Google Denies Trump’s Allegation That it Did Not Promote His State of The Union Address

Fresh from threatening Google with possible regulatory action for showing alleged liberal bias in its search results, Donald Trump on Wednesday accused the tech giant of ignoring his State of the Union addresses by failing to feature it on its homepage.

To illustrate his point, the US President posted a video of unknown origin on Twitter, accusing the company of promoting former president Obama’s State of the Union addresses on its homepage, while ignoring his. The video claims, “For years, Google promoted president Obama’s State of the Union on its homepage. When President Trump took office, Google stopped”.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1034907478566359041

Google denied the allegation forthright, and in a statement to Buzzfeed, said that it did promote a live video stream of Trump’s address this year. In 2017, no video was promoted on the homepage because the President had delivered a joint statement to Congress, not a State of the Union address, Google said.

On January 30 2018, we highlighted the livestream of President Trump’s State of the Union on the 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 google.com for this address in either 2009 or 2017

Multiple Redditors have also since posted screenshots claiming to expose Trump’s apparent lie, but given that such images can be easily manipulated, it will be difficult to vouch for the veracity of any of those screenshots.

Having said that, one of those screenshots was apparently posted back in January when the event was ongoing, much before the unseemly spat broke out between the President and the tech giant. The 2018 State of the Union was delivered between 9:15pm and 10:32pm on January 30.

The allegation is the latest in a long line of accusations the President and his supporters have hurled at tech companies over the past year after they started getting their act together in purging fake news, Russian propaganda and conspiracy theories from their platforms after all of that reportedly affected the outcomes of the US presidential election and the Brexit referendum in 2016.