Google defends search policy following Trump accusations
The company says its search results aren't politically biased.
In response to accusations tweeted today by Donald Trump, Google has issued a statement saying that it doesn't tailor its search results based on political ideologies. Across two tweets, the president claimed that Google searches for "Trump News" surfaced mostly negative coverage of him from left-wing media outlets and that the company was "suppressing" conservative voices. "This is a very serious situation-will be addressed," he wrote.
"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," a Google spokesperson told CNBC. "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."
President Trump made similar claims about Twitter last month. Earlier this year, a judge threw out a lawsuit against Google that claimed YouTube was censoring conservatives.
Next week, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and a representative from Google are scheduled to appear before Congress to discuss topics including censorship and election interference.
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