(Image source from: BBC.com)
The United States President Donald Trump has warned Google, Twitter and Facebook they are "treading on troubled territory" amid a row over sensed bias.
He said they had to be "very careful", after earlier accusing Google of rigging the search results for the phrase "Trump news".
An aide said the administration was "looking into" the issue of regulation.
Google said its search engine set no political agenda and was not biased towards any political ideology.
Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump said Google had "really taken a lot of advantage of a lot of people, it's a very serious thing".
Adding the names of Facebook and Twitter, he said: "They better be careful, because you can't do that to people... we have literally thousands of complaints coming in."
However, he gave no details of what action he might take and when asked earlier about Google, Trump's top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, said the administration was "taking a look" at whether it should be regulated and would do "some investigation and some analysis".
Analysts say there is little to back up Trump's claim and that it is unclear how he could take action.
Some said attempts to alter search engine results could violate the First Amendment, although his administration could make it difficult for Google by looking into its dominance of the market.
In an earlier tweet, Trump accused Google of prioritizing negative news stories from what he described as the "national left-wing media".
He said most of the stories that appeared on the results page were negative and that conservative reporting was being "suppressed".
Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News 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. Illegal? 96% of....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2018
....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!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2018
Earlier this week, he said social media were "totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices" and that he would "not let that happen".
Google denied using political viewpoints to shape its search results.
It said: "Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don't bias our results toward any political ideology.
"We continually work to improve Google search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment."
In his tweets, President Trump claimed that 96 percent of the news articles presented by Google in response to the phrase "Trump news" were from left-wing news outlets.
Bolyard reported the 96 percent figure and said CNN had the greatest number of featured links, which President Trump mentioned as well.
"I performed the search multiple times using different computers - registered to different users - and Google returned similar results," she wrote.
While not scientific, the results suggest a pattern of bias against right-leaning content.
By Sowmya Sangam
