Google Feature Omits Search Results for Failed Trump Assassination — Tech Giant Accused of Election Meddling

 

Google’s Autocomplete function provides no further results about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, leading conservatives to accuse the web giant of election tampering.

The tech giant has been accused by conservatives of interfering in elections dating back to 2008, with the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression in 2020 leading many on the right irate.

Now, those who enter the terms ‘the assassination attempt of’ into the system, the attempt on the life of Donald Trump just two weeks ago doesn’t show up via Autocomplete.

Roger Marshall, a Republican Senator from Kansas, announced Sunday night that he’s launching an Congressional inquiry into the company.

The news also reached Donald Trump Jr. who issued a blistering statement on X regarding the omission.

He wrote: ‘Big Tech is trying to interfere in the election AGAIN to help Kamala Harris. We all know this is intentional election interference from Google. Truly despicable.’

Texas Republican Congressman Chip Roy posted his own attempt with the caption: ‘Can verify’.

‘Why are you censoring the ass*ss*nat*on attempt of DJT??’ asked the popular LibsofTikTok account.

The screenshot below their posts shows a user searching the words ‘assassination attempt on’ and then lists several names of people who were shot at decades ago as part of its auto-complete feature.

Some of the non-Trump names were Ronald Reagan, Bob Marley, Vladimir Lenin, Gerald Ford and William Seward.

A DailyMail.com search of the phrase ‘the assassination attempt of’ Sunday evening produced Reagan and Archduke Franz Ferdinand but not Trump.

When DailyMail.com enters the assassination of Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy, several other options come up via Autocomplete, which Google uses to allow people to find information more easily.

When we searched the 1981 attempt on the life of President Reagan, Autocomplete suggested the date, the location and the legislation that was enacted in response to the shooting came up via autocomplete.

Trump was shot at during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, miraculously surviving.

“We’re working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up to date,’ a Google spokesperson told the New York Post in a statement.

‘Of course, Autocomplete is just a tool to help people save time, and they can still search for anything they want to. Following this terrible act, people turned to Google to find high quality information– we connected them with helpful results, and will continue to do so,” they added.

They claimed that no ‘manual action’ had been used to create these auto-completes and there are ‘protections’ against suggestions that are aligned with political violence.

Marshall, a Republican who sits on the Senate Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, announced he wants further answers in a post on social media Sunday.

He asked: ‘Why is @Google suppressing the search about the Trump assassination attempt? These are all screenshots from this morning. Has there been a dramatic increase in Truman biographers in the last two weeks?’

‘I’ll be making an official inquiry into @google this week – I look forward to their response.’

In March, a Media Research Center study not only cited 16 incidents of Google election interference but also claimed that Google’s new AI tool Gemini ‘won’t answer negative questions’ about Joe Biden.

‘MRC researchers have found 41 times where Google interfered in elections over the last 16 years,’ MRC Free Speech America vice president Dan Schneider and editor Gabriela Pariseau wrote in the report’s summary.

‘From the mouths of Google executives, the tech giant let slip what was never meant to be made public: That Google uses its ‘great strength and resources and reach’ to advance its leftist values,’ the authors added.

Google has strongly denied the claims in the report, calling them ‘baseless, inaccurate complaints that have been debunked by third parties’ including ‘many that failed in the courts’.

The report cited research by AllSides researcher Dr Robert Epstein, who found that ‘Google’s results and get-out-the-vote reminders favored Democrats and shifted the 2020 election results by at least 6 million votes.’

Dr Epstein added that the American corporation’s search algorithm ‘likely shifted at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton’ in 2016.

‘Google’s outsized influence on information technology, the body politic and American elections became evident in 2008,’ the authors summarized.

‘After failing to prevent then-candidate for president Donald Trump from being inaugurated following the 2016 election, Google has since made clear to any discerning observer that it has been — and will continue — interfering in America’s elections.’

‘Its impact has surged dramatically, making it evermore harmful to democracy,’ they added.

‘In every case, Google harmed the candidates – regardless of party – who threatened its left-wing candidate of choice.’

MRC Free Speech America, a division of the conservative Media Research Center, also blasted Google’s AI service Gemini, for allegedly ‘refusing to answer questions damaging’ to Biden.

It said the engine also appeared to favor left-leaning Democrat candidates. This included Barack Obama over John McCain in 2008, and Obama over Mitt Romney in 2012.

The site is also accused of using its algorithm to exclude autofill results that were potentially damaging to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and ‘not doing the same for then-candidates Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders’.

Google condemned the report as inaccurate.

‘There is absolutely nothing new here – just a recycled list of baseless, inaccurate complaints that have been debunked by third parties and many that failed in the courts,’ the search engine said.

‘Politicians on the left have a long history of making similar claims too.

‘We have a clear business incentive to keep everyone using our products, so we have no desire to make them biased or inaccurate and have safeguards in place to ensure this.

‘Numerous conservatives have been particularly successful in using our platforms to spread their message to a wide audience.’

Google said third parties including the Economist, Stanford and Ahrefs conducted similar studies and ‘found no evidence to support claims of political bias’.

‘Our algorithms look at features and qualities of sites, not individual pages and never political ideology,’ a Google spokesperson said.

https://www.cf.org/news/google-feature-omits-search-results-for-failed-trump-assassination-tech-giant-accused-of-election-meddling/