U.S. President Donald Trump is stepping up his attacks against Google, continuing to call the search engine biased against him.
In a tweet Wednesday night, Trump posted a video that claimed the landing page of Google promoted former president Barack Obama’s State of the Union addresses but not his own. A Google spokesperson denied these claims to Global News.
The tweet comes after two days of attacks on Google, which the president claimed only shows negative news about him – which Google also refuted. He also said they were “trying to silence” people and suggested, without evidence, that their activities may be illegal.
“I think that Google and Facebook and Twitter … treat conservatives and Republicans very unfairly,” Trump told reporters at the White House earlier on Wednesday.
Trump officials have since said they are looking into regulating Google’s search engine because of the “unfair” treatment.
The video Trump tweeted Wednesday shows a picture of Google.com on various dates throughout Obama’s presidency, with a link to watch the State of the Union Address.
But the video then shows a picture of the website on Jan. 30. 2018, which was the date of Trump’s State of the Union address earlier this year.
It appears no link is provided to watch Trump’s address.
Google refuted that claim, saying officials did promote Trump’s speech.
“On January 30 2018, we highlighted the livestream of President Trump’s State of the Union on the google.com homepage,” a Google spokesperson said in an email to Global News.
When Global News checked archived versions of Google’s homepage for Jan. 30 on the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving websites, no link to watch the address was seen.
But since the Internet Archive only captures website at certain times of the day, it’s unclear whether or not the link was present at other times of the day.
For reference, links to Obama’s State of the Union were found on the Internet Archive.
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The video also showed a screen grab of the website on Feb 28, 2017, where no link is provided to watch Trump’s first speech to Congress since being elected.
A spokesperson for Google said that’s because the company doesn’t typically promote speeches to Congress.
“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,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.
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“I think it’s a very serious problem because they’re really trying to silence a very large part of this country, and those people don’t want to be silenced. It’s not right. It’s not fair. It may not be legal, but we’ll see. We just want fairness,” Trump added Wednesday.
Google has said its search is non-political and aimed at getting users the most relevant answers.
“Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology,” the company said in a statement.
*with files from Reuters
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