White House “looking into” regulating Google after Trump claims bias in search results

US President Donald Trump accused Google’s search engine of promoting negative news articles and hiding “fair media” coverage of him, adding that the situation “will be addressed” but giving no further details, Reuters reports.

This is not the first time Trump criticizes a technology company – he has been in conflict with social media platforms Twitter and Facebook, accusing them of silencing conservative voices, as well as Amazon.com, which he accused of hurting small businesses.

Google said in a statement that its search engine is “not used to set a political agenda”, adding “we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology”.

Trump’s tweets read: “Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of results on ‘Trump News’ are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!”

In the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump added: “I think Google is really taking advantage of our people. Google, and Twitter and Facebook, they are really treading on very, very troubled territory, and they have to be careful. It’s not fair to large portions of the population.”

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Trump’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow later told the press that the White House was “taking a look” at Google, but no details have been provided as to the legal justification that would be used to probe Google.

U.S. member of Congress Ted Lieu, a Democrat, said in a tweet directed at Trump that such restrictions on Google would violate the U.S. Constitution: “If government tried to dictate the free speech algorithms of private companies, courts would strike it down in a nanosecond.”