(Ken Silva, Headline USA) In the weeks following the failed assassination attempt on presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, Google users noticed that the search engine was seemingly suppressing information about the fatal July 13 event in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The House Judiciary Committee launched a probe into the issue. According to the committee, Google admitted that results for Trump assassination searchers were suppressed—blaming the problem on a “bug.”
it's even worse pic.twitter.com/2fEQEqeK4R
— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) July 28, 2024
“Autocomplete was not showing President Trump’s name in response to searches for ‘President Donald’ and similar terms. Alphabet claims ‘that this particular issue was caused by a bug’ and has been fixed by a recent update,” House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, disclosed in a Monday letter to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. Alphabet is the parent company of Google.
According to Jordan, Alphabet/Google also admitted that “predictions for queries about the assassination attempt against former President Trump … should have appeared but didn’t.”
“Alphabet explained that Google Search’s Autocomplete’s built-in protections around political violence were ‘out of date,’ and that as a result, Autocomplete failed to provide relevant results about the attempt on President Trump’s life,” Jordan wrote in his letter.
Along with suppressing info about the Trump shooting, Google admitted that Google searches for Donald Trump returned news labels and stories about Vice President Kamala Harris.
1. Google ADMITTED that after the July 13 assassination attempt on President Trump “predictions for queries about the assassination attempt against former President Trump” “should have appeared but didn’t.” pic.twitter.com/dVswcL28tJ
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) August 5, 2024
“Alphabet claimed that this error was the result of its algorithm that automatically generates and displays labels about news topics related to a Google Search inquiry,” Jordan said.
Even though the suppression has stopped, Jordan said he’s not satisfied with Google’s explanation for what happened. He has numerous questions, including about how long Google knew it had a “bug,” what other features were affected by the bug and what impact the shoddy search engine results had on Americans’ ability to obtain information about the July 13 assassination attempt.
Jordan said Google is obligated to provide records about the issue pursuant to his committee’s Feb. 15, 2023 subpoena. Jordan’s committee has been investigating the extent to which tech companies censor content at the government’s behest.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
