Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has opened an investigation into Google Thursday, claiming the tech giant censors conservative speech.

Bailey announced the investigation into Twitter), saying Google is “waging war on the democratic process” and said Fox Business that the search engine manipulates results to “minimize information about the Trump campaign before Election Day.”

“I am launching an investigation into Google, America’s largest search engine, for censoring conservative speech during the most consequential election in our nation’s history,” Bailey said, adding, “It’s time to fight back.” The post has since received 1 million views.

The investigation would include subpoenas examining Google’s algorithms and their impact on the conservative visibility of content in search results.

Google strongly rejected the allegations, with a company spokesperson calling them “completely false” in a statement to Reuters. “Search serves all of our users, and our business is about showing useful information to everyone, regardless of their political beliefs,” the spokesperson said.

News week contacted Google and Attorney General Bailey via email for comment.

The Missouri investigation comes amid growing tensions between Google and conservative figures, including Donald Trump. In a recent Bloomberg Press interview at the Economic Club of Chicago, The Republican presidential candidate said he personally contacted Google CEO Sundar Pichai to complain. about search results showing negative stories about him.

Trump alleged that Google only shows “bad stories” about him, even when there is positive coverage. “They only have bad stories. In other words, if I have 20 good stories and 20 bad stories, and everyone gets one, you only see the 20 bad stories,” he said. -he declared to John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. -chief.

This is not the first time Google has been accused of anti-conservative bias. In July, following an X post sharing screenshots of his Google searches, Senator Roger Marshall launched an investigation into the company after claiming its search features omitted results related to a Trump assassination attempt.

“On July 27, 2024, Google failed to provide consistent search suggestions related to President Trump following the July 13 assassination attempt near Butler, Pennsylvania,” Marshall said in a letter to to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

“This failure to provide relevant and consistent results to users seeking information is just the most recent example in a long line of attempts by Google to editorialize content related to conservative presidential candidates,” a- he declared.

Marshall went on to say that a report from the Media Research Center, a conservative media monitoring group, found that “Google has influenced or interfered in U.S. elections more than 40 times over the past 16 years.”

Similarly, there was the Prager University v. Google/YouTube case in 2020 in which the university alleged discrimination against conservative content. The nonprofit education and media organization claimed that by classifying some of its videos as “Restricted Content,” YouTube was censoring “conservative views and perspectives on public issues.”

The courts ultimately ruled in favor of Google, finding that as a private company, Google has the right to moderate the content of its platforms.