A recent investigation from Axios has revealed that Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has been re-writing mainstream media headlines and running them as Google ads.
The practice, along with poor internal controls by Google, allowed the campaign to create the false impression that glowing headlines written by her campaign were actual headlines from media outlets.
“Wow! Google and the Harris campaign are manipulating stories. Is this legal?” said former President Donald Trump on Truth Social after news of the headline manipulation broke.
The ads, which appeared alongside search results, included links to real articles from more than ten outlets, including the Associated Press, NPR, USA Today, and CNN, and replaced the headlines with praise for Harris.
Most users scanning search results would only have seen the headlines, written by the campaign, assumed they matched the articles behind the links.
One article stealthily altered by Harris’ people took a headline from the Associated Press which read “Harris will carry Biden’s economic record into the election” and changed it to “VP Harris’ Economic Vision—Lower Costs and Higher Wages.”
In an even more egregious change, the Harris campaign took another article titled “The impact of Biden’s economic agenda may be felt long after his presidency” and changed it to simply “Inflation is Down.”
Even liberal mainstream media outlets were unaware of the Harris campaign’s use of their content and were displeased by the manipulation.
“We were not aware the Harris campaign was using our content in this manner,” said Lark-Marie Anton, spokesperson for USA TODAY parent company Gannett. “As a news organization, we are committed to ensuring that our stories are shared appropriately, adhering to the highest standards of integrity and accuracy.”
CNN, which has published numerous articles favoring Harris, was critical of the strategy and discussed the Axios report on air.
Google has defended the ads, claiming that other politicians have done similar things in the past and arguing that, because they include a statement saying that they are sponsored content, they are not misleading.
An analysis of Google’s ad transparency center revealed that, although other candidates have used similar tactics, former President Donald Trump is not running any of the misleading headline ads.
Despite Google’s claim, the ads are nevertheless working to appear like true articles, even using official logos from outlets like the AP.
Additionally, Axios reported that Google apologized after some of the ads failed to disclose who was paying for them, blaming a glitch.
This is not the first time the tech company has seemingly intervened to benefit Harris, before blaming a glitch after being called out for election interference.
Last month, Google made headlines after it was discovered that its autofill search results were excluding any references to President Trump, particularly the July assassination attempt.
While that was ongoing, it was discovered that searches about Trump were altered to include information about Harris, which was often displayed more prominently than the information actually requested in the search query.
Although Axios revealed Harris’s most recent misinformation scheme, it is far from innocent in helping Harris hide her unpopular record.
As Republicans leveled attacks at Harris for her terrible failures at the southern border while serving as President Joe Biden’s “border czar,” mainstream media outlets jumped to her defense and falsely denied that she had been placed in charge of the situation at the southern border.
Axios provided one of the most obvious examples when it published an article claiming that Harris was never the border czar, after having previously reported on her as the border czar in an earlier article.
The Axios reporter who broke the story about the Google search result scheme even sought to downplay the significance of her own story in subsequent social media posts.
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