Trump Accuses Google Of Rigging Search Results To Feature 'Bad' News About Him

He said the search engine is suppressing conservative and "fair" voices.
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President Donald Trump 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.

He threatened that the situation “will be addressed.”

Larry Kudlow, Trump’s economic adviser, told The Washington Post on Tuesday that the administration was “taking a look” at whether the government should regulate Google searches.

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.”

But on July 19, he referred to Google as “one of our great companies.”

He has also criticized Facebook in the past for “always” being anti-Trump, accusing the social media giant of colluding with news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

And he accused Twitter of illegally “shadow-banning” Republicans last month, a term used by Vice News to describe how certain Republicans weren’t coming up in search results.

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.

This article has been updated with comment from Kudlow and Google.

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