Trump says Google rigs search results, hides conservative news
President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Tuesday to accuse tech giant Google of favoring liberal news sites via its search engine, therefore highlighting negative coverage of himself and suppressing conservative coverage.
In response to those claims, a spokesperson for the search giant said "search is not used to set a political agenda and we don't bias our results toward any political ideology ... We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment."
The White House refused to directly address the issue when asked by reporters on Tuesday.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he could only speak for the president on economic issues.
National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow responded to a question on whether there needs to be regulation for Google by saying, “We’re taking a look at it. We’ll let you know,” as reported by FOX Business’ Blake Burman. Kudlow added that looking into the issue meant the administration would be doing some investigation and analysis.
The claim that some sites, like Facebook and Twitter, suppress conservative news is not new. In 2016 Facebook came under scrutiny following reports that its news curators favored liberal news articles to highlight under its "Trending" news section.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during testimony on Capitol Hill in May that the company would bring in advisers to look into whether conservative voices get a fair representation, while the tech mogul was doing damage control after it was revealed that millions of users had their personal data exposed through a third-party app.