Google is facing criticism for not including the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump in its autocomplete search bar prompts. The company’s autocomplete search bar controversy has led Donald Trump Jr. to accuse the company of “intentional election interference.”
On Sunday, Donald Trump Jr. shared a picture posted by another social media user on X, formerly Twitter, which showed Google’s autocomplete search bar prompt give multiple suggestions for the search “assassination attemp[t] on.” While the autocomplete search bar provided multiple suggestions of assassination attempts on political figures and other influential figures, Google did not list anything for the recent assassination attempt against the former president and current Republican presidential nominee.
In a statement accompanying the photo, Donald Trump Jr. slammed Google, saying, “Big Tech is trying to interfere in the election AGAIN to help Kamala Harris. We all know this is intentional election interference from Google. Truly despicable.”
According to The Post Millennial, multiple social media users shared screenshots of Google’s autocomplete for “assassination attempt on” and verified that the search engine did not list anything for the July 13 assassination attempt against Trump that resulted in the former president being shot in the ear, a retired fire chief being killed, and two other rally attendees being severely injured.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) released a statement on Sunday and shared multiple photos of Google’s autocomplete featuring “assassination attempt on truman” as the first search suggestion while eliminating any suggestion of “assassination attempt on Trump.”
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“Why is @Google suppressing the search about the Trump assassination attempt? These are all screenshots from this morning,” Marshall tweeted. “Has there been a dramatic increase in Truman biographers in the last two weeks? I’ll be making an official inquiry into @google this week – I look forward to their response.”
In response to widespread criticism on social media, Google Communications released a statement on X claiming that “no manual action” had been taken by the company to remove search suggestions of the assassination attempt against Trump.
“Our systems have protections against Autocomplete predictions associated with political violence, which were working as intended prior to this horrific event,” Google Communications stated. “We’re working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up to date.”
Google Communications also claimed that the autocomplete function is “just a tool to help people save time” and that users are still able to “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,” Google Communications added.
