At present, with the literal entire United States in front of him, President Donald Trump has decided that what happens when you Google his name is of the utmost priority. He and his allies are continuing their claims that internet giants like Google, Facebook, and Twitter discriminate against those who think like him, and this week, he’s taken his attacks to a new level.
Thursday, he claimed to Bloomberg that a number of particular companies may be in violation of antitrust laws — although, as with so many other of his claims, he didn’t provide any immediate evidence. He declined to comment on whether the companies he mentioned should be broken up.
He explained:
‘I won’t comment on the breaking up, of whether it’s [Google] or Amazon or Facebook. As you know, many people think it is a very anti-trust situation, the three of them. But I just, I won’t comment on that.’
He’s used the argument that “many people” are also saying things he’s claimed in the past so they must be legitimate, but it’s not as though he offered any apparent explanation for who those “many people” are.
He does have at least one tentative ally in this particular aspect of his fight — Utah’s Republican U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch, who Thursday asked U.S. Federal Trade Commission Chairman Joseph Simons to look into possible anticompetitive conduct perpetuated by Google. The FTC has previously looked into Google; in 2013, though, they closed a case examining whether Google unfairly skewed users towards its own services. As part of that case’s resolution, authorities got the tech giant — now technically a subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc. — to remove some restrictions on the usage of its platform.
Trump has himself singled out Google already. Just this week, he wrongly claimed the platform didn’t promote his 2018 State of the Union address as it had pushed every State of the Union address of the Obama administration. That’s wrong, though — the site did promote his 2018 address.
He also claimed that Google search results for “Trump news” unfairly skew towards the mainstream media he hates so much.
As he put it on Twitter:
‘Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent… This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!’
On the one hand, though, the company has insisted:
‘Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology… We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.’
Additionally, Trump can’t dismiss as fake news what he himself has described as 80 percent of the mainstream media and then complain when that media pops up in search results. What does he expect those outlets to do — vaporize because he doesn’t like them?
No logical fallacy is stopping Trump and his allies. This week, his top economic adviser Larry Kudlow insisted the administration was “taking a look” at whether “there needs to be some form of regulation for Google.” A reporter posed the question as he walked back into the White House from an interview with Fox News.
The moves all figure into the Trump administration’s broad campaign against free speech.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
