1/ So I used the Wayback machine and verified this. It's indeed true Google promoted Obama but not Trump State of the Union addresses on their front page.
But that's Trump's fault, not Google's. You can verify this yourself by looking at the underlying metadata.
But that's Trump's fault, not Google's. You can verify this yourself by looking at the underlying metadata.
2/ The Obama White House promoted the events via their YouTube channel, encouraging people to watch them live via YouTube. Obama even held question/answer sessions. Here is a good sample of the live YouTube feed.
3/ Conversely, Trump didn't promote his SOTU addresses via YouTube. The only YouTube videos are of broadcast media like ABC, CBS, FoxNews, Vice, C-SPAN, etc.
youtube.com/results?search…
youtube.com/results?search…
4/ Obama was young, technologically hip, using social media to his advantage.
Trump is old, tragically square, and does little more than troll us on Twitter.
Trump is old, tragically square, and does little more than troll us on Twitter.
5/ You can't expect Google to promote "Watch President Tonight on YouTube" videos ahead of time unless you, the President, arrange it with them ahead of time. Trump didn't do a live YouTube feed, much less ask Google to promote it.
6/ To believe Google/YouTube wouldn't promote a SOTU address means believing they aren't money grubbing capitalists who would love to get eyeballs to their site. While I believe there are more lefties at Google than right-wing, I still believe in the ascendancy of pure capitalism
7/ Go look at the archive.org, look at the promoted URL. It's to a YouTube live stream from the youtube.com/user/whitehouse.
If you promote "click here to watch video" stream, you must first have a "here" there. If the White House doesn't arrange it, there is no "here".
If you promote "click here to watch video" stream, you must first have a "here" there. If the White House doesn't arrange it, there is no "here".
8/ So this tweet seems to have a screenshot from 7 months ago showing Google homepage promoting it. It could be true, though it's missing from arhive.org.
9/ Google doesn't have a single home page, but many different ones it shows to different markets. With the Obama PR machine pushing, they probably had a wider market impact than Google would normally have left to their own devices.
10/ Ah, this tweet explains it. For Obama's speeches where the White House setup the live stream ahead of time, Google promoted it ahead of time. For Trump's, they waited until after the NBC stream went live to promote it:
11/ archive.org timestamps things by GMT time, so you needed the Jan 31 2am link instead of the Jan 30 9pm link.
