US President Donald Trump has once again accused Google of amplifying negative news stories about him, this time citing an ex-employee who claims he was fired for conservative bias.
“All very illegal. We are watching Google very closely!” Trump said in a series of tweets on Tuesday, adding he’d met with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, though didn’t say when. Trump tweeted a pair of clips from the segments late on Monday, and continued to tweet about the subject Tuesday morning.
The Twitter storm is an indication that the president continues to try to rev up his base with charges of tech company bias as the 2020 election approaches.
Trump said he’d watched comments by Kevin Cernekee in a Fox News interview, where the former Google employee alleged that conservatives were harassed at the company. Cernekee said Google wants Trump to lose the 2020 election, and that Google executives wept after Trump’s victory and “vowed that it would never happen again”. Cernekee told Fox he’s in a legal fight with the search engine giant after he was fired.
Trump also cited comments to Fox Business by author Peter Schweizer, who alleged Google suppressed negative stories about Hillary Clinton.
‘Crooked Hillary’
Pichai “was in the Oval Office working very hard to explain how much he liked me, what a great job the administration is doing, that Google was not involved with China’s military, that they didn’t help Crooked Hillary over me in the 2016 Election and that they are NOT planning to illegally subvert the 2020 Election despite all that has been said to the contrary”, Trump said in a pair of Tuesday tweets.
Google didn’t respond to requests for comment late on Monday. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, including about when the Pichai meeting that Trump referred to occurred.
Trump has long harboured a suspicion of anti-conservative bias by technology giants, and has mused about whether major Internet platforms should be broken apart. On Monday, he separately pledged to work with social media companies to identify radicalised people before mass shootings can take place. — Reported by Josh Wingrove, (c) 2019 Bloomberg LP
