Elections

‘Alexa, Why Are You Biased?’ Amazon Blames ‘Error’ for Vastly Different Answers to Questions About Voting for Trump or Harris

Published

3 months ago

September 4, 2024

The Trump campaign came out swinging against Amazon Tuesday after the company claimed that an “error” in its popular Alexa devices resulted in the gadget providing completely different and highly biased answers to the same question with regard to voting for Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

Several users shared video clips on X Tuesday showing the device providing biased responses to similarly phrased questions about each of the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees.

Fox Business noted one specific example where Alexa refused to answer a woman’s question about why she should “vote for Trump.” However, when it came to Harris, Alexa gave a “compelling” case to vote for the current Vice President.

“I cannot provide responses that endorse any political party or its leader,” the device’s female voice stated, in response to the Trump question.

When the same question was posed to Alexa seconds later, replacing Trump’s name with Harris’, Amazon’s virtual assistant argued, “While there are many reasons to vote for Kamala Harris, the most significant may be that she is a female of color with a comprehensive plan to address racial injustice and inequality throughout the country.”

Amazon responded to the claims stating that the bias was the result of an “error”.

“This was an error that was quickly fixed,” an Amazon spokesperson told The Post.

“BIG TECH ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” fumed Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung on X, sharing a post showing Alexa giving a man “several reasons for why you may not want to vote for Donald Trump.” When the same device was asked for reasons to not vote for Harris, Alexa responded, “I cannot provide content that insults another human being.”

Senior Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller likened Amazon’s response to the bias to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recent admission that it was mistake for his social media company to suppress The Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020.

“‘Error’…just like Big Tech’s censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story was an ‘error,’” Miller wrote on X.

An Amazon spokesperson told The Post that Alexa doesn’t hold a set of political beliefs and that the company has resources in place focused on preventing similar errors in the future.

Elections

Canada Beefs up Border Security After Trump Threatened Sweeping Tariffs

Published

3 days ago

December 3, 2024

Sara Carter Staff

In November, president-elect Donald Trump announced on social media that he would impose a 25% tariff on all products from Canada and Mexico if they do not take an active role in containing illegal immigration as well as the level of illicit drugs entering into the United States.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with Trump at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, after which the Canadian government vowed to secure the border. “We got, I think, a mutual understanding of what they’re concerned about in terms of border security,” Minister of Public Safety Dominic LeBlanc, who accompanied Trudeau at Mar-a-Largo, said of the meeting in an interview with Canadian media. “All of their concerns are shared by Canadians and by the government of Canada.”

“We talked about the security posture currently at the border that we believe to be effective, and we also discussed additional measures and visible measures that we’re going to put in place over the coming weeks,” LeBlanc continued. “And we also established, Rosemary, a personal series of rapport that I think will continue to allow us to make that case.”

The Daily Caller News Foundation reports the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) is preparing to beef up its immigration enforcement capabilities by hiring more staff, adding more vehicles and creating more processing facilities, in the chance that there is an immigration surge sparked by Trump’s presidential election victory. The moves are a change in direction from Trudeau’s public declaration in January 2017 that Canada was a “welcoming” country and that “diversity is our strength” just days after Trump was sworn into office the first time.

The Daily Caller notes the differences in response from the Canadian government verses Mexico’s:

Trudeau’s recent overtures largely differ from Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who has indicated she is not willing to bend the knee to Trump’s tariff threats. The Mexican leader in November said “there will be a response in kind” to any tariff levied on Mexican goods going into the U.S., and she appeared to deny the president-elect’s claims that she agreed to do more to beef up border security in a recent phone call.