Trump doubles down on bias accusations against US tech giants
US President Donald Trump has doubled down on his attacks towards tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, accusing them of illegal activity.
"I think that Google and Facebook and Twitter … treat conservatives and Republicans very unfairly,” Trump told reporters at the White House last night.
"I think it’s a very serious problem because they’re really trying to silence a very large part of this country, and those people don’t want to be silenced. It’s not right. It’s not fair. It may not be legal, but we’ll see. We just want fairness," he added.
Read more: Trump puts China behind Clinton email hacks
Trump then later tweeted a video purporting to show screenshots of the Google homepage on the dates of each presidential State of the Union address from 2012 onwards.
#StopTheBias pic.twitter.com/xqz599iQZw
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 29, 2018
Entitled #StopTheBias, the screenshots show Google promoting a livestream of at least five of former President Barack Obama's State of the Union addresses, but a blank page on the dates of Trump's two most recent addresses.
A Google spokesperson denied the accuracy of his claims, and said it had "highlighted the livestream of President Trump's State of the Union address on the Google.com homepage".
However it had not promoted either president's first speech to Congress, as it is "not a State of Union address".
Google Lab director Steve Grove also responded to the President's claim with "proof" of Google's coverage of Trump's State of the Union, using screenshots from web archive site Wayback Machine.
This is not true. See our statement, and the proof, here: https://t.co/6a19EbknYS https://t.co/gteiHe12Hw
— Steve Grove (@grove) August 30, 2018
Read more: Trump takes aim at Google for biased 'leftwing media' search results
Trump's remarks move on from his attacks against Google on Tuesday night, in which he accused Google of promoting negative search results from "leftwing media" and censoring conservative news sources.
The US president's economic adviser Larry Kudlow said the White House is conducting "some investigation and analysis" into Google, without providing further details.