On Friday Eastern Time, Republican presidential candidate and former President Trump posted on his social media site Truth Social that if he wins the November 5th election, he will seek to sue Google because Google only displays bad news about him and good news about Harris.
Trump criticizes Google
Trump wrote on Truth Social:
It has been determined that Google illegally used a system to only disclose and display bad news about Donald J. Trump, some of which were intentionally fabricated, while only disclosing good news about Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris
This is illegal activity, and I hope the Department of Justice can bring criminal charges against their blatant interference in elections... If not, according to our country's laws, when I win the election and become the President of the United States, I will demand the highest level of prosecution against them
Trump did not provide any evidence in his post to support his complaints about Google. However, some foreign media believe that Trump may be responding to a study by the conservative organization Media Research Center (MRC).
Is Google really biased?
Recently, MRC released a report stating that they found that when searching for the term "Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign" on Google, Google tends to display news reports that support Harris positively, rather than Trump's own campaign website.
MRC wrote in the report that their researchers searched for the term "Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign" on September 6th and found that news from traditional left-wing (pro Democratic) media such as CNN and The New York Times topped the search results, ranking sixth behind Trump's campaign website.
When researchers searched for the term 'Kamala Harris 2024 presidential campaign', Harris' campaign website ranked third, and out of the nine news articles appearing on the homepage, eight were from left-wing media.
MRC founder Brent Bozell bluntly stated on Wednesday, "Google is trying to cheer for Kamala Harris
Google denied on Friday that they intentionally manipulated search results and believed that MRC's report conclusions were incorrect. A Google spokesperson told the media, "In relevant and common search queries, both of their campaign websites have consistently appeared at the top of search results
He also explained, "Inquiries about presidential elections or candidates often come with constantly changing links pointing to different news articles that reflect the content on the internet - so they are constantly changing... We will never manipulate search results to favor any candidate... In fact, some media reports have stated that the Trump campaign website ranks higher in Google search results compared to results from other search engines
Previously in 2019, Trump also made similar criticisms of Google. At that time, he posted a series of posts on X (then known as Twitter) accusing Google of being more inclined to display negative news reports about him in the 2016 election. But Google denied this quality control at the time.
In recent weeks, some supporters of Trump have reintroduced accusations against Google. In July of this year, a few days after the attempted assassination of Trump, one of Trump's current supporters and Tesla CEO Elon Musk published an article on X accusing Google of banning users from searching for Trump.