In a series of tweets, US President Donald Trump expressed his concern over Google's alleged bias against his campaign, warning that "we are watching Google very closely" in the wake of allegations that Google employees were trying to prevent him from winning another presidential term in 2020.
"@sundarpichai of Google was in the Oval Office working very hard to explain how much he liked me, what a great job the Administration is doing, that Google was not involved with China’s military, that they didn’t help Crooked Hillary over me in the 2016 Election, and that they are NOT planning to illegally subvert the 2020 Election despite all that has been said to the contrary."
Trump added, mispelling his own name in the process:
"It all sounded good until I watched Kevin Cernekee, a Google engineer, say terrible things about what they did in 2016 and that they want to “Make sure that Trump losses [sic] ....in 2020. Lou Dobbs stated that this is a fraud on the American public. @peterschweizer stated with certainty that they suppressed negative stories on Hillary Clinton, and boosted negative stories on Donald Ttump. All very illegal. We are watching Google very closely!”
....in 2020.” Lou Dobbs stated that this is a fraud on the American public. @peterschweizer stated with certainty that they suppressed negative stories on Hillary Clinton, and boosted negative stories on Donald Ttump. All very illegal. We are watching Google very closely!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 6, 2019
Trump was referencing a recent interview given by former Google engineer, Kevin Cernekee, who was fired from Google in June of 2018 after a series of disputes with the company's management and on the company's internal message boards led him to be fired for "improper conduct". Cernekee claimed that he was fired for his conservative views and that right-leaning employees are treated unfairly at Google.
Peter Schweizer, who Trump cited in his tweet, is a writer with Breitbart who has claimed that Google search results favour Hillary Clinton.
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In the interview with Fox News, Cernekee said, “When President Trump won in 2016, Google executives went up on stage right away and cried, literally tears streaming down their faces over the fact that President Trump won. They vowed that it would never happen again and they want to use all the power and all the resources that they have to control the flow of information to the public and make sure that Trump loses in 2020.”
Pichai had testified to Congress in 2018 on the working of Google’s algorithm, defending against allegations that the search results were biased against Conservatives. He responded to a Senator’s query over why Donald Trump was the top search result for “idiot” with an explanation of how the algorithm worked “at scale”, preventing individual employees from manipulating search results based on their biases.
Trump’s allegations came two weeks after Democratic presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard sued Google for deactivating her political advertising account for six hours after the first Democratic debate.
