Trump declares war on Google
US President Donald Trump has tweeted that Google search results about him are biased in favour of leftwing media.
Leaving aside whatever Machiavellian motives Trump has for tweeting for the time being, this move seems to mark an escalation in the debates over the role the big internet companies play in controlling the flow of public information and discussion. Being openly accused of acting in bad faith by such a powerful person is not something Google can afford to ignore.
Here are the tweets in question, which have apparently been slightly revised since they were first published.
….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
Unsurprisingly Google rejects these accusations. At time of writing it didn’t seem to have published a blog, or whatever, on the matter, but it has sent statements to a bunch of media. In keeping with the theme of this piece here’s an NBC Politics tweet containing the statement.
JUST IN: “Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology … we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment,” Google says in response to Pres. Trump’s conspiracy theory about search results & news reports.
— NBC Politics (@NBCPolitics) August 28, 2018
Trump isn’t the first to flag up perceived leftwing bias from internet giants such as Google and Facebook, and may well be opportunistically riding that wave ahead of US midterm elections in November, in which all of the seats in the House of Representative and a third of the seats in the Senate are up for grabs. At the very least it seems likely he’s trying to swing search results in his favour at this critical juncture.
This is also a sensitive time for Google, especially on this topic. Its claims not to let its search results be affected by political ideology come just a few days after it had to deal with internal concerns that it’s planning to do just that in order to get back into the Chinese market. There is huge pressure on internet giants to censor undesirable content from their platforms, but if they accept the role of censor then they can’t be surprised if they also get accused of bias.
