Tech giant Google has rejected the US President's claim that it is "rigging" search results to prioritise negative stories about him.
In a tweet posted in the early hours of Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump claimed the search engine was promoting negative stories about him while suppressing positive articles from conservative news organisations.
He doubled down on the claim last night, insisting Google had promoted his predecessor Barack Obama's State of the Union addresses but not his own.
President Trump tweeted a video which he claimed showed the homepage displaying live links to President Obama's speeches every year from 2012 to 2016 - with no link to President Trump's from 2017 on.
#StopTheBias pic.twitter.com/xqz599iQZw
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 29, 2018
In response, Google noted that it did promote President Trump's first and only State of the Union address in 2018 - and clarified that it has never featured a new president's first address to Congress, which President Trump would delivered in 2017.
A Google spokesman said: "On January 30 2018, we highlighted the livestream of President Trump's State of the Union on the 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 google.com for this address in either 2009 or 2017."
The spat is the latest between Mr Trump and big tech - which he has frequently accused of online censorship.
Mr Trump claimed on Twitter on Tuesday that Google's search engine results were "rigged" to only show bad news about him and other Republican voices.
Google denied these accusations, saying it never ranks search results to manipulate political sentiment.
