Trump accuses Google suppressing conservative voices
President Trump claims the tech giant prioritizes 'fake news' in its search results.
Google has refuted President Donald Trump’s accusation that the tech giant snubbed his State of the Union address after years of promoting President Obama’s addresses.
The claims were made in a 24-second video posted on Twitter by Trump on Wednesday. The president also tweeted hashtag “#StopTheBias.”
“For years, Google promoted President Obama’s State of the Union on its homepage. When President Trump took office, Google stopped,” the video claims.
The video appears to show screenshots of the Google homepage from the date of the State of the Union addresses from 2012 through 2018. The screenshots for Feb. 28, 2017 and Jan. 30, 2018, during the first two years of Trump’s presidency, do not show promotions for the State of the Union address on the Google homepage.
WHITE HOUSE 'TAKING A LOOK' AT REGULATING GOOGLE
In a statement, Google took exception with the claims. “On January 30 2018, we highlighted the livestream of President Trump’s State of the Union on the google.com homepage. We have historically not promoted the first address to Congress by a new President, which is technically not a State of the Union address. As a result, we didn’t include a promotion on google.com for this address in either 2009 or 2017,” said a Google spokesperson.
A widely circulated screenshot from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows Google’s promotion of President Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address dated Jan. 31, 2018. On Twitter, @WrockBro said that the date discrepancy is because the Wayback Machine follows GMT.
Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address began at 9:15 p.m. ET on Jan 30, which was 2:10 a.m. GMT on Jan 31.
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine documents more than 336 billion Web pages.
Fox News has reached out to the White House with a request for comment on this story.
Earlier this week, the President said Google and other tech companies are "treading on very, very troubled territory." Trump's chief economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, also said the administration is looking at "regulating" Google.
Trump's warning came as he was meeting in the Oval Office with the president of FIFA, the international governing body of soccer. Trump had claimed in a pair of tweets earlier Tuesday that Google search results are "RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD."
In response, Google said that its search is not used to set a political agenda and the results are not biased toward any political ideology.
Fox News’ Kristin Brown and the Associated Press contributed to this article.
Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers
Get a daily look at what’s developing in science and technology throughout the world.