Google is correcting the president.
Earlier today, President Donald Trump accused Google of rigging results in its search engine to favor unflattering articles about him.
Trump did not clarify how exactly the situation would be addressed or where his citing of "96% of results" came from. However, the statistic presumably came from the right wing site PJ Media. The writer who originally cited the 96% statistic did so by googling "Trump news" then compared the results to an unsubstantiated chart that divided various media companies as "left" or "right." It was picked up by Lou Dobbs at Fox Business, which ran a segment on the false claim.
Trump later elaborated on the comments.
I think what Google and what others are doing, if you look at what’s going on with Twitter, if you look at what’s going on with Facebook, they better be careful because you can’t do that to people. So I think that Google, and Twitter and Facebook, they are really treading on very, very troubled territory and they have to be careful. It’s not fair to large portions of the population.
Google jumped into the fray with a statement denying such political rigging of search results:
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.
According to Trump advisor Larry Kudlow, Trump's team is "taking a look" at regulating Google searches. In addition, the House Energy and Commerce Committee plans to hold a hearing on the matter early next month.
But Google isn't the only one calling out the president.
And it opened the door for some Google-themed jokes as well.
The allegations that entire institutions are rigged against him is no new accusation from the president.
Trump routinely claims that anti-Trump bias is rampant within every institution.
He's done it, possibly most famously, with the Mueller investigation:
And about the media:
And about the media's coverage about the Mueller investigation:
Now, the president appears to be accusing Google and even social media companies, whose manipulation played a large part in getting him elected. As the accusations become more and more far-fetched, many are beginning to think the walls are closing in.
