Users searching Google for the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump find nothing, leading the search engine giant to be accused of election manipulation.
Google has been accused of election meddling by conservatives since 2008. Its suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 angered many on the right.
Now, searchers are noticing that when they enter the term “assassination attempt” into the system, the attempt on Donald Trump’s life from two weeks ago is not found.
The news reached Donald Trump Jr., who issued a scathing statement about X’s omission.
He wrote: ‘Big Tech is AGAIN trying to interfere in the election to help Kamala Harris. We all know this is intentional election interference by Google. Absolutely despicable.’
Users searching Google for the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump find nothing, leaving the search engine giant open to accusations of election manipulation
Chip Roy, Republican congressman from Texas, posted his own attempt with the caption: “Can verify.”
“Why are you censoring DJT’s shit attempt??,” asked the popular LibsofTikTok account.
The screenshot below their posts shows a user searching for the words “assassination attempt on” and then listing off a number of names of people who were shot decades ago as part of the autocomplete feature.
Some of the names that weren’t Trump’s were Ronald Reagan, Bob Marley, Vladimir Lenin, Gerald Ford and William Seward.
A search on DailyMail.com for the term “assassination attempt” on Sunday night turned up Reagan and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but not Trump.
Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, but miraculously survived.
“We are working on improvements to ensure our systems are 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. After this terrible act, people turned to Google to find high-quality information – we connected them to useful results, and we will continue to do so,” they added.
The news reached Donald Trump Jr., who issued a scathing statement about X regarding the omission
They claimed that no “manual action” was used to create these autocompletes and that there is “protection” against suggestions related to political violence.
In March, a Media Research Center investigation not only reported 16 incidents of Google election interference, but also claimed that Google’s new AI tool Gemini will not answer “negative questions” about Joe Biden.
“MRC researchers found 41 instances of Google meddling in elections over the past 16 years,” Dan Schneider, vice president of MRC Free Speech America, and editor Gabriela Pariseau wrote in the report’s executive summary.
“Google executives have made public what should never have been made public: that Google is using its ‘vast power, resources and reach’ to advance its left-wing values,” the authors added.
Google has strongly denied the claims in the report, calling them “unsubstantiated, false complaints that have been debunked by third parties,” including “many that have been dismissed in courts.”
The report cites research by AllSides researcher Dr. Robert Epstein, who concluded that “Google results and vote reminders favored Democrats and changed the 2020 election outcome by at least 6 million votes.”
Dr Epstein added that the US company’s search algorithm “probably diverted at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton” in 2016.
“Google’s outsized influence on information technology, politics, and American elections became apparent in 2008,” the authors summarize.
Google has been accused by conservatives of election meddling dating back to 2008, with the suppression of Hunter Biden laptop stories in 2020 infuriating many on the right. Pictured: Google CEO Sundar Pichai
‘After Google failed to prevent then-presidential candidate Donald Trump from being inaugurated after the 2016 election, the company made it clear to every critical observer that it has interfered in the U.S. election and will continue to do so.’
“Its impact has grown dramatically and has therefore become increasingly damaging to democracy,” they added.
“In all cases, Google has disadvantaged candidates – regardless of party – who posed a threat to the left-wing candidate of its choice.”
MRC Free Speech America, a division of the conservative Media Research Center, also strongly criticized Google’s AI service Gemini for “refusing to answer questions that were damaging” to Biden.
It said the engine also appeared to favor left-leaning Democratic 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 auto-filled results that were potentially damaging to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and “failing to do the same for then-candidates Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders.”
Google condemned the report as inaccurate.
“There is absolutely nothing new under the sun here – just a rehash of unsubstantiated, false complaints that have been debunked by third parties and many of which have been dismissed in court,” the search engine said.
‘Politicians on the left have a long history of making similar claims.
‘We have a clear business interest in ensuring that everyone continues to use our products, so we don’t want them to be biased or inaccurate, so we’ve taken steps to ensure this.
“Many conservatives have been remarkably successful in using our platforms to spread their messages to a broad audience.”
According to Google, 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 characteristics and qualities of sites, not individual pages and never political ideology,” a Google spokesperson said.