Donald Trump has lashed out at Google, accusing the online giant of ‘rigging’ its search results against conservative news outlets. Does the outspoken US President have a point?
On Tuesday August 28, President Trump took to his preferred social media platform, Twitter, to allege that Google was guilty of “hiding information” and “suppressing voices” in certain search results, claiming that 96% of queries for ‘Trump news’ pointed to the left-wing media.
He vowed to ‘address’ the “very dangerous” situation in a pair of tweets sent at around 5:30am US eastern time that, combined, garnered over 100,000 likes and 75,000 comments.
Trump is no stranger to making bold (some might say brash) statements on Twitter. While he doesn’t back up the 96% figure in his tweets, The Guardian points out that the stat appears to originate with right-wing website PJ Media, and was subsequently picked up by mainstream conservative outlets like Fox News.
….results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2018
Google, for its part, has denied fiddling search results to favour certain news sources.
“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. 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,” the Mountain View-based company said in a prepared statement to the press.
Will Trump crackdown on Google during his presidency? We’ll keep this article updated with all the latest news and developments so stay tuned.
Alternatively, tweet us @TrustedReviews to share your thoughts on the budding Trump vs Google grudge match.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
