An attorney for Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., acknowledged that the autocomplete tool for its search function failed to include predictions related to the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. This admission follows controversy online regarding apparent search issues.
Alphabet Inc.’s counsel informed the House Judiciary Committee that bugs in Google’s autocomplete tool prevented it from predicting searches about the assassination attempt on Trump. The built-in protections designed to manage searches related to political violence were “out of date,” the attorney explained, and this outdated system prevented the search autocomplete feature from generating results for the assassination attempt three weeks ago.
The autocomplete feature also experienced issues when users searched for “President Donald” and related terms. The attorney mentioned that these bugs were fixed after they were brought to Google’s attention, reports National Review.
In addition, Google claimed that an algorithmic error was responsible for displaying news stories about Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s 2024 rival, when users searched for Trump’s name.
Ahead of a private briefing with Judiciary Committee staff, committee chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) sent a letter to Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai, listing questions about the search issues.
“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,” the letter reads.
“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.”
Jordan asked Pichai for more specific details about the bugs that caused “President Donald” searches to not show an autocomplete for Trump’s name and about the errors that prioritized stories about Harris in searches for Trump.
Trump and many conservatives strongly criticized the search issues, leading Google to issue a detailed statement addressing accusations of political censorship.
“After the horrific events in Butler, PA, those predicted queries should have appeared but didn’t. Once the issue was flagged, we started working on improvements, and they’re already rolling out. You can see many relevant predictions now,” Google said on X last week.
The issue with the “President Donald” search autocomplete affected other presidents such as former president Obama, Google stated. The malfunction appears to have been resolved.
Google also explained that the news-recommendation feature generating Harris stories for users searching for Trump is not unique, given her status as the Democratic party’s presumptive presidential nominee after President Joe Biden stepped aside from the presidential contest.
“Overall, these types of prediction and labeling systems are algorithmic. While our systems work very well most of the time, you can find predictions that may be unexpected or imperfect, and bugs will occur,” Google concluded. National Review has reached out for further comment.
Google’s challenges extend beyond this incident, as it recently faced a significant defeat in an antitrust case brought by the Justice Department and states’ attorneys general.
Google is not alone in facing scrutiny over its handling of the Trump assassination attempt. Meta also received backlash for suppressing images of Trump fist-pumping after being injured during the attempt. Trump told Fox News last week that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the apparent censorship and assured him that Meta is correcting the error.
“He actually apologized. He said they made a mistake . . . and they’re correcting the mistake,” Trump said, while noting that Google did not contact him about the search issues.
A Meta spokeswoman clarified that Facebook’s fact-checking systems were erroneously applied to images of Trump after doctored photos resembling the real images circulated.
