Eric Trump seemingly alleged a vast leftwing conspiracy from Google to censor images of protests.
“Google is once again trying to manipulate Americans,” the president’s son tweeted. Type ‘mob’ or ‘mobs’ into google and watch what comes up. Do the same on any other search engine.”
Trump’s tweet featured images of apparent search results from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. Only Google showed still images from a cartoon while the other images appeared to be of protests.
“#NothingToSeeHere,” Trump ended his post.
But what Trump discovered, in fact, was not some wild conspiracy, but rather the anime TV show Mob Psycho 100. People perhaps just like to Google a popular show. The results might also show that Google is, in fact, a really good search engine that discerned that most people are probably looking for a TV show and not random pictures of mobs of people.
As people online often do, they mocked Trump. They also responded with fancams, clips from the show, or panels from the manga that inspired the show.
IMFNFJFJF FUCKING PEEING ERIC TRUMP SAID GOOGLE WAS TRYING TO CENSOR WHAT A “mob” LOOKS LIKE BUT ITS JUST SHIGEO “Mob” KAGEYAMA FROM MOB PSYCHO 100 pic.twitter.com/LcBVKtMzcI
— Nina (@bnina_15) September 8, 2020
Google is, of course, the dominant force in search. The New York Times reported last week that the Justice Department may soon pursue an anti-trust case against Google. The paper also reported that some lawyers working on the inquiry worried Attorney General Bill Barr was pushing the investigation to move faster because President Donald Trump has accused Google of being biased against him.
With that backdrop, it makes some sense Eric Trump felt the need to tweet about seeing anime pictures in a Google search. But, rather than grab onto the conspiracy, the internet mostly found it funny.
Soon enough, the show’s Twitter account even tweeted about the ordeal.
“Hello I heard I was trending,” it posted.