Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump has accused Google of being involved in a conspiracy to rig search results relating to his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
During a Wisconsin rally on Wednesday, Trump told supporters that "Google's search engine was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton", while discussing the results of a Google poll.
Trump refused to go into more detail regarding his claims, but they appear to stem from accusations levelled at Clinton earlier in the year. YouTube channel SourceFed published a video in June claiming to have discovered evidence that Google was intentionally hiding autocomplete results relating to Clinton's alleged crimes.
The video was picked up by Sputnik News, a state-controlled Russian news outlet. Sputnik claimed to have further substantiated the allegations, and also suggested that Google could be manipulating up to 3 million votes.
Google refuted the claims of SourceFed entirely, saying it "simply misunderstand[s] how Autocomplete works". In a statement to The Washington Times, the company explained: "Our Autocomplete algorithm will not show a predicted query that is offensive or disparaging when displayed in conjunction with a person's name."
This would not be the first time that Trump has made questionable claims of conspiracies. He is famously credited with starting the 'birther' movement - which claims that Obama was born in Kenya, rather than America - and has previously stated that global warming was invented in order to promote Chinese business interests.
Despite evidence to the contrary, he has since vigorously denied making both claims and has a proven history of walking back from similarly inflammatory statements. Google could not be reached for comment regarding the accusations.
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