Neither President Donald Trump nor the PJ Media article he appeared to reference offered any proof that Google was purposely promoting negative stories about the president at the expense of positive ones. | Win McNamee/Getty Images Trump warns that Google and other tech giants 'better be careful'

President Donald Trump on Tuesday issued a stark warning to tech giants including Google, Facebook and Twitter, accusing them of muzzling conservatives and saying they are “treading on very, very troubled territory.”

“I think Google has really taken advantage of a lot of people. It’s a very serious thing,” Trump told reporters at a White House event Tuesday afternoon. “If you look at what is going on at Twitter, if you look at what is going on in Facebook, they better be careful because you can’t do that to people.”


The president spent the day criticizing the tech companies for what he sees as the suppression of conservative voices. Earlier in the day, the president posted a series of tweets accusing Google of treating certain political ideologies unfairly. The presidents said the search giant is "rigged" to show users "bad" stories about him.

"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. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out," Trump wrote online.

The president appears to be referencing an article from PJ Media, a conservative blog founded in the early 2000s. The article, published over the weekend, features a pie chart that says it breaks down "Google search results for 'Trump'" by party bias. Only a sliver of the pie chart, which encompasses the Wall Street Journal, is red. The rest of the chart, marked in blue, is made up of outlets PJ media accused of being "left-leaning," including The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post and POLITICO.

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Google is among the tech giants that have drawn the ire of the president and his conservative base. Last week, Trump blasted Facebook and Twitter for "silencing millions of people." Google said in a statement Tuesday morning that its search feature is "not used to set a political agenda." in a statement on Tuesday morning.

"We don't bias our results toward any political ideology," a Google spokesperson said. "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."

Neither Trump nor the PJ media article offered any proof that Google was purposely promoting negative stories about the president at the expense of positive ones. Many news outlets specifically tailor their online content to match Google's search algorithms in an effort to appear at or near the top of search results.

"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!" the president wrote on Twitter.

Trump did not elaborate on what steps he might take against Google, although White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told reporters on Tuesday morning the administration is “taking a look” at imposing regulations on Google.

Trump's attacks on Tuesday marked a continuation of his long-running feud with media outlets and tech companies that he claims offer him unfairly negative coverage.

“We have tremendous - we have literally thousands and thousands of complaints coming in and you just can't do that, so I think that Google and Twitter and Facebook, they're really treading on very very troubled territory and they have to be careful. It's not fair to large portions of the population,” Trump said Tuesday afternoon.

