A report from independent journalist, author, and filmmaker Mike Cernovich detailing the link between the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a group that demonizes and dehumanizes conservatives, and a far-left mass shooter appears to have been scrubbed from Google search results.
Searching for the title of Cernovich’s report, “How a Convicted Terrorist used the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Website to Identify Targets,” does not bring up a link to the report on the first page of Google results, which instead returns results for the SPLC’s own website.
The report details the story of Floyd Lee Corkins, a far-left activist who attempted to carry out a mass shooting at the headquarters of the Christian conservative Family Research Council in Washington DC.
As detailed in Cernovich’s report, the FRC was just one organization on a list of four targets possessed by the shooter, who admitted to the FBI that he planned to carry out shootings at each of the targets, one by one.
He also told the FBI that he identified the FRC as a target because he read an item on the SPLC’s “hate watch” list calling it an “anti-gay organization.”
If you search for the title of Cernovich’s report on DuckDuckGo or Bing, it is the first result. But if you search for it on Google, it is nowhere to be found.
Breitbart News has experienced similar censorship from Google, with the exact wording of Breitbart headlines failing to generate results on the first page of Google. Instead, the searches bring up results for websites that plagiarize the headlines and content of original Breitbart News stories.
In a comment to Breitbart News, Cernovich said he believed the SPLC went to Google to remove negative information about themselves.
“I wrote a truthful report, which relied on publicly available court records, about the SPLC’s connection to a mass shooter. Rather than demand a retraction, which they know they could not obtain, the SPLC clearly ran to Google to have them remove my report. Google is censoring truthful information at the behest of left wing organizations.”
Cernovich noted that the SPLC is a discredited organization, having been forced into a multi-million dollar settlement with the secularist campaigner Maajid Nawaz after it added the moderate Muslim to a list of “anti-Muslim extremists.”
“The censorship against me is shocking considering the SPLC paid nearly $4 million to settle a lawsuit brought against it by a Muslim whom the SPLC falsely labeled an extremist. Keep in mind that the SPLC applied this extremism label even after being put on notice that terrorists rely on the SPLC for its hits lists. Likewise the SPLC smeared Ben Carlson – again with fill knowledge that terrorists rely on the SPLC for targets to attack.”
“If Google wants to fight disinformation, then it must explain why an organization that was forced to settle a lawsuit for falsely smearing an innocent Muslim man should be considered an “authoritative” outlet in Google’s algorithmic ratings,” said Cernovich.
“Because it’s clear Google puts the SPLC at the top of its search results, in addition to censoring truthful reporting about the SPLC.”
Breitbart News has reached out to Google for comment.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.