Former President Donald Trump threatened on Friday that he will request the criminal prosecution of Google “at maximum levels” when he returns to office, accusing the tech giant of “illegal activity” through its bias against him in search results.
In a post on Truth Social, the former president claimed that Google “has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump” while simultaneously “only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris.”
The post continues, “This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections. If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election, and become President of the United States!”
Trump’s vow to prosecute Google is likely based on many examples of election interference that have been revealed in the runup to the 2024 election. Most recently a Media Research Center (MRC) study demonstrated that the search giant is “padding” its results in favor of Kamala Harris:
In the past, Google buried the campaign websites of Republican candidates. Now the search giant very clearly pads its search results about political candidates with leftist legacy news articles, many of which are hostile to Republicans and either neutral or favorable toward Democrats. Readers will have to sift through the biased news before they even see the organic results of their searches, let alone a candidate’s website.
MRC Free Speech America researchers conducted searches on Sept. 6 for “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024” to determine where Google Search would position each candidate’s presidential campaign website. In both searches, news from leftist-biased legacy outlets like CNN and The New York Times populated the top of the search results.
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign website appeared sixth in search results for “donald trump presidential race 2024.” But before reaching Trump’s website, readers would see options to click on seven articles from left-wing sources. The New York Times, Politico and The Washington Post were listed under the “Top Stories” panel.
