This morning during President Trump’s “executive time,” he decided to tweet what some conspiracy theorist — Sean Hannity is his favorite one, but any will do — obviously told him was the problem with his public image: That the internet is lying about him.
Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2018
….results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2018
If that sounds hilariously stupid, it’s because it is. The internet is tailored to how people use it. If you look up the instructions to build a kite with your daughter and you can use a search engine, you end up with a kite. You’re not going to end up building a bicycle or a birdhouse, even if that’s what you secretly wish you were building, because search engines don’t care what you want, only what you ask them.
But that’s not the only thing wrong with these tweets.
For one thing, “96 percent” sounds a lot like that approval rating of “52 percent” he just tweeted that no one could find any polls supporting. But obviously he just means “any news that is not vocally and editorially supportive” of his presidency, which would actually put almost all international reporting not based in the United States in the category of “National Left-Wing Media.”
That’s ridiculous right on its face, as is the whole concept of Google “controlling what we can & cannot see.” In fact, it sounds like Mr. President doesn’t quite understand how the internet works at all. Perhaps he subscribes to the former Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) theory that the internet is, in fact, a “series of tubes,” which can be clogged with “enormous amounts of material.”
But helpfully, Google was here to set the President straight on just how their little search doohickey comes up with all of its thingamabobs.
When users type queries into the Google Search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds. Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology. Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries. We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”
So it looks like all the news about Donald Trump that comes up when you search really is because he’s such a terrible President. Who’s very bad at the internet.
Featured image via screen capture
