An executive order reportedly drawn up by President Trump to investigate Google and Facebook for possible violation of anti-trust laws is a fraud – cooked up by an industry competitor in a bid to hobble the Internet giant, Newsmax has learned.
Bloomberg reported last week the "the White House is considering a draft executive order for President Donald Trump that would instruct federal antitrust and law enforcement agencies to open probes into the practices of Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Facebook Inc., and other social media companies."
Incredibly, sources at the White House say, a Google competitor drafted their version of an executive order they wanted President Trump to sign.
In recent weeks they brazenly delivered it to the White House, which quickly rebuffed the offer.
White House senior staff were aghast this company had actually written an executive order and when they could not get any interest from the administration, leaked it to Bloomberg claiming it was awaiting President Trump's signature.
While President Trump is deeply concerned about the political bias of social media companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, he has not ordered any department to begin anti-trust actions against these companies.
It would be "unprecedented" for the White House order anti-trust action by the Department of Justice or Federal Trade Commission, a senior White House official told Newsmax.
The sources declined to name the company that concocted the draft order, referring to it only as "an industry organization competitive to Google."
One reason some may have believed the draft executive order is because of a tweet Trump fired off last month questioning the legitimacy of Google's search results.
Trump charged Google, in name searches of him, seemed to be prioritizing stories from CNN and other "National Left-Wing Media" over conservative news groups – an alleged act that is "very dangerous."
In a statement to Business Insider shortly after those tweets, Google responded: "Search is not used to set a political agenda, and we don't bias our results toward any political ideology." The company added it prioritized relevancy and quality.
But last week, The Wall Street Journal, citing internal company emails, reported that soon after Trump's controversial travel ban was enacted in January 2017, Google employees discussed how they might be able to tweak search-related functions to show users how to oppose Trump's policies, including helping contributions to pro-immigration groups and encouraging contacts to lawmakers and government agencies.
Employees proposed ways to "leverage" search functions and counter what they considered to be "islamophobic, algorithmically biased results from search terms 'Islam,' 'Muslim,' 'Iran,' etc." and "prejudiced, algorithmically biased search results from search terms 'Mexico,' 'Hispanic,' 'Latino,' etc," according to the Journal. Google said the ideas discussed were never implemented.
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