Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Friday threatened to criminally prosecute the Internet search engine Google for allegedly favoring Democratic opponent Kamala Harris in its search results.
Without providing evidence, Trump claimed in a post on his Truth Social site that Google is trying to interfere with the 2024 presidential election by purposely displaying only “bad stories” about him.
“It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris,” he wrote in the post.
The former president then threatened to bring criminal charges against the tech giant, writing, “This is an illegal activity, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant interference of elections. If not, and subject to the laws of our country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the election, and become president of the United States.”
Trump’s allegations seem to be in reaction to a study issued this week by the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog group led by activist L. Brent Bozell, CNBC reported.
The study claims Google “very clearly pads its search results about political candidates with leftist legacy news articles, many of which are hostile to Republicans and either neutral or favourable toward Democrats.”
“Google is trying to stack the deck in favour of Kamala Harris,” Bozell told Fox News Digital Wednesday.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., did not immediately respond to Trump’s allegations.
The GOP candidate’s complaints about Google represent the latest in long line of allegations from Trump and other Republican politicians and conservative activists who perceive a bias against them from social media platforms.
He similarly alleged Google’s search results were biased against him in 2019 after an Google employee claimed he was fired for being conservative and that company executives used their power “to control the flow of information to the public and make sure that Trump loses in 2020.”
Google, as well as some independent technology experts, have dismissed claims that its search results are being manipulated for political purposes, not only because that would undermine the company’s successful business model but also because its algorithms are designed to highly rank results from news sources judged to be factually “authoritative and accurate.”
Despite the denials, accusations from conservatives about alleged anti-Trump bias in the search engine have resurfaced as he appears deadlocked with Harris with the election looming.
Elon Musk, owner of the X media platform and a supporter of Trump, accused Google of such bias in a series of X posts in July, zeroing in on its autocomplete feature, which provides suggestions based on what users type into its search bar.
He claimed Google had a “search ban” on Trump because he didn’t appear in some users’ autocomplete predictions for “president Donald.”
“Autocomplete is currently not working as intended for some searches about the names of several past presidents and the current vice-president,” a Google spokesperson told NBC News. “We’re looking into these anomalies and working on improvements, which we hope to roll out soon. Our autocomplete systems are dynamic, so predictions will change based on common and trending queries.”(UPI)
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