Tulsi most-Googled candidate during debate… raising questions over ‘muted’ Twitter trend

While presidential challenger Tulsi Gabbard was the most searched for candidate on Google during the second round of Democratic debates, her rankings on Twitter stoked accusations that results were being manipulated.

Ahead of the Wednesday night debate, former VP Joe Biden dominated Google’s search rankings. But Tulsi came out the clear winner across all fifty US states after the event started. Directly trailing Tulsi in the search trends was California Senator Kamala Harris at number two, while Biden held onto third place.

By large margins, Gabbard also repeated her victory in separate online polls organized by conservative media outlets, crushing Breitbart News’ poll with 50 percent of the vote, and winning out in the Drudge poll at 39 percent.

The dovish Hawaii Congresswoman likely bolstered her search numbers in tangling with her fellow Democrats on stage, drawing wide praise and attention online after confronting Harris on her tough-on-crime record as a criminal prosecutor.

Contrasting her rankings on Google, Tulsi didn’t perform quite as well in Twitter’s “trending” category, a fact many on social media found suspicious. Some users suggested Tulsi was being deliberately “throttled” by Twitter to limit her reach on the platform.

A number of commenters also thought it strange that Syrian President Bashar Assad made it into Wednesday’s trends ahead of Tulsi, despite her name consistently dominating that of Assad’s in Google searches.

Others went into more detail in their speculation, with one user noting, in a lengthy thread, that at least one member of Twitter’s communications staff previously worked for Kamala Harris.

Skeptics argued that Twitter’s algorithm, coupled with individually-tailored results and settings, were behind the discrepancies. Others suggested that the theory doesn’t add up, because hashtag “KamalaHarrisDestroyed” trended later.

However, this is far from the first time questions have been raised over whether Twitter and other platforms are purposely skewing what users see in terms of trends. Notably, during the 2016 election, conservative critics accused Google of returning search results favorable to Hillary Clinton over other candidates, though the tech giant denied its searches were biased.

Last week, Tulsi filed a $50 million lawsuit against Google, arguing the company abridged her right to free speech by suspending her advertising account after the first round of Democratic debates; she also accused the company’s email service, Gmail, of auto-flagging her campaign’s emails as junk mail at “a disproportionately high rate” in contrast to other candidates.

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