Google’s autofill search results don’t show the Donald Trump assassination attempt or shooting as concerns about big tech interference in the 2024 election grows.
The revelation went viral on X on July 28, with Donald Trump Jr. writing, “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.”
We tried it. It’s true that the Google autofill doesn’t deliver search results related to “Trump assassination attempt,” “Trump shooting” or “Trump shot” when you type those terms or part of them into the Google search function.
The same happens when you type “Trump fight,” to find, say, the famous Trump fight video. When you Google “Trump fight” you get nothing in the autofill, either. “Trump fi” produces “Trump first impeachment” in the Google autofill. And when you type “Trump butler” for Butler, Pennsylvania, there are also no autofill results. To be clear, if you actually google those terms, you get relevant results. However, many people use the autofill function to find relevant searches. We got the same results on Firefox and Chrome. Google Trends shows the terms have strong search volume, i.e. audience interets.
People were outraged on X.
Google needs an anti-trust lawsuit and then broken up.
— Moral Authority Complex (@EhOHSeeLogic) July 28, 2024
Here’s the proof:
Google told The New York Post that there was no “manual action taken on these predictions,” and that there are “protections” against the autofill results “associated with political violence.”
“We’re working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up to date. 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,” the spokesperson said to The Post.
However, the autofill – or autocomplete, as some call it – does turn up voluminous results for other incidents of “political violence.”
As a point of comparison, we typed the names of other survivors of political gun violence with the letters “sh” – Gabby Giffords and Steve Scalise. The results show those search results deliver a very different autofill from Google.
This is ridiculous. Full on coverup. pic.twitter.com/bdlaKr9WKl
— Jarvis (@jarvis_best) July 28, 2024
