Google Fights Back and Dismantles Trump's Assertion About The State Of The Union Speech
- Google has issued a methodical statement dismantling US President Donald Trump's latest attack on it.
- Trump on Wednesday tweeted a video purportedly showing that Google had not promoted his addresses to Congress even after doing so for President Barack Obama.
- Google debunked this, with independently archived web pages supporting its statement.
Google is fighting back.
After President Donald Trump widened his line of attack on the search-engine giant, Google swiftly debunked the US president's latest tweet against it in a methodical statement.
Using the hashtag "#StopTheBias," Trump posted a video claiming to show that Google had promoted President Barack Obama's State of the Union speeches but ignored Trump's addresses to Congress for the past two years.
"For years, Google promoted President Obama's State of the Union on its homepage," the 24-second video said. "When President Trump took office, Google stopped." Google disagreed. In a statement sent to journalists on Wednesday, the company said:
"On January 30 2018, we highlighted the livestream of President Trump's State of the Union on the http://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 http://google.com for this address in either 2009 or 2017."
There's evidence to support Google ...
Google's statement is supported by records on the internet-archive website Wayback Machine, which shows that the search engine indeed promoted live coverage of Trump's State of the Union address this year. This was backed up by a screenshot posted to the "r/The_Donald" community on Reddit.
Google/Way Back Machine ... and questions over whether Trump's video was doctored
Other inconsistencies in Trump's video have been pointed out. BuzzFeed and others noted that the 2016 screenshot in Trump's video appears to feature a Google logo that was ditched in September 2015. The company explained its new look in a blog post.
Finally, Wayback Machine shows that Google also ran a Cinderella doodle on January 12, 2016. This does not feature in the short video that Trump tweeted.
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