Donald Trump loves a favorable poll, and he loves to cite favorable poll numbers at his rallies. This week was no exception, as he opened an event in Wisconsin by referencing the numbers in that state and neighboring Iowa.
He also made mention of a Google poll that had the Republican presidential hopeful leading Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by two points nationwide. But rather than leave it at that, his prepared remarks took aim at Google.
“That’s despite the fact that Google’s search engine was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton. How about that?” Trump said (in the first minute of the video below).
According to CNN, Trump cited no source in making this claim Wednesday, but his remarks came two weeks after Sputnik News, a Russian state-owned news agency, published a report saying Google search results are biased in Clinton’s favor.
This followed a report from June in which a video from SourceFed went viral after claiming Google was altering search recommendations in favor of the Clinton campaign. Google responded then:
“Google Autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause,” the company said in a statement. “Claims to the contrary simply misunderstand how Autocomplete works. Our Autocomplete algorithm will not show a predicted query that is offensive or disparaging when displayed in conjunction with a person’s name. More generally, our autocomplete predictions are produced based on a number of factors including the popularity of search terms.”
CNET pointed out that the Trump campaign wouldn’t respond this week when asked which suppressed “bad news” Trump was referring to, but the site says stories such as Clinton’s controversial “superpredator” comment appears in the first five results of a Google search.
We tested the same search and it returned this:
