Google has shot down President Trump’s charge that the tech giant ignored his first State of the Union address after promoting President Obama’s speeches to Congress for his eight years in office.
Trump made the claims in a 24-second video posted on Twitter Wednesday.
“For years, Google promoted President Obama’s State of the Union on its homepage. When President Trump took office, Google stopped,” the video claimed.
The video showed purported screenshots of Google’s homepage from the date of the State of the Union addresses from 2012 through 2018.
The screenshots for Feb. 28, 2017 and Jan. 30, 2018, during the first two years of Trump’s presidency, do not show any promotions for the State of the Union address on Google’s homepage.
Google later issued a statement refuting the commander-in-chief’s accusation — one of his near-daily attacks on the news media or social media platforms — and explaining what really happened.
“On January 30 2018, we highlighted the livestream of President Trump’s [first] State of the Union on the google.com homepage,” the statement said.
“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.”
A screenshot from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows Google’s promotion of Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address dated Jan. 31, 2018.
The date is different because the Wayback Machine follows Greenwich Mean Time — the time in London.
Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address began at 9:15 p.m. New York time on Jan. 30, which was 2:10 a.m. GMT on Jan 31.
Earlier this week, the President said Google and other tech companies were “treading on very, very troubled territory.”
Trump had also claimed on Twitter Tuesday that Google search results were “RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD.”
Google denied it had a political agenda.
Fox News and the AP contributed to this report.
