Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump suggested,
without evidence, that the companies' activities may be illegal.
He later posted a tweet saying Google had for years promoted
former President Barack Obama's State of the Union addresses on
its home page, but stopped the practice when Trump took office
last year. The tweet included screenshots of the Google home
page and the hashtag #StopTheBias.
A Google representative said the company "highlighted the
livestream of President Trump’s State of the Union on the
google.com homepage" on Jan. 30.
Google did not promote either president's first speech to the
U.S. Congress, "which is technically not a State of the Union
address," the representative said.
"I think that Google and Facebook and Twitter ... treat
conservatives and Republicans very unfairly," Trump said in his
White House remarks.
"I think it's a very serious problem because they're really
trying to silence a very large part of this country, and those
people don't want to be silenced. It's not right. It's not fair.
It may not be legal, but we'll see. We just want fairness,"
Trump added.
The Republican president on Tuesday accused Google's search
engine of promoting negative news articles and hiding "fair
media" coverage of him, vowing to address the situation without
providing evidence or giving details of action he might take.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason and David Shepardson; Writing by Makini
Brice and Mohammad Zargham; Editing by Peter Cooney)
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