Google denies Trump claims of bias against the President
Google has refuted Donald Trump’s latest claim of bias after the US President shared a video suggesting the tech giant promoted Barack Obama’s State of the
Union address but not his.
The video purportedly shows screenshots of the search engine’s homepage, displaying a live link to watch Mr Obama’s speeches each year from 2012 to 2016, but not a link to Mr Trump’s from 2017 onwards.
Mr Trump, who has 54 million followers on Twitter, simply tweeted “#Stopthebias” alongside the video.
Google said it did promote Mr Trump’s first State of the Union address in 2018, while clarifying that it has never featured a new president’s first address to Congress.
“On January 30 2018, we highlighted the livestream of President Trump’s State of the Union on the google. com homepage,” a Google spokesman said.
“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.”
Earlier this week, Mr Trump claimed results on Google’s search engine were “rigged” to only show bad news about him and other Republican voices.
Google denied this, saying it never ranks search results to manipulate political sentiment.