Trump Warns Google, FB and Twitter In Row Over Bias
US President Donald Trump has warned Google, Twitter and Facebook they are “treading on troubled territory” amid a row over perceived bias.
He said they had to be “very careful”, after earlier accusing Google of rigging the search results for the phrase “Trump news”.
An aide said the administration was “looking into” the issue of regulation.
Google said its search engine set no political agenda and was not biased towards any political ideology.
Speaking to reporters at the White House, Mr Trump said Google had “really taken a lot of advantage of a lot of people, it’s a very serious thing”.
Adding the names of Facebook and Twitter, he said: “They better be careful, because you can’t do that to people... we have literally thousands of complaints coming in.”
He gave no details of what action he might take. However, when asked earlier about Google, Mr Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, said the administration was “taking a look” at whether it should be regulated and would do “some investigation and some analysis”.
‘Suppressed’
Analysts say there is little to back up Mr Trump’s claim and that it is unclear how he could take action.
Some said attempts to alter search engine results could violate the First Amendment, although his administration could make it difficult for Google by looking into its dominance of the market.
In an earlier tweet, Mr Trump accused
Google of prioritising negative news stories from what he described as the “national leftwing media”.
He said most of the stories that appeared on the results page were negative and that conservative reporting was being “suppressed”. Last week he said social media were “totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices” and that he would “not let that happen”.
Google denied using political viewpoints to shape its search results.
It said: “Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology.
“We continually work to improve Google search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”