Supporters of Donald Trump have responded furiously after it emerged that the Google search engine failed, selectively, to pull up results about the attempted assassination of the former president.
Users who typed “the assassination attempt of” into Google found that ‘Google Suggest’—a feature, also known as Autocomplete, which provides search suggestions based on predictive text—brought up no mention of Trump.
The European Conservative tested claims made online. We entered the prompt and were offered suggested results—and further reading—about assassination attempts on former presidents Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan, Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro and Jamaican musician Bob Marley. But not about Trump.
The former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., responded that “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.
A spokesman from the tech company told the New York Post that there was no “manual action taken on these predictions,” and that its systems include “protections” against Autocomplete predictions “associated with political violence.”
But it is difficult to see how this could explain the alleged suppression of the even more simple search request of “president Donald Trump.”
Internet users have also been sharing examples over the weekend of Meta AI—an artificial intelligence tool founded by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg which claims to help “you learn, create, connect in new ways, so you can get more out of every moment”—suggesting that the attempted assassination of Trump was a “fictional” event.
Google announced that it was “working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up to date.”
