https://arab.news/nsmzs
- Users reported that typing ‘assassination attempt on’ into Google’s search engine did not suggest Trump’s incident
- Google said error was due to ‘anomalies’ and did not affect only the Republican candidate
LONDON: Google has been accused of election interference by top Republican figures after its autocomplete feature allegedly omitted former US president and current candidate Donald Trump from some results.
Since Sunday evening, several X users posted photos showing that typing “assassination attempt on” into Google’s search engine only yielded autocomplete results for former President Ronald Reagan, Bob Marley, and others, omitting the July 14 attempt on Trump’s life.
Influential conservative critics, including Donald Trump Jr. and Elon Musk, who recently endorsed the Republican candidate, criticized Google for imposing a “search ban” and attempting to “gaslight” the American people.
“Wow, Google has a search ban on President Donald Trump,” Musk posted. “Election interference?”
“Probably just a coincidence that Alphabet (Google) employees were the top donors to Biden,” he sarcastically wrote in another X post.
Google said on Monday that the issue was due to “anomalies” causing autocomplete not to work as intended.
They explained the error affected searches about the names of several past presidents and the current vice president, not just Trump.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the company did not take “manual action” on the autocomplete predictions, adding the system has “protections against autocomplete predictions associated with political violence, which were working as intended prior to this horrific event occurring.”
The news came amid growing concerns over big tech’s potential to influence the upcoming election, especially as deepfakes and other artificial intelligence-generated content proliferate, increasing the potential for misinformation to spread.