The Washington Post ran a series of tests asking Amazon’s Alexa if the 2020 election was stolen. The results were quite disturbing:

Asked about fraud in the race — in which President Biden defeated former president Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video streaming service favored by conservatives.

The 2020 races were “notorious for many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers,” according to Alexa, referencing Substack, a subscription newsletter service. Alexa contended that Trump won Pennsylvania, citing “an Alexa answers contributor.”

Alexa has more than 70 million estimated users, according to The Post, yet Amazon “declined to explain why” it relied on unvetted sources for such important responses.

The reason appears to be bothsidesism and Republican pressure. More from The Post:

The inconsistent answers from Alexa could reflect an attempt by developers to draw from a wide range of news sources across the political spectrum to address concerns of bias, said Meredith Broussard, an associate professor at New York University and author of “More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender and Ability Bias in Tech.”

Developers “often think that they have to give a balanced viewpoint and they do this by alternating between pulling sources from right and left, thinking this is going to give balance,” Broussard said. “The most popular sources on the left and right vary dramatically in quality.”

…

Since the beginning of the year, Republicans in Congress have escalated the pressure on tech companies to take a hands-off approach to misinformation, opening an investigation into long-running allegations that the industry is biased and colluding with Democrats to censor their views online.

Ironically, Jeff Bezos is both the owner of The Washington Post and the executive chairman of Amazon. The Post’s official slogan is, “Democracy Dies In Darkness.” Let’s hope Bezos has enough light to take a good look in time for the 2024 election.