Twitter buried the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 and Jack Dorsey later admitted it was wrong.
Now Apple and Google just got caught running the same play on a rape-accused Democrat with a Nazi tattoo.
A new study just proved every iPhone in America was a Democrat campaign tool.
MRC Study Catches Apple and Google Running a Conservative News Blackout
The Media Research Center tracked every story Apple News and Google News featured each morning from November 2025 through July 2026.
Apple News published zero negative stories about Graham Platner until June 5.
Google News held the line until May 31.
During those eight months, Platner's scandals were piling up.
The Democrat Senate hopeful from Maine was caught with a Nazi concentration camp guard tattoo on his chest – the Totenkopf, the same death's-head symbol worn by SS guards who ran the gas chambers.
He had 2,000 Reddit posts ranging from slurs to commentary about women who get drunk and get assaulted. Ex-girlfriends described physical abuse. He had a sexting scandal with multiple women while married.
Conservative outlets covered all of it. Fox News, Breitbart, and the Daily Caller published at least 112 documented negative stories.
Apple News and Google News Dropped Platner the Moment He Became a Liability
MRC President David Bozell named exactly what happened.
"For months, while Platner looked like the one Democrat who could beat Susan Collins, the two most powerful news apps in America buried scandal after scandal," Bozell said. "Then the polls turned, Platner became a liability, and suddenly the blackout ended. News judgment had nothing to do with it."
The blackout began after a poll in late October 2025 showed Platner leading incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins – the first Democrat anyone believed could take her down.
It ended the moment a Fox News poll on June 30, 2026, flipped the numbers back in Collins' favor. Within days, Apple and Google were promoting 12 negative Platner stories across two days.
They didn't develop a conscience. They updated their political math.
Big Tech Censorship Has a Pattern and Graham Platner Is Not the First Victim
Platner is not an anomaly. He is proof of a business model.
AllSides – a media bias organization that rates outlets using panels from across the political spectrum – found that Google News drew 73 percent of its content from liberal outlets in 2025 and just 1 percent from conservative ones. Apple News ran 50 percent liberal content and a grand total of 2 percent conservative.
The MRC's broader study of the four major news apps found they pushed 70 percent of their content from liberal sources out of more than 10,000 articles analyzed between November 2025 and March 2026.
Big Tech pulled the same move in 2020, when Twitter suppressed the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story – a story Twitter's own executives later admitted did not violate any platform policy. Jack Dorsey conceded the decision was wrong.
Apple and Google didn't ban stories about Platner. They didn't need to. They just made sure tens of millions of smartphone users never saw them.
The FTC Is Building a Case Against Apple News for Conservative Censorship
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson sent a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook in February warning that Apple News' promotion of liberal content while suppressing conservative outlets could violate the company's own terms of service and the FTC Act itself.
"The FTC is not the speech police," Ferguson wrote – but Congress mandated protection against material misrepresentations, and Apple had told users its news app delivered balanced coverage.
That letter has not yet produced consequences. What it has produced is a paper trail.
Google called the MRC methodology "completely flawed" and claimed its platform personalizes results.
Apple's Top Stories section is explicitly non-personalized – curated by human editors, identical for every user. It showed zero conservative sources and 54 percent liberal content. The algorithm doesn't get the blame when a person made the call.
Every phone in America was a campaign contribution. Apple and Google just didn't disclose it.
Sources:
- Joseph A. Wulfsohn and Brian Flood, "Apple and Google suppressed negative Graham Platner stories for months on their news platform, study finds," Fox News, July 13, 2026.
- Luis Cornelio, "Special Report: Inside Apple and Google's Failed Attempt to Effectively Shield Graham Platner from Scandals," MRC Free Speech America / NewsBusters, July 13, 2026.
- Michael Morris, "Only 5%: Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo Shut Out Right-Leaning News," MRC Free Speech America, April 23, 2026.
- "Many News Aggregators Still Biased to the Left, including Google, Apple, Bing: AllSides Updated Analysis, 2026," AllSides, May 1, 2026.
- "Apple News accused of left-leaning bias in new study of 620 stories," Fox Business, February 10, 2026.
