GOOG Alphabet Inc

By Vivian Salama and Douglas MacMillan 

WASHINGTON -- President Trump on Tuesday accused Alphabet Inc.'s Google search platform of elevating critical news stories about his presidency at the expense of friendly conservative voices, adding to the growing scrutiny of tech giants from policy makers.

Mr. Trump said on Twitter that Google search results for the words "Trump news" returned results primarily from liberal media outlets. "Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good," he wrote. He declared Google's practices to be a "very serious situation" that will be addressed.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for Google said its search results aren't biased toward a particular political ideology. "We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment," the spokeswoman said.

The allegations come as policy makers in Washington have voiced concerns about a number of Google's practices, including whether they are stifling competition and endangering the privacy of billions of users. Members of Congress questioned Google and other tech giants earlier this year over allegations that their platforms favored liberal voices over conservative ones.

Kent Walker, Google's senior vice president for global affairs, plans to testify about election interference before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Sept. 5, along with Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Jack Dorsey and Facebook Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Last week, Sen. Richard Burr (R., N.C.), who heads that committee, said he had rejected Google's offer to send Mr. Walker, apparently in an effort to force a more-senior executive to appear before lawmakers.

In his tweets Tuesday, President Trump questioned whether Google's political bias may be "illegal" and didn't elaborate on what he meant when he said the issue "will be addressed."

Asked to elaborate later on the administration's views on potential regulation of the search giant, Lawrence Kudlow, the director of Mr. Trump's National Economic Council, said, "We'll let you know, we're taking a look at it."

Google, which forged close ties to Democrats under President Obama, has lost some of its political clout under President Trump. Google employees donated $1.6 million to Hillary Clinton's campaign, about 80% more than the amount given by workers at any other corporation, and its former Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt helped set up companies to analyze political data for Mrs. Clinton's campaign.

Republicans have criticized social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter over their treatment of conservatives on their platforms. Last week, the president accused social-media platforms of "silencing millions of people."

Earlier in the month, Mr. Trump also claimed that tech companies are "totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices," pledging that his administration "won't let that happen."

Google News's search algorithm is opaque, and news media outlets expend considerable energy and resources optimizing their online content to win better placement in search results.

Mr. Trump's longstanding criticism of the media adds to the difficulty of evaluating his claims. He has frequently charged that news outlets broadly are biased against him, saying last month that "a large percentage" of the media are "fake news," making it likely that even a statistically neutral news aggregator would pull heavily from sources he labels that way.

Accusations that Google tampers with search results appeared during the run up to the 2016 presidential election, when some conservatives claimed that the technology giant was censoring controversial subjects as part of an effort to purge the internet of fake news reports. Pop-culture news website SourceFed also posted a video alleging that Google's autocomplete service, which tries to predict queries as users type, was biased toward Mrs. Clinton.

According to the video, typing "Hillary Clinton cri" into a Google search box yielded suggested queries related to crime reform, crisis, and a crime bill. It didn't include the suggested search "Hillary Clinton crimes," although Google statistics show that search is more common than the suggested queries.

A 2016 analysis by online-search marketer CanIRank.com found that 50 recent searches for political terms on Google surfaced more liberal-leaning web pages than conservative ones, as rated by a panel of four people.

In response to both the SourceFed video and the CanIRank.com study, Google denied allegations of bias.

In recent weeks, tech giants Facebook Inc., Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc.'s YouTube platform and Spotify Technology S.A. stripped their sites of content from far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, saying the Infowars star had violated terms of service barring certain hateful or offensive speech. Mr. Jones still retains his Twitter account.

In April, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Robert Goodlatte (R, Va.) warned tech executives in a hearing that while social media companies were "exercising great care and discretion to ensure that their services are not abused," there is a "fine line between removing illegal activity and suppressing speech."

Write to Vivian Salama at Vivian.Salama@wsj.com and Douglas Macmillan at Douglas.Macmillan@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 28, 2018 12:30 ET (16:30 GMT)

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