Google has denied accusations from Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr. over a “search ban” against Trump, claiming the search engine is meddling in the election through its autocomplete results.
The controversy began when several users on X (formerly Twitter) posted screenshots showing that when they typed “assassination attempt” into Google, they got no autocomplete results related to the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. Instead, they got suggestions related to people like Ronald Reagan and Bob Marley.
When I typed “attempted assassination of President Trump” into Chrome’s incognito mode, no autocomplete suggestions appeared, but when I pressed “Enter,” a news article about the incident appeared.
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Musk reveals Google ‘search ban’ on Trump
Tesla CEO Musk also weighed in on the controversy, posting a screenshot of a search for “President Donald,” which showed “President Donald Duck” as a result, rather than “President Donald Trump.” Musk commented, “Wow, Google is banning searches for President Donald Trump,” adding, “It’s probably just a coincidence that Alphabet employees were Biden’s biggest donors.”
Several Republican figures have accused Google of “gaslighting” people and trying to influence the 2024 presidential election. Donald Trump Jr. wrote on X, “Big Tech is trying to interfere in our election again to help Kamala Harris. We all know this was deliberate election interference by Google. It’s despicable.”
Google denied to Fortune that it had taken any “manual action” against autocomplete predictions and said it was “working to improve” the feature.
In response to a question about the assassination attempt, a Google spokesperson said the company has “protections against autocomplete predictions related to political violence” in its systems and that they were working as intended before the incident. The company is currently updating its systems to be more up-to-date.
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Regarding Musk’s “Donald Duck” search, a spokesperson acknowledged that “autocomplete is not currently working as intended” for searches that include past presidents or the current vice president.
“We are investigating these anomalies and working on remediation which we hope to deploy soon,” the spokesperson said.
“Our autocomplete system is dynamic, so predictions change based on common and trending queries.”
