Debunking Trump’s claim of Google’s SOTU bias
Today, Trump posted this video proving Google promoted all of Obama “State of the Union” (SotU) speeches but none of his own. In this post, I debunk this claim. The short answer is this: it’s not Google’s fault but Trump’s for not having a sophisticated social media team.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 29, 2018
But wait, there’s more to the saga. After Trump’s speech, Google promoted the Democrat response:
Casually looking back through the Obama years, I don’t see any equivalent Republican response. Is this evidence of bias?
Maybe. Or again, maybe it’s still the Democrats are more media savvy than the Republicans. Indeed, what came after Obama’s speech on YouTube in some years was a question-and-answer session with Obama himself, which of course is vastly more desirable for YouTube (personal interaction!!) and is going to push any competing item into obscurity.
If Trump wants Google’s attention next January, it’s quite clear what he has to do. First, set up a live event the day before so that Google can link to it. Second, setup a second post-speech interactive question event that will, of course, smother the heck out of any Democrat response — and probably crash YouTube in the process.
Buzzfeed quotes Google PR saying:
On January 30 2018, we highlighted the livestream of President Trump’s State of the Union on the 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 google.com for this address in either 2009 or 2017.
This is also bunk. It ignores the difference between promoting upcoming and live events. I can’t see that they promoted any of Bush’s speeches (like in 2008) or even Obama’s first SotU in 2010, though it did promote a question/answer session with Obama after the 2010 speech. Thus, the 2017 trend has only a single data point.
My explanation is better: Obama had a media savvy team that reached out to them, whereas Trump didn’t. But you see the problem for a PR flack: while they know they have no corporate policy to be biased against Trump, at the same time, they don’t necessarily have an explanation, either. They can point to data, such as the live promotion page, but they can’t necessarily explain why. An explanation like mine is harder for them to reach.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Errata Security authored by Robert Graham. Read the original post at: https://blog.erratasec.com/2018/08/debunking-trumps-claim-of-googles-sotu.html