US President Donald Trump.
Getty
Google is fighting back.
After Donald Trump widened his line of attack on the search engine giant, Google swiftly debunked the US president’s tweet in a methodical statement.
Using the hashtag “#StopTheBias,” Trump posted a video claiming to show how Google has promoted Barack Obama’s State of the Union speeches, but ignored his own address to Congress for the past two years.
“For years, Google promoted president Obama’s State of the Union on its homepage,” the 24-second video states. “When President Trump took office, Google stopped.”
Google disagreed. In a statement sent to journalists on Wednesday, the company said:
“On January 30 2018, we highlighted the livestream of President Trump’s State of the Union on the http://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 http://google.com for this address in either 2009 or 2017.”
There’s evidence to support Google…
Google’s statement is supported by records on internet archive website Wayback Machine, which shows that the search engine had indeed promoted live coverage of Trump’s State of the Union this year. This was backed up by a screenshot posted to the “r/The_Donald” community on Reddit.
…and questions over whether Trump’s video was doctored
Other inconsistencies in Trump’s video have also been pointed out. BuzzFeed and others noted that the 2016 screenshot in Trump’s video appears to feature a Google logo that was ditched in September 2015. Here’s the Google blog in which the company explains its new look.
Finally, Wayback Machine shows that Google also ran a Cinderella doodle on January 12, 2016. This does not feature in the short video that Trump tweeted.
