Aniket Pujari
Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the press at Trump Tower in New York City, U.S., September 26, 2024. REUTERS/David Dee Delgado
David Dee Delgado | Reuters
Donald Trump on Friday called for Google to be criminally prosecuted for what the Republican presidential nominee called the company’s bias toward his election opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, in online search results.
Trump in a social media post wrote that if the Department of Justice does not prosecute Google “for this blatant interference of Elections” he would request its prosecution “when I win the election and become President of the United States!”
He seemed to be reacting to a new study by the right-leaning Media Research Center, or MRC, which purportedly found that Google search engine results tended to show news articles that supposedly were positive to the Democrat Harris ahead of Trump’s own campaign website when a user searched for “Donald Trump presidential race 2024.”
In his post on Truth Social, Trump wrote: “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.”
US Vice President and Democratic nominee for President Kamala Harris speaks at an event hosted by The Economic Club of Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University on September 25, 2024 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Jeff Swensen | Getty Images
MRC founder Brent Bozell told Fox News Digital on Wednesday that “Google is trying to stack the deck in favor of Kamala Harris.”
A Google spokesperson, when contacted by CNBC about Trump’s post, pointed to the company’s earlier statement on the report.
“Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries,” Google said at that time. “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.”
The spokesperson on Friday also said the MRC report looks at a “very uncommon query,” and said that the report’s conclusions are wrong.
“Queries about the presidential election or candidates generally surface links to constantly changing news articles reflecting what’s on the web — so they change all the time,” the spokesperson said. “We absolutely do not manipulate search results to favor any candidate.”‘
“In fact, outlets have reported that the Trump campaign website appears higher in Google results for these queries, compared to other search engines’ results.”
Harris’ campaign had no immediate comment on Trump’s claim.
CNBC has requested comment from Trump’s campaign.
