Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Google accused of covering up Trump assassination attempt

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Ted Cruz, the pro-Trump senator, wrote: “This…is…insane. @Google is engaged in active election interference. They are gas-lighting the American people & trying to erase the attempted assassination of Trump.”

Roger Marshall, a Republican senator from Kentucky, wrote: “I’ll be making an official inquiry into @google this week – I look forward to their response.”

Elon Musk, the owner of X who endorsed Mr Trump earlier this month, wrote: “Wow, Google has a search ban on President Donald Trump! Election interference?”

He posted a screenshot of Google’s autocomplete failing to add the word “Trump” when searching “President Donald”. The autocomplete bar instead suggested “president donald duck” and “president donald regan”.

Mr Trump was suggested when The Telegraph searched for “president donald” on Monday morning.

Google said the company was updating its autocomplete systems.

“Our systems have protections against autocomplete predictions associated with political violence, which were working as intended prior to this horrific event occurring,” a spokesman said.

“We’re working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up to date.”

The complaint appears related solely to the autocomplete feature. Searching Google for “Assassination attempt on Donald Trump” produced a full set of search results.

Google has moderated its autocomplete function in recent years after a string of controversies.

It removed a string of anti-Semitic and sexist suggestions in 2016 such as “are Jews evil” and “are women evil”.

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