Google denied President Donald Trump's claim on Wednesday that the search engine promoted President Barack Obama's State of the Union addresses but not his own annual address in January.
Trump tweeted a video Wednesday on Twitter that read: "For years, Google promoted President Obama's State of the Union on its homepage. When President Trump took office, Google stopped." It shows the site's homepage on the dates of presidential speeches from 2012 through 2018, highlighting the section of the page where a link would be posted to a YouTube livestream of the speeches.
In the video, the links to all of Obama's State of the Union addresses are shown but there are no links to Trump's first address to Congress in February 2017 or his State of the Union address last January. Trump added the hashtag, "#StopTheBias."
However, a spokesperson from Google said the video was inaccurate.
In a statement to CNN, the spokesperson said, "On January 30, 2018, we highlighted the livestream of President Trump's State of the Union on the google.com homepage. We have historically not promoted the first address to Congress by a new President, which is technically not a State of the Union address. As a result, we didn't include a promotion on google.com for this address in either 2009 or 2017."
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump had accused Google on Tuesday of rigging its results to show "bad" stories when users search for "Trump news." In a pair of tweets, the President suggested Google's actions could be illegal and said the situation would be addressed, but he did not specify what actions he would take.
"Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don't bias our results toward any political ideology," a Google spokesperson said in a statement. "We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment."
The-CNN-Wire
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