On Friday, Donald Trump declared that Google was only displaying “bad stories” about him and threatened to sue the internet company if he were to win the presidency again.
In a post on his Truth Social site, Trump made the claim without offering any evidence, adding that the search engine only returns favorable news about his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections,” he said in the post.
“If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the election.”
The Trump post came after a conservative group reported on what it said it found when doing a search on “Donald Trump presidential race 2024.”
“Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries,” Google said in response to an AFP inquiry.
“This report looked at a single rare search term on a single day a few weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites ranked in the top results on Google.”
Google has made it clear that it does not rig search results in order to support a certain political candidate.
The corporation keeps the inner workings of the software that drives its widely used search engine a secret.
However, the popularity of a topic and its timeliness are known to affect search results for news pieces.
Trump is at the center of numerous criminal and civil cases in which he faces accusations including sexual abuse, paying hush money to a porn star, interfering with the 2020 election and trying to thwart the peaceful transition of power after President Joe Biden defeated him.
