Former President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to sue Google if elected in November, claiming the search engine “only” shows “bad” articles about him and “good” articles about Vice President Harris.
“It turns out that Google was illegally exploiting a system that published and displayed only bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some of which were fabricated for this purpose, while also telling stories about Comrade Kamala Harris. We published only the good stories,” Trump wrote. In a post by Truth Social.
“This is illegal and we hope the Department of Justice will criminally prosecute them for this blatant election interference,” he continued. “If not, according to the laws of our country, if I win the election and become President of the United States, I will demand their prosecution at the highest level!”
The former president did not say what led to his post, but appeared to be referring to a report released earlier this week by the conservative media watchdog group Media Research Center.
The Media Research Center alleges in a report that Google is “inflating search results for political candidates with left-leaning traditional news stories” published on both candidates' campaign websites. He pointed to articles from news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN that have been published.
In response to a request for comment on Trump's post, Google pointed The Hill to an earlier statement regarding the Media Research Center report.
A Google spokesperson said: “Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of searches for common and relevant search queries.” “This report examines a single rare search term on a single day a few weeks ago for which both candidates' websites ranked among the top results on Google.”
