Elon Musk has repeatedly accused Google of being biased against former President Donald Trump in a series of X posts.
Musk, who has endorsed Trump, and other influential conservative critics primarily focused on Google’s Autocomplete feature, which provides suggestions based on what you’ve typed into the search bar.
In screenshots reposted by Musk, Google suggestions for “assassination attempt of” and “president donald” don’t show Trump in the autocomplete predictions.
When some users typed “assassination attempt of” into the search bar, the top autocomplete suggestions appeared to be for former President Ronald Reagan and Bob Marley. On July 13, Trump was shot in the ear during a failed assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania. Numerous conservative commentators speculated that Trump being left out of the suggestions was an intentional effort to influence the November election.
“Big Tech is trying to interfere in the election AGAIN to help Kamala Harris,” Donald Trump Jr. posted on X Sunday. “We all know this is intentional election interference from Google. Truly despicable.” Musk shared and commented on a similar post.
When NBC News typed in “assassination attempt of,” it got similar results — Trump didn’t appear in the autocomplete predictions.
Musk also posted that Google had a “search ban” on the former president because Trump did not appear in some users’ autocomplete predictions for “president donald.” His post quickly went viral, racking up 81.9 million views and 779,500 likes. Other users said that they were seeing the same results.
In the screenshots, when users searched for “president donald,” the Google autocomplete predictions appeared to be “president donald duck” and “president donald regan.”
“Election interference?” Musk asked in a post including the screenshots.
On Monday, when NBC News typed in “president” in Google’s search bar, the first autocomplete prediction was for Trump. President Joe Biden appeared below on the list.
In a statement, a Google spokesperson told NBC News that the Autocomplete feature was experiencing some issues Monday.
“Autocomplete is currently not working as intended for some searches about the names of several past presidents and the current vice president,” a Google spokesperson said. “We’re looking into these anomalies and working on improvements, which we hope to roll out soon. Our autocomplete systems are dynamic, so predictions will change based on common and trending queries.”
Google added that autocomplete predictions are suggestions and that users can search for whatever content they’re interested in. The company said that no manual action had been taken.
Musk continued to call out Google late Monday afternoon, resharing posts showing that searches about Trump had surfaced news about Harris instead. One screenshot showed Google generating a header reading “News about Harris” in response to a query about Trump. When Harris’ name was typed into the Google search, the news results were also about her.
“Wow,” Musk said.
When NBC News searched for Trump and Harris on Google, the news articles that appeared focused on the person whose name was searched for.
Google addressed the screenshots in a post on X.
“Some context here: These labels are automatically generated based on common topics across many news articles, and they change over time,” the Google Communications account posted on X with screenshots. “A search today for Kamala Harris showed Top Stories labeled with ‘Donald Trump,’ because many articles cover the two of them together. You can see this happening across many topics, like the Olympics, other public figures, companies and more.”
These posts caught the attention of a number of Republican politicians, including Rep. Chip Roy, who showed a screenshot of his own autocomplete predictions.
“I’ll be making an official inquiry into @google this week — I look forward to their response,” Sen. Roger Marshall posted on X.
In response to a tweet from Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski calling for an investigation, Musk affirmed the sentiment, simply responding “Yeah.”