|
?:reviewBody
|
-
On 28 August 2018, the President of the United States used Twitter to accuse the search engine Google of rigging its results in order to highlight the left-wing fake news media while shunning conservative outlets and favorable reporting about himself: Shortly after President Trump issued these accusations via Twitter, the website trumpbetrayed.us, which is part of America's Last Line of Defense network of junk news sites, published an article positing that Google's CFO Martin Brailey had admitted his company was indeed rigging search results to be anti-Trump. That was not the case. First, TrumpBetrayed.us is part of a trolling network that spews out fabricated, inflammatory political content under the guise of proffering satire. Second, Martin Brailey is not the CFO of Google, as that position actually belongs to Ruth Porat. Finally, the article included two alleged quotes from Google's (fictional) CFO, each of which was accompanied by a hyperlink. While genuine news sites would have used these links to direct readers back to an authoritative source for the quotes, the links included in this junk news directed readers to a surprise GIF and an article about incestual family trees: Unsurprisingly, neither of those source links contained a quote from Google's CFO. Google's CFO did not admit that the search engine was rigging results against Donald Trump. In fact, a genuine statement from Riva Sciuto, a spokesperson for the company, explained that Google's search results are not bent to any political ideology:
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}