawsuit, Google shut down Gabbard’s ad campaign in the hours following the first Democratic debate, just as her name was among the most-searched terms in the United States. Gabbard claims that by suspending her ad campaign during this time, Google prevented her from ensuring that web searchers would see her official site at the top of the rankings, potentially costing her millions in donation dollars.
From The New York Times:
Tulsi Now Inc., the campaign committee for Ms. Gabbard, said Google suspended the campaign’s advertising account for six hours on June 27 and June 28, obstructing its ability to raise money and spread her message to potential voters.
After the first Democratic debate, Ms. Gabbard was briefly the most searched-for candidate on Google. Her campaign wanted to capitalize on the attention she was receiving by buying ads that would have placed its website at the top of search results for her name.
The lawsuit also said the Gabbard campaign believed its emails were being placed in spam folders on Gmail at “a disproportionately high rate” when compared with emails from other Democratic candidates.
“Google’s arbitrary and capricious treatment of Gabbard’s campaign should raise concerns for policymakers everywhere about the company’s ability to use its dominance to impact political discourse, in a way that interferes with the upcoming 2020 presidential election,” the lawsuit said.
If there is such a thing as a “popular Democrat” among Republicans, Gabbard could easily claim the mantle. Her unorthodox political views regularly conflict with the party, and she has been one of the few Democrats to criticize major party figures like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. She has also staked out a niche in the party as being both virulently pro-troops and anti-war, especially when the wars in question are those intended to overthrow a foreign regime. Simultaneously, she has repeatedly raised the alarm on Islamic extremism, bashing the party elite for refusing to call radical Islamic terrorism by its true name.
All of this makes her somewhat of a pariah inside the Democratic Party, and that status makes it all the more suspicious that Google would pull this move against her, of all candidates.
A close look at Gabbard’s campaign platform reveals that she is far, far from a Republican, but apparently any enemy of the Democratic Party establishment is an enemy to Big Tech. Google has gotten comfortable in its role as America’s Censor, but this time they may have taken things a step too far.
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