President Donald Trump has promised to get to the bottom of what he says is Google's rigging of search results to highlight "fake news" stories from the liberal media.
Related: Trump Threatens Investigation of Twitter
The President has long called the mainstream media fake news and enemies, but in recent tweets, including two on Tuesday morning (Aug. 28), he said that Google search results have been rigged to that when "Trump news" is searched for, almost all the stories that come up are from "prominent fake CNN," one of his most frequent targets, and other fake, liberal, media outlets, while Republican/Conservative & Fair" media is "shut out."
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Trump was echoing a recent concern from Hill Republicans and others that social media sites like Google and Facebook are suppressing conservative speech as "hate" speech or speech that makes their communities uncomfortable or include fake news.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has told legislators he understands that concern given the leftward leaning of Silicon Valley, but the there was no systematic effort by his company to do so.
Related: Reps Square Off Over Online Censorship
But the President appears to have concluded conservative speech is being censored, calling it very dangerous and saying the situation "will be addressed!"
Later Tuesday he also warned that Twitter and Facebook had better watch out, and White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow said that the White House would be investigating the issue.
“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," Google responded. "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."
