Google has refuted allegations from Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr. concerning a purported “search ban” on former President Donald Trump. The search engine giant has been accused of election interference through its autocomplete results.
The controversy erupted when users on X (formerly Twitter) shared screenshots showing that typing “assassination attempt on” into Google failed to generate autocomplete results related to the recent attempt on Donald Trump’s life. Instead, the suggestions were for figures like Ronald Reagan and Bob Marley. Even when “assassination attempt on Trump” was typed in Chrome’s incognito mode, no autocomplete suggestions appeared, though pressing “enter” did produce news articles about the incident.
Elon Musk added fuel to the fire by posting a screenshot of his search for “President Donald,” which suggested “President Donald Duck” instead of “President Donald Trump.” Musk commented, “Wow, Google has a search ban on President Donald Trump,” and noted, “Probably just a coincidence that Alphabet (Google) employees were the top donors to Biden.” Several GOP figures accused Google of “gaslighting” and trying to influence the 2024 presidential election. Donald Trump Jr. wrote on X, “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.”
In response to these accusations, Google told Fortune that it did not take “manual action” on the autocomplete predictions and is “working on improvements” to the feature. Addressing the queries about the assassination attempt, a Google spokesperson explained that their systems have “protections against autocomplete predictions associated with political violence,” which were functioning as intended before the incident. The company is now updating its systems to be more current.
Regarding Musk’s “Donald Duck” search, the spokesperson admitted that “autocomplete is currently not working as intended” for searches involving past presidents and the current vice president. “We’re looking into these anomalies and working on improvements, which we hope to roll out soon,” the spokesperson said. “Our autocomplete systems are dynamic, so predictions will change based on common and trending queries.”
