US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has vowed to take Google to court if he is reelected this November, accusing the tech giant of deliberately showing negative stories about him and favoring his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump expressed hope that the Department of Justice will criminally prosecute Alphabet’s Google for the “blatant Interference of elections,” adding that he will “request their prosecution” if he is reelected.
“It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris,” the former president said in the post.
Earlier this month, the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog, released a study suggesting that Google has featured Harris’ campaign website in a more favorable location in its search results than the Trump campaign’s official site.
The tech giant dismissed the findings, saying it does not manipulate search results to benefit a particular party. A Google spokesperson told Fox News Digital at the time: “Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries.”
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Trump previously attacked the tech company, claiming that it prioritizes “fake news” in its search results, which are “rigged” against him and other conservatives. Google denied the allegations.
In July, US tech billionaire Elon Musk accused the company of being biased against the Republican candidate. He shared a screenshot of a page in which the query ‘President Donald’ was typed into the search bar. The capture demonstrated how Google’s autocomplete feature, which provides suggestions based on the words typed, did not offer ‘President Donald Trump’, but instead showed ‘President Donald Duck’ and ‘President Donald Reagan’.
At the time, a Google representative told NBC News that the autocomplete feature was experiencing issues that day, adding that the company was “looking into these anomalies and working on improvements.”