Well, this is indeed a shocker: Google admitted this past week that they were indeed censoring searches on GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and the assassination attempt against him. But it was just an outdated algorithm, honest!
In the latest improbable claim of semi-innocence in the field of election manipulation by a big tech corporation, counsel for Google parent company Alphabet told the House Judiciary Committee that its autocomplete algorithm wouldn’t allow people to search for results about the Trump assassination attempt at a Butler, Pennsylvania, rally on July 13 due to a prohibition against searches for political violence-related topics, National Review reported.
Similar “errors” — and I know, this is the strangest coincidence! — were also responsible for not giving autocomplete suggestions when “President Donald” was typed in or giving users news stories about Trump’s presumed rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, when searching for him.
“The attorney said the bugs were fixed after they were brought to Google’s attention,” National Review reported.
The responses came after a letter from Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday laid out the issues in depth.
“The Committee and Select Subcommittee [on the Weaponization of the Federal Government]’s oversight has shown how the federal government has coerced or colluded with technology, social media, and other companies, including Alphabet, to moderate content online,” Jordan wrote.
“Recent reporting has indicated that Google may now be interfering in the 2024 presidential election by censoring information about former President Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign for the presidency, including relating to the July 13 assassination attempt on him in Pennsylvania.
“In response to the Committee and Select Subcommittee’s oversight, your counsel provided the Committee and Select Subcommittee with non-public information about Google’s issues with Search and Autocomplete and the company’s efforts to correct them, in addition to offering a private briefing to the Committee and Select Subcommittee this week.”
During the private briefing, Google’s counsel offered somewhat unconvincing explanations for phenomena that many on social media, including X impresario/tech titan Elon Musk, had noticed.
Is Google lying – were these “errors” actually intentional?
Wow, Google has a search ban on President Donald Trump!
Election interference? pic.twitter.com/dJzgVAAFZA
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 29, 2024
In Jordan’s letter, he noted that Google’s counsel reportedly admitted to the committee that “predictions for queries about the assassination attempt against former President Trump … should have appeared but didn’t.”
Counsel blamed protections for political violence which were “out of date.”
Meanwhile, when it came to Trump’s name not showing up in autocomplete, counsel said “that this particular issue was caused by a bug.”
As for searching for Trump and getting news about Kamala, Google said that “predictions … may be unexpected or imperfect, and bugs will occur.”
“Bugs will occur” is essentially a big tech version of “mistakes were made.” Bugs did not just spring up out of thin air, Google software engineers programmed the software that contained the bugs.
Under each of the points, Jordan asked Pichai a series of questions he wanted answered. The last one under each point was the same, and it was the most important: “How can the American people be confident that a similar issue, whether intentional or not, will not occur again?”
I can answer for them — you can’t, because it’s Google.
This was understandably a busy week for the search giant, what with a major antitrust case going against them, but you’d at least think there would be some kind of mea culpa other than a “whoops, let’s fix that!”
This is, after all, election interference by one of the biggest corporations in the world. Not just one huge error involving a memory-holed assassination attempt, but also memory-holing an entire administration and news about the GOP presidential candidate.
If this weren’t in the United States and/or didn’t favor Democrats, the hue and cry from the Elizabeth Warrens of the world would be cacophonous.
Instead, we have crickets from liberal Washington, and I’m pretty sure we can guess why. It’s funny how the algorithm errors always seem to go one way, particularly when that just so happens to be the way Google tends to lean as a corporate monolith.
