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.
