Google on Tuesday refuted United States President Donald Trump accusations that it was rigging its search engine to show only negative reportage of him. Trump took to Twitter to accuse the firm of suppressing conservative voices to conceal news reports that portray him in a good light.

Google’s spokesperson said its platform was not used to set a political agenda. “We do not bias our results toward any political ideology,” AFP quoted the company’s spokesperson as saying. “Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries. We continually work to improve Google search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”

Trump said this was a serious situation that will be addressed. “Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of fake news media,” the US president tweeted. “In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me and others, so that almost all stories and news is bad. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/conservative and fair media is shut out. Illegal?”

The president claimed that 96% of the results that appear under “Trump News” are from Left-wing media publications and described it as very dangerous. “They are controlling what we and cannot see.”

Trump’s economic advisor Larry Kudlow said the administration was looking into the president’s claims.

Trump has persistently criticised the news media of being biased against him and has used the term fake news to refer to reports that are critical of him. In the past, Trump accused Twitter and Facebook of censorship.

The president’s accusations come at a time when several social media companies are cracking down on accounts that reportedly interfere in American politics or are conspiracy driven content and hate speech, the news agency reported.

On August 16, more than 300 newspapers across the United States responded to The Boston Globe’s call to write and publish editorials denouncing President Donald Trump’s ‘‘dirty war against the free press”. Trump has repeatedly referred to the media as the enemy of the American people.