Trump calls for prosecution of Google over search results he says favor Harris

7 pointsposted 9 months ago
by pinewurst

5 Comments

h2odragon

9 months ago

Is there any law that says Google (or others) can't be completely partisan in editorializing the presentation of anything they offer?

Could it count as donated advertising? They offer this service commercially for nonpolitical purposes, so is there any difference? Is this just a matter of "they haven't paid as much for the keyword bidding?"

bediger4000

9 months ago

Absolutely no such law. Think about how we (as a society, not the "freedom of speach absolutists") interpret the 1st Amendment. Newspapers with an ideological bent (like NYT WaPo) would immediately fall foul of it.

lawn

9 months ago

And if there was such a law, Trump would be the big looser as Fox News would be shut down immediately.

rsynnott

9 months ago

> He seemed to be reacting to a new study by the right-leaning Media Research Center, which purportedly found that Google search engine results tended to show news articles that supposedly were positive to the Democrat Harris ahead of Trump’s own campaign website when a user searched for “Donald Trump presidential race 2024.”

Er… I mean, yeah, probably, because:

(A) Most people searching that probably aren’t looking for his _campaign website_, they’re looking for news about the race, and

(B) He keeps going on about people eating cats and otherwise being weird, so, yeah, the average news article is probably not going to be favourable to him.

Like, this is very much a self-created problem; if you court publicity by being publicly crazy (and you’ve got to assume that this is a deliberate strategy), you have to expect much of that publicity to be negative.