- Donald Trump threatened to prosecute Google “at the maximum levels” if he’s elected president.
- Trump accused Google of favoring rival Kamala Harris over him in search results.
- It’s the latest direct threat against a company that caught Trump’s ire.
Former President Donald Trump is no stranger to lashing out at companies — and now he’s taking aim at Google.
In a post on Truth Social on Friday, the Republican presidential nominee accused Google of being biased toward his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris in search results.
And Trump threatened to order the Justice Department to prosecute the tech giant if he wins in November.
Trump alleged that Google “illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump” while surfacing good stories about Harris.
“Hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections,” the post continued. “If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election, and become President of the United States!”
A representative for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider seeking the source of Trump’s allegations.
But Trump’s post may have been referencing a recent report published this week from Free Speech America researchers at the conservative media watchdog group, Media Research Center. In the report, the group said it conducted Google searches on September 6 for the terms “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024.”
The group said Trump’s campaign website appeared sixth in search results, while Harris’ appeared third in “organic search results.”
But in a statement shared with BI, Google refuted the purported findings from the Media Research Center’s report.
“Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries,” the statement from Google reads. “This report looked at a single rare search term on a single day a few weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites ranked in the top results on Google.”
“Queries about the presidential election or candidates generally surface links to constantly changing news articles reflecting what’s on the web – so they change all the time,” a spokesperson for Google added in an email to BI. “We absolutely do not manipulate Search results to favor any candidate.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has taken a swipe at Google. Just last month, the former president lodged another hefty accusation against the tech giant.
“Google is a Crooked, Election Interference Machine,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in August. “Totally Illegal, they will pay a big price for what they are doing!”
In this post, Trump linked to an article from conservative outlet Townhall, which detailed an Axios report that found the Harris-Walz campaign had edited news headlines in Google search ads to make it look like major outlets were favoring the Democratic candidate.
Axios reported at the time that the Harris campaign’s ads were not breaking any rules, and did not violate Google’s policies.
In addition to threats against Google, Trump has levied warnings to other companies and CEOs who crossed him.
Trump has had a long-standing feud with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, even threatening in July to send “ZUCKERBUCKS” to prison in a post that repeated Trump’s false claims of election fraud.
And on Monday, Trump threatened to slap John Deere with a 200% tariff if it moved some manufacturing jobs to Mexico — an economic warning that economists said made no sense.
Representatives for the Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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