Texas congressman demands answers from Google after Harris campaign edits headlines for use in ads

Congressman Lance Gooden, R-Texas, is requesting answers from Google following reports that Vice President Kamala Harris's presidential campaign has been editing past headlines in news articles from different outlets and reposting them as ads. 

"Google interfered in the 2020 election through the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story," Gooden wrote on the social media platform, X. "Now they appear to be interfering through shadow banning Trump-related searches & allowing Kamala Harris to manipulate article headlines."

An analysis released earlier this week showed that the Harris-Walz campaign changed the headlines of news outlets to generate more favorable results in Google searches.

The articles with altered headlines were reposted as advertisements and labeled as sponsored in Google search results. The problem, according to Gooden, is that the ads are set up in such a way that they suggest "endorsement from major news publications."

Former President Donald Trump said on TRUTH Social that what the campaign was doing was "election interference." 

Gooden wrote a letter to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, Google's parent company, and expressed his concerns. 

"It is crucial for Google to protect the integrity of the upcoming election by implementing clear guidelines to prohibit political campaigns, like the Kamala Harris campaign, from intentionally manipulating results on your platform to mislead voters," he wrote in the letter posted to X.