Google dismantles Donald Trump’s State of The Union video

US President Donald
Trump.
Getty

• Google issued a methodical statement dismantling US
  President Donald Trump’s latest attack on it.
• Trump tweeted a video purportedly showing that Google
  has not promoted his State of the Union address for the past
  two years.
• Google debunked this, and archived web pages support
  their statement.

Google is fighting back.

After Donald Trump widened his line of attack on the search
engine giant, Google swiftly debunked the US president’s tweet in
a methodical statement.

Using the hashtag “#StopTheBias,”
Trump posted a video claiming to show how Google has promoted
Barack Obama’s State of the Union speeches, but ignored his own
address to Congress for the past two years.

“For years, Google promoted president Obama’s State of the Union
on its homepage,” the 24-second video states. “When President
Trump took office, Google stopped.”

Google disagreed. In a statement sent to journalists on
Wednesday, the company said:

“On January 30 2018, we highlighted the livestream of President
Trump’s State of the Union on the http://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
http://google.com for this address in either 2009 or 2017.”

There’s evidence to support Google…

Google’s statement is supported by records on internet
archive website Wayback Machine, which shows that the search
engine had indeed promoted live coverage of Trump’s State of the
Union this year. This was backed up by a screenshot posted to the “r/The_Donald” community
on Reddit.

Google/Way Back Machine

…and questions over whether Trump’s video was doctored

Other inconsistencies in Trump’s video have also been pointed
out. BuzzFeed and others noted that
the 2016 screenshot in Trump’s video appears to feature a Google
logo that was ditched in September 2015. Here’s the Google blog in which
the company explains its new look.On
the left: Google’s new logo, unveiled in September 2015. On the
right: Trump’s video, showing an old logo in
2016.Google/Donald
Trump/Twitter

Finally, Wayback Machine shows that Google
also ran a Cinderella doodle on January 12, 2016. This does
not feature in the short video that Trump tweeted.

Google/Wayback Machine