President Donald Trump has accused Google of rigging its search engine results to feature overwhelmingly negative coverage of him and “others.”
The “Fake New Media,” according to Trump’s early Tuesday tweets, makes up “96 percent” of the news displayed in Google’s search for “Trump News.” He accused the search engine of not including Republican, Conservative and “Fair” media, a practice he dubbed illegal.
….results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. 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!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2018
He threatened that the situation “will be addressed.”
Google disputed the notion that it was using political favoritism to tailor its search results.
“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,” the company 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.”
Trump regularly rants against media outlets whose coverage he doesn’t agree with, and that at times also includes internet platforms. In October 2016, he tweeted, “Wow, Twitter, Google and Facebook are burying the FBI criminal investigation of Clinton.”
On Aug. 18, he said social media companies were “totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices.”
Trump also typically uses the term “rigged” to describe special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian involvement in the 2016 election
