Google CEO Sundar Pichai responded to reports that some staff had discussed tweaking search results to show a pro-immigration bias.
“We do not bias our products to favor any political agenda,” he wrote in an email to Google employees.
Pichai sent the note on Friday after The Wall Street Journal obtained emails traded between Google employees about tweaking search results to show pro-immigration content.
Those ideas, which were discussed around the time the Trump administration was rolling out a controversial travel ban for seven Muslim-majority countries, were never implemented, the company said last week.
“Recent news stories reference an internal email to suggest that we would compromise the integrity of our Search results for a political end. This is absolutely false,” Pichai said.
The email from Pichai to employees was reported on earlier by Axios and others, and its authenticity was confirmed by Google to CNN on Sunday.
It’s the latest in a series of events that seem to have pitted Google, and other tech companies, against the White House.
In an August 28 tweet, Trump accused “Google & others” of “suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good.”
He accused Google of rigging results to show “bad” stories when users search for “Trump news,” though he offered no evidence to support his claim.
The controversy stirred up again last week when an hour-long video was leaked of Google executives and staff expressing anger after Trump won the 2016 US presidential election.
The company responded in a statement, saying Googlers are free to “express their opinions” at company meetings.
“Nothing was said at that meeting, or any other meeting, to suggest that any political bias ever influences the way we build or operate our products,” the company said.
