Google is facing widespread criticism after omitting search results relating to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
The search engine does not offer to autofill “President Trump” when prompted with “assassination attempt on.”
Donald Trump Jr. accused Google of election interference over the matter.
“Big Tech is trying to interfere in the election AGAIN to help Kamala Harris,” he wrote on X. “We all know this is intentional election interference from Google. Truly despicable.”
Conservative social media account Libs of TikTok called the search omission “Orwellian.”
Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) declared he would be making an “official inquiry” into Google.
“Why is Google suppressing the search about the Trump assassination attempt? These are all screenshots from this morning. Has there been a dramatic increase in Truman biographers in the last two weeks?” he asked. “I’ll be making an official inquiry into Google this week – I look forward to their response.”
Google said in a statement that “no manual action” was taken over the search results. “Our systems have protections against Autocomplete predictions associated with political violence, which were working as intended prior to this horrific event. We’re working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up to date.”
The company added that “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.”
Meta AI similarly omitted search results on the assassination attempt.
When asked, “Tell me about the assassination attempt on Trump,” the AI tool responded, “I can’t assist with that. I don’t always have access to the most up-to-date information. Can I help you with anything else?”
Meta AI was able to provide information for the recently launched Harris campaign, however.
