The White House is “taking a look” at whether the government should regulate Google, President Trump’s top economic adviser said Tuesday – hours after the commander-in-chief targeted the platform.
“We’ll let you know,” Larry Kudlow told reporters outside the White House when asked whether Trump believes Google and its search engine should be regulated, The Washington Post reported. “We’re taking a look at it.”
In a pair of early morning tweets, Trump promised to address what he called the “very serious situation” of social media companies “suppressing” conservative voices and hiding “news that is good.”
Trump recently began complaining about the issue as social media companies moved to ban right-wing “Infowars” conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from their platforms.
Apple, YouTube and Spotify have permanently yanked some of Jones’ content, Facebook has suspended him for 30 days and removed some of his pages, while Twitter gave him a weeklong timeout.
The president has not named Jones – whose reputation he once described as “amazing” – in any of his tweets on the issue.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee recently announced that Twitter chief Jack Dorsey will testify before the panel on Sept. 5 about the platform’s algorithms and content monitoring.
Google, based in Mountain View, California, responded to Trump’s tweetstorm Tuesday by saying: “When users type queries into the Google Search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds.
“Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology,” a 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.”
With Post Wires