Trump posts video accusing Google of not promoting his State of the Union address

By Michael Grothaus

August 30, 2018

The thing is, it’s fake news.

 

Last night President Trump continued attacking Google for alleged bias against him by posting a 24-second video that purports that Google promoted President Obama’s State of the Union addresses on it homepage every year but stopped the State of the Union promotion when Trump took office.

It’s not clear if the president or the president’s came up with the idea, or if Trump simply found it online and uploaded it himself to Twitter. But either way, the video is pretty much, well, as Trump would put it, fake news.

While Google did promote President Obama’s State of the Union speeches, it also has promoted all of President Trump’s State of the Union speeches to date too. As Google explained in a statement:

On January 30 2018, we highlighted the livestream of President Trump’s State of the Union on the google.com homepage. We have historically not promoted the first address to Congress by a new President, which is technically not a State of the Union address. As a result, we didn’t include a promotion on google.com for this address in either 2009 or 2017.

In other words, Google didn’t promote Obama’s 2009 speech nor Trump’s 2017 speech because they weren’t technically State of the Union addresses. And as one of Trump’s own supporters posted in the r/The_Donald subreddit back in January, Google clearly promoted Trump’s first official State of the Union address on its homepage.

Debunking Trump’s fake news video even more, Gizmodo points out that the 2016 screen grab used in the video is a fake. Whoever made the video apparently couldn’t find an actual screenshot of Google’s homepage on the day of Obama’s 2016 State of the Union address, so they just mocked up their own to support their argument. You can tell the 2016 screenshot is a fake because they used the old Google logo instead of the current one, which was in use at that time.

Google: 1, Trump: 0.

 
 
 
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