Donald Trump Google Manipulation Tweet

Gage Skidmore/Flickr (CC-BY-SA)

Trump thinks Google made 16 million people vote for Clinton

People had a lot of questions.

 

Andrew Wyrich

Tech

Posted on Aug 19, 2019   Updated on May 20, 2021, 6:04 am CDT

President Donald Trump claimed in a tweet on Monday that Google “manipulated” 16 million votes during the 2016 presidential election and for many people, the immediate reaction was: what is he talking about?

“Wow, Report Just Out! Google manipulated from 2.6 million to 16 million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 Election! This was put out by a Clinton supporter, not a Trump Supporter! Google should be sued. My victory was even bigger than thought! @JudicialWatch,” the president tweeted on Monday afternoon, tagging right-wing advocacy group Judicial Watch.

Trump has been a critic of technology companies and has often said that he believes there is an anti-conservative bias among them.

Many believed Trump may have been citing the testimony of Robert Epstein, a research psychologist, who testified before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee earlier this summer. Epstein has argued that candidates being favored in search results can “easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more.”

In his testimony before the Senate subcommittee, Epstein said that he found that Google’s search algorithm “impacted undecided voters in a way that gave at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton.”

However, Google’s Sundar Pichai found some of Epstein’s methodology to be flawed, according to the Los Angeles Times. The company also called Epstein’s research “nothing more than a poorly constructed conspiracy theory,” when asked about it by the Washington Post.

Epstein, in his testimony, said he supported Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Others noticed that Trump’s tweet may have come after he watched Fox Business.

Even in his bombastic analysis, Trump appears to be wildly wrong.

“Notably Trump’s claim that the guy said ‘Google manipulated from 2.6 million to 16 million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016′ is wrong — he said it impacted 2.6 million in 2016, and could, together with Facebook and Twitter, impact 15 million people in 2020,” noted Media Matters’ Matthew Gertz.

Despite this, the tweet drew a lot of mockery.

https://twitter.com/Anthony/status/1163480681684643842

READ MORE: 

Share this article
*First Published: Aug 19, 2019, 12:54 pm CDT