U.S. Republican candidate Donald Trump on Friday called for criminal prosecution of Google, claiming the company favored his rival, Vice President Harris, in online search results. Trump wrote on social media that if the Justice Department does not sue Google for "this blatant election interference," he will sue the company "when he wins the election and becomes President of the United States."
He appeared to be reacting to a new study from the right-leaning Media Research Center. The study allegedly found that when users searched for "Donald Trump 2024 presidential campaign," Google search engine results tended to show news articles favorable to Democrat Harris rather than Trump's own campaign website.
"It has been determined that Google illegally used a system to disclose and display only bad stories about me, some of which were fabricated for this purpose, while only revealing good stories about Harris," Trump wrote in a TruthSocial post.
MRC founder Brent Bozell said earlier this week that "Google is trying to give Kamala Harris more leverage."
"Both campaign websites consistently appeared at the top of search results for relevant and common search queries," a Google spokesperson said at the time. "This report looks at a rare search term on one day a few weeks ago, and even for that search term, both candidates' websites ranked high in Google search results."
The spokesman also said on Friday that the MRC's report looked at a "very unusual issue" and said its conclusions were wrong.
"Queries about the presidential election or candidates will often turn up links to changing news articles that reflect what's happening around the web, so they're always changing," the spokesperson said. "We absolutely do not manipulate search results to favor any candidate."
In fact, some media reported that the Trump campaign website ranked higher in Google search results compared to results from other search engines.