Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser, said Tuesday the administration is “taking a look” at whether Google searches should be regulated, hours after Trump complained on Twitter about search results.
In a pair of early morning tweets, the president said Google GOOG, -0.49% GOOGL, -0.38% search results for “Trump News” showed only “the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media.” The origin of the president’s complaints appears to be an article from the right-wing blog PJ Media headlined “96 Percent of Google Search Results for ‘Trump’ News Are from Liberal Media Outlets.”
Read: Here’s what lies behind Trump’s anti-Google complaints
A Google representative said “search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology.”
In his tweets, Trump said “Illegal?” and wrote that the company is “controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation — will be addressed!”
Neither Trump nor Kudlow gave specifics of how the administration would address the issue.
“We’ll let you know,” Kudlow said in a brief appearance outside the White House.
Google’s spokesperson said, “every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries. We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”
