Google has debunked Donald Trump’s claims that the search engine is biased against his presidency.
Earlier in the week, Trump took aim at the Cali tech giants for supposedly pushing negative stories about him – which is to say, reports on what he has said and done, usually in public, usually on video – to the top of Google's results page.
"Google search results for 'Trump News' shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media," the president said Tuesday on Twitter.
"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," he added. "Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives."
He suggested that Google could be committing a crime, and has since doubled-down on his accusations with a video on his Twitter account, which claims that the search engine stopped promoting the State of the Union address on its homepage once he took office.
Google quickly denied the accusations of bias in its search results, and debunked Trump’s homepage conspiracy theory. In a statement given to The Verge, a Google spokesperson said that the company did in fact promote Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address.
“On January 30th 2018, we highlighted the livestream of President Trump’s State of the Union on the google.com homepage,” reads Google’s statement. “We have historically not promoted the first address to Congress by a new President, which is 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.”
An old screenshot uncovered by The Verge on rabid pro-Trump subreddit the /r/The_Donald even shows that the link appeared on 30 January 2018, and it’s more than possible that the screenshot in Trump’s video is pulled from a cache copy of the page from the Wayback Machine, which could have left the link out.
Not that Trump, or many of his conspiracy-starved supporters, will care.
In their ever-widening crusade against "Fake News", Google has long been in the crosshairs.
Nick Pope is the Site Director of Esquire, overseeing digital strategy for the brand.
