Trump is not happy with Google over purported ‘rigged’ news

President Trump has escalated his claims that the big tech companies have a leftwing bias. On Monday, the president took to Twitter to argue that companies such as Google are suppressing conservative voices.

In the tweet, Trump said Google search results for “Trump News” showed only the “viewing/reporting of Fake New Media.” Further, he promised to do something about it. Check out the tweets below.

The president’s comments come after PJ Media found that 96 percent of Google search results for “Trump News” came from liberal media outlets. To test this, the right-wing site used the search engine’s “News” tab and analyzed the results using a media bias chart first created by former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson.

Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2018

….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

The site claims there wasn’t a single right-leaning site on the first page of the search results. Further, it determined CNN had nearly twice as many results returned as the second-place finisher, The Washington Post.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

First, the general findings from PJ Media seem correct. In my search for “Trump News” on Google, I was able to determine that Fox News is the only right-leaning organization mentioned on the first page of the search results. In this case, an article from the company was mentioned twice. The rest of the results, by Attkisson’s definition, were indeed from left-leaning sites. Even a search for “Trump News Fox News” tends to include more articles from CNN than other outlets, including Fox News.

Still, you could also make the case that there are more articles from left-leaning sites because more of those organizations exist, hence the perceived biased.

Update: In a statement provided to Gizmodo, Google offers some insight into President Trump’s allegations:

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.

Where do you stand on the issue? Do you think companies like Google are anti-Trump? Let us know below. 

In other tech news:

• Meet MAGANinaJo, the pro-Trump Twitterbot that’s actually a person
• Trump thinks Twitter is ‘shadow banning’ Republican accounts but it was really a bug
• Donald Trump is officially the #1 idiot in the world (according to Google)