Google is firing back at President Trump’s accusation that the search engine behemoth was displaying only negative news about the president when searching for his name, saying the company does not favor search results for political purposes.
“When users type queries into the Google Search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds,” Google, whose parent company is Alphabet, said in a statement. “Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology. Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries. We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”
On yet another Twitter rampage this morning, Trump accused Google of “suppressing voices of conservatives” and rigging its search engine to amplify liberal media outlets.
“Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media,” Trump wrote. “In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out.
“Illegal? 96% of results on ‘Trump News’ are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous,” he added. “Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!”
Trump’s criticism and threat of action to somehow restrict Google was his latest attack on a major tech company, following a series of tweets about Amazon.com, which he has accused of hurting small businesses and benefiting from a favorable deal with the U.S. Postal Service.
Last week, without mentioning specific companies, he accused social media companies of silencing “millions of people” in an act of censorship, without offering evidence to support the claim.
Trump’s economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, later told reporters that the White House was “taking a look” at Google, saying they would do “some investigation and some analysis,” without providing further details.
Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democrat, said in a tweet directed at Trump: “If government tried to dictate the free speech algorithms of private companies, courts would strike it down in a nanosecond.”