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Once again on the far-side fringe
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Arizona GOP Secretary Of State Candidate Insists ‘Deep State’ Google Is Blocking His Website; Turns Out He Requested It Not Be Indexed
from the stupidity-or-incompetence dept
"These days, the conspiracy-minded GOP candidates (who seem to be an increasing majority of the party right now) seem to believe that there needs to be a conspiracy against them or they’re just not that important. It can be the deep state, big tech, or the “woke banks” or whatever, but someone must be coming to get them. It’s all nonsense. Mark Finchem is the GOP candidate in Arizona for Secretary of State. If he wins, he’ll be one of a distressingly high number of politicians in charge of future elections who believes — against all facts and evidence — that the 2020 election was fraudulent. Such people can do an awful lot of damage.
Anyway, this week Finchem insisted that Google and its “deeps state algorithm” was blocking his campaign website to try to stymie his campaign:
And it is true that if you search for his campaign website on Google, you come up empty (though you do find lots of other stuff about him, including his lies about the 2020 election). However as Grid News figured out, the reality is not just different, but (for yet another reason) raises serious questions about Finchem’s competence. It turns out that Finchem’s campaign inserted a “noindex” meta tag… telling Google not to index it or show it in search. I mean, it’s right there for anyone to see:
If you can’t see that image, it’s a screenshot of the source code on his website, showing some of the meta tags, and it looks like they used the AIOSEO plugins to setup their SEO tags. In this case, they chose to block search engines, as seen in the meta tag:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow, max-image-preview:large">
This leads to one of two possible conclusions. Option one is that Finchem is so desperate to be seen as being oppressed that he literally (if hamfistedly) had his campaign block Google from indexing his site so he could claim to be deplatformed from Google.
✓✓ Or, option two is that the guy who might soon be in charge of Arizona state elections is so incompetent and so stupid that he accidentally blocked Google from searching his website:
I honestly can’t decide which possibility is more damning. As Grid notes, it looks like this deliberate change to Finchem’s website was made somewhere in mid-July, because that meta tag wasn’t there before that.
They also got an appropriately dry comment from Google basically saying if Finchem wants to be “replatformed” he should, uh, remove his own tag telling Google to deplatform him:
“The webmaster for this site has instructed Google and other search engines not to include the site’s homepage in our search results by using a ‘noindex’ directive,” the spokesman said in an email to Grid. “If a site wishes to appear in search results, they can remove the ‘noindex’ directive.”
Of course, this won’t actually matter to many of his supporters and many in the nonsense-peddling parts of the Trumpist world. I imagine we’re going to be hearing for months about how Google “censored” this guy, when the truth is he appears to have chosen to deliberately “censor” himself and then blame others for it."
Filed Under: anti-conservative bias, arizona, bias, deplatformed, mark finchem, meta tags, noindex, search, secretary of state
Companies: google
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RNC Chair McDaniel: If You Use Gmail, Google Is Marking Emails From The Republican Party As "Spam"
RNC Chair McDaniel: If You Use Gmail, Google Is Marking Emails From The Republican Party As "Spam"
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RNC
chairwoman Ronna McDaniel told FBN's Maria Bartiromo on Wednesday
morning that the Republican Party is "seriously looking at how we can
sue Google" for suppressing their get-out-the-vote emails by labeling
them as "spam." MARIA BARTIROMO, FOX BUSINESS: You also say that Google is suppressing millions of election-related e-mails, just in the last month the [Republican National] Committee is accusing the company of marking 22 million e-mails as spam, including get-out-the-vote messages. You're exploring legal options. What are you going to do?RONNA ROMNEY MCDANIEL: We spent the day on the phone with attorneys yesterday. We're very seriously looking at how we can sue Google. Google controls 53% of the e-mails in the United States. And they are suppressing right now Republican get-out-the-vote e-mails ahead of this election. We know this, for the past 10 months, the last four days of every month all of our e-mails go undeliverable. Zero percent deliverability.
This is outrageous, it is voter suppression by big tech and we have to hold them accountable. The RNC is looking to sue. We hope to have an announcement soon on that. This is another reason why we need Republicans to take back the House and Senate. We need to find a way to keep big tech's thumb off the scale in our elections and our democracy because they should not be able to suppress e-mails that we're sending to people who asked for us to send these e-mails. They have to opt-in. They have to opt-in.
So, Google is saying oh, it's a Republican e-mail, we're going to suppress it, put it in spam, or we're not going to deliver it.
BARTIROMO: Why? Why are they doing this? We know that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook told us that right before the 2020 election, the FBI and DOJ called Facebook and said we've got misinformation and pretty much directed them to censor the Hunter Biden story, which is exactly what they did. And now you're saying that they are censoring e-mails to get-out-the-vote for Republicans. Why? Why is technology putting their hand on the scale? For Democrats?
MCDANIEL: I think this is a really important question. We have to understand. We have to hold big tech accountable. They should not be able to use a utility like e-mail, everybody is using Gmail, they don't know that Google is censoring Republican e-mails to tell people to get out and vote or register to vote. We just tried to send them they Virginia and Minnesota. They suppressed 9.9 million e-mails last month. This is outrageous.
BARTIROMO: You can't do anything about it? You just spoke to lawyers. What can you do about this?
✓ MCDANIEL: We're trying to -- it's probably going to be through a state route. Every state has a different law. We're trying to find a way to bring a lawsuit against Google. We're trying to raise public awareness. If you have a Gmail, right now, Google is suppressing your turnout emails and your registration e-mails from the Republican Party.
It's not going down to 5% or 10%. It's zero percent deliverability. The last four months of every month the past 10 months, with fundraising emails as well."
AZ GOP CHAIR KELLI WARD Kelli Ward is an American osteopathic physician and politician who has served as the chair of the Arizona Republican Party since 2019. She served in the Arizona State Senate from 2013 to 2015. She challenged incumbent Senator John McCain in the Republican primary for the United States Senate in 2016.Wikipedia
AZGOP chair Kelli Ward pleaded the Fifth when the Jan. 6 committee questioned her
"Kelli Ward, the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, refused to answer questions from the congressional committee investigating the violent Jan. 6 insurrection aimed at overturning the 2020 election and instead asserted her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
The disclosure was made Tuesday in federal court by an attorney for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol as part of litigation surrounding the committee’s subpoena of phone records for Ward and her husband.
Politico first reported the news:
“Dr. Ward was deposed by the select committee, and she declined to answer on every substantive question and asserted her rights under the Fifth Amendment,” select committee attorney Eric Columbus said during a court hearing before Arizona-based U.S. District Court Judge Diane Humetewa. Columbus did not say when Ward’s deposition took place, though the select panel’s subpoena instructed her to appear on March 8, 2022.
Columbus revealed Ward’s posture during a hearing on the committee’s attempt to obtain her phone records from cell phone carrier T-Mobile. Ward sued the panel to block T-Mobile from cooperating, but Humetewa recently rejected her effort. Tuesday’s hearing came amid Ward’s effort to ask Humetewa to delay the impact of her ruling while she seeks a review from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Attorneys for Ward did not immediately respond to a request for comment..."
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