Washington Free Beacon senior writer Elizabeth Harrington said Wednesday that social media and other large technology companies have shown a bias against conservatives to support left-wing causes.
Fox Business host Neil Cavuto spoke to Harrington about President Donald Trump's recent claim that big technology platforms, particularly Google, are only showing negative news about him and "suppressing voices of conservatives."
"Google search results for 'Trump News' shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD," Trump tweeted on Tuesday. "Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of 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!"
Cavuto asked Harrington what the White House or other parts of the government may do to address the issues raised by Trump.
"It's very vague right now. All we had is Larry Kudlow saying this is something that we might potentially look into, which is kind of akin to when kind of Trump goes off on the libel laws and issues like that," Harrington said. "He uses a lot of grandiose rhetoric to go after negative coverage of him, but in the end doesn't really do much."
Harrington added that, while social media and other technology companies "have a history of being very biased against conservatives," the government should not intervene to make changes.
"But I think it's important for him [Trump] to point out how biased it is because Google doesn't have to change its algorithm to make coverage bad for Trump," Harrington said. "We know that 90 percent of the news stories out there are negative against Trump, so this is clearly something that can be fixed anyway because the media is so biased against him. But Google, Facebook, Twitter, all these big tech companies have a history of being very biased against conservatives and it is an issue. I just don't think the government is probably the best correction going forward."
Harrington went on to say that Trump may have criticized Google to put technology companies under public scrutiny rather than as a prelude to government action.
"They should be held to account on what they're doing because they do have an incredible amount of power," she added.
Harrington then noted how, during the 2016 presidential campaign, Google was accused of manipulating its autocorrect results in the search bar to suppress negative stories about Hillary Clinton to help her candidacy.