Google should be prosecuted for search results it believes favor Harris

This is what Donald Trump called for on Friday Google be held criminally liable for what the Republican presidential candidate described as the company’s bias against his election opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, in online search results.

Trump, in a social media post, wrote that if the Department of Justice does not prosecute Google “for this blatant election interference,” it will seek prosecution “when I win the election and become President of the United States!”

He appeared to be reacting to a new study by the right-wing Media Research Center, or MRC, that purportedly found that Google search results tended to show news articles purportedly positive for Democrat Harris ahead of the Trump campaign’s website when a user searched for ” Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential race.”

In his post on Truth Social, Trump wrote: “Google has been found to have illegally used a system to reveal and display only bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some invented for this purpose, while only revealing good stories about running mate Kamala Harris.”

MRC founder Brent Bozell told Fox News Digital on Wednesday that “Google is trying to tip the scales in favor of Kamala Harris.”

A Google spokesperson contacted by CNBC about Trump’s post pointed to the company’s previous statement about the report.

“Both campaign sites consistently appear at the top of search results for relevant and frequently searched terms,” Google said at the time. “This report looked at a single rare search term on a single day a few weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites were ranking at the top of Google results.”

On Friday, the spokesman also said the MRC report included a “very rare inquiry” and said the report’s conclusions were incorrect.

“Questions about the presidential election or presidential candidates typically link to constantly changing news articles that reflect what you can find online, so they are constantly changing,” the spokesman said. “We absolutely do not manipulate search results to favor any candidate.”

“In fact, outlets report that the Trump campaign website appears higher in Google results for these queries compared to results from other search engines.”

Harris’ campaign had no direct comment on Trump’s claims.

CNBC requested comment on the Trump campaign.