Former President Donald Trump called for the criminal prosecution of Google over what he said was the tech giant’s bias toward his presidential opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, in online search results.
Trump appeared to be referring to a report released this week from the Media Research Center, a conservative group, that claims it found that Google search engine results displayed positive results about Harris more prominently than those for Trump when searching “Donald Trump presidential race 2024.”
Trump said in a post on Truth Social that if the Department of Justice does not prosecute Google, he will “request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election.”
“It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris,” Trump wrote on his social media platform. “This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY.”
A spokesperson for Google said in a statement that the company does not manipulate search results to favor any candidate, and suggested the search term in question—the candidate’s name, followed by “presidential race 2024″—was actually pretty niche. “Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries,” the spokesperson said. “This report looked at a single rare search term on a single day a few weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites ranked in the top results on Google.”
The former president has a long-standing feud with the tech giant, with multiple grievances. At one point, Trump falsely claimed that Google “manipulated” millions of votes in the 2016 election, and that a lack of Google autocomplete results about Trump and his attempted assassination is evidence of election interference.
Update: This story has been updated to include comment from Google.