President Donald Trump criticized Google on Tuesday morning, insinuating that the tech company may be working against his reelection campaign and saying "we are watching Google very closely."
In a series of tweets, Trump listed baseless accusations by several people, including Fox News host Lou Dobbs and former Google employee Kevin Cernekee, that the tech company has an anti-conservative bias. Trump tagged Google CEO Sundar Pichai in the first tweet.
There's no evidence that Google manipulates information to stifle conservative voices.
Cernekee is a former Google employee who was outspoken within the company about what he perceived as an anti-conservative bias. He was fired from the company in 2018 and was the subject of a Wall Street Journal feature last week. Since the WSJ article, Cernekee has been making the rounds on conservative media outlets, claiming Google plans to influence the flow of information against Trump and hurt his reelection in 2020.
"The statements made by this disgruntled former employee are absolutely false," a Google spokesperson said in a statement. "We go to great lengths to build our products and enforce our policies in ways that don't take political leanings into account. Distorting results for political purposes would harm our business and go against our mission of providing helpful content to all of our users."
Google said it fired Cernekee for allegedly downloading confidential company documents and that Cernekee produced tens of thousands of pages of documents after the company obtained a court order requiring him to return confidential information.
