Google disputes Trump's claim it failed to promote State of the Union address

Google on Wednesday disputed President Trump’s claim in a Twitter post that the tech giant exhibited bias by failing to promote his State of the Union addresses.

Trump posted a video Wednesday afternoon with the hashtag “#StopTheBias,” which accused Google of promoting each of former President Barack Obama’s State of the Union addresses on its homepage while failing to do the same for Trump.

In response, Google said it did highlight a live stream of Trump’s State of the Union address on January 30, 2018. A screenshot circulating Reddit appeared to confirm the tech giant’s claim.

“We have historically not promoted the first address to Congress by a new President, which is technically not a State of the Union address,” Google added. “As a result, we didn’t include a promotion on google.com for this address in either 2009 or 2017.”

Trump posted the accusation one day after he claimed Google had suppressed access to conservative media outlets while promoting what he referred to as the “Fake News Media.” The president said the vast majority of search results for “Trump news” yielded results from left-leaning sources – a claim that Google also denied.

“Google is really taking advantage of a lot of people and I think that’s a very serious thing and a very serious charge,” Trump said Tuesday during a press conference in the Oval Office. “I think what Google and what others are doing, if you look at what’s going on at Twitter, if you look at what’s going on at Facebook – they better be careful, because you can’t do that to people.”