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Republicans are questioning why Google’s auto-populated search terms don’t suggest the shooting of former President Donald Trump when users search for “attempted assassination.” When someone searches “assassination attempt” on Google, despite Trump being the most recent victim of such violence, his name isn’t suggested as one of the search results.
Other assassination attempts of presidents and politicians, such as President Harry S. Truman’s in 1950, are common search suggestions. Some Republicans believe Google is censoring the event.
“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,” Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., posted on X.
“Why is Google suppressing the search about the Trump assassination attempt? These are all screenshots from this morning. Has there been a dramatic increase in Truman biographers in the last two weeks?” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) posted on X. He said he would be making an “official inquiry” into the alleged censorship this week.
Google stated that its autocomplete feature is designed as a tool to help people save time, and users can still search for anything they want. 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 said the company has protections against autocomplete predictions associated with political violence, which were “working as intended prior to this horrific event occurring” in Butler County, Pennsylvania.
It denied any reports of “manual action” on the autocomplete predictions surrounding the assassination attempt of Trump.
“We’re working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up to date,” the spokesperson said.
