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Big Tech Tries to Memory-hole Trump Assassination Attempt

Posted on Wednesday, August 14, 2024
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by Andrew Shirley
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37 Comments
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Just over one month since the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, Big Tech companies are already trying to erase it from history. But conservatives, in large part thanks to Elon Musk’s control of X, have exposed the scheme.

In one of the most shocking admissions from a Big Tech company in recent memory, Google executives last week acknowledged that the search engine’s autocomplete tool had been omitting results related to the Trump assassination attempt. When users typed in “the assassination attempt on,” Google suggested the name of every president who was killed or had an attempt made on his life – except Trump.

The discrepancy sparked an investigation from House Republicans, who demanded answers from Google’s parent company Alphabet. According to The Daily Wire, Alphabet representatives claimed a “bug” was responsible for the omission and that it was unintentional. Since then, Trump’s name has appeared in the search results.

But as many conservatives and Republican lawmakers have pointed out, the American people have little reason to believe Alphabet’s excuse that a simple coding error hid information about one of the most important U.S. political events in a generation. Google has a notorious history of using its algorithm to suppress stories that could reflect positively on Republicans, particularly Donald Trump while promoting negative coverage.

Republican Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas has pledged to press forward with his own investigation of Google, recently requesting answers from CEO Sundar Pichai. “Google claimed that ‘no manual action’ was taken to effectuate these results,” Marshall said in a statement. “However, this clarification is woefully inadequate, disingenuous, and misleading. If the autocomplete function is truly reflective of the recent searches completed on Google, the self-learning algorithms should have easily adjusted their autocomplete function during a massive increase in search queries over the last two weeks.”

It’s not just Google that has appeared to try to memory-hole the Trump assassination attempt. Facebook’s Meta AI program, which provides AI-generated answers to user queries, called the event “fictional” when people prompted the chatbot to answer basic questions about it. Additionally, when users on Facebook or Instagram posted the iconic image of Trump raising his fist following the shooting, the image was flagged as “false information” and “misinformation.”

The error was so egregious that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally called Trump to apologize for the error.

In both cases, X (formerly Twitter) played an instrumental role in exposing the censorship of information about the Trump assassination attempt. High-profile conservatives, including Donald Trump Jr., posted screenshots of their Google searches to the platform, prompting others to do the same.

That trend in turn sparked a litany of other searches that showed more apparent bias by Google. On August 2nd, SpaceX founder and X owner Elon Musk posted on the platform, “I just did a search for ‘Trump rally’ on Google, and Kamala was the top result!” alongside a screenshot of his search results. That post has garnered some 54 million views.

Other X users confirmed that information about Trump was shifted to the bottom of the search results when they specifically asked Google for information about Trump rallies, while only stories about Harris remained at the top. Meanwhile, any search for “Harris rally” or “Kamala rally” immediately led to glowing coverage regarding the vice president’s campaign events. A Google spokesman declined to comment on that inconsistency.

Before Musk’s purchase of Twitter, it is not unreasonable to believe that posts exposing Google and Meta’s deception would’ve been similarly censored or suppressed. During the 2020 election cycle, Twitter infamously joined Facebook and Google in censoring the Hunter Biden Laptop story as “Russian disinformation,” even going so far as to ban the New York Post’s account.

It is in large part thanks to Musk’s commitment to restoring free speech on the platform that conservatives were able to pressure Google and Meta this time around to acknowledge the attempted stifling of information about the Trump assassination attempt and adjust their algorithms accordingly.

Nonetheless, Americans can be confident that this is not the last time Big Tech will use its control over the flow of information to influence the outcome of the election this November. From the “bloodbath” hoax to the attempted cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and now the ongoing effort to reinvent Kamala Harris from a hapless vice president into an iconic and visionary leader, Google and Big Tech have worked overtime to promote every Democrat narrative while undermining Trump.

However, the effort to suppress information about an event as important and newsworthy as an assassination attempt on a former president and major party nominee may serve as a Rubicon of sorts. Once people begin questioning why Google is hiding that information, they may question what else the world’s foremost search engine isn’t telling them on any number of issues, from the border to the economy to Kamala Harris’s record of left-wing extremism.

That is a rabbit hole Democrats desperately need to keep the public from going down.

Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.

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Max
Max
3 months ago

Highly doubt that any MSM outlets will clean up their acts since they are so far down in the hole with the Left. Again, the name of the game is to destroy the USA and its Constitution as this stands in the way of the Left’s global conquest.

FedUp
FedUp
3 months ago

Google and other big tech will probably get a ceremonial slap on their wrist by this administration and agree to never do it again. And after the smoke clears, they’ll be right back to censoring content and search results, just as their Democrat party masters demand.

uncleferd
uncleferd
3 months ago

This article is accurate, and I had often pondered the reasons why I had difficulty finding articles that were popular and available only a dozen years ago.
Anyone who labors to conceal truths that have long been a matter of public record is not fit to be a member of our society (that’s you, Democrats).

Ralph
Ralph
3 months ago

The American Communist Party [aka the Democratic Party] won’t be satisfied until everyone is living in a gulag, using only yellow school buses for personal transportation, and drawing Venn diagrams describing the wonderful attributes of their leaders who have preserved democracy from the existential threats of the nasty capitalists.

PaulE
PaulE
3 months ago

It is unrealistic to expect MSM or social media to change their behavior at this point. All of MSM and all the largest social media platforms are owned and populated by diehard Democrat supporters. This has been the case for much of the last 55-60 years for MSM and 25 to 30 years for social media outlets.

If the author is just realizing the MSM and most social media is biased towards the left, then shame on him for being for woefully uninformed about the state of media in this country. Perhaps he should have paid more attention to the types of articles and videos promoted or suppressed by the left across the various forms of media they control over the years.

M Latham
M Latham
3 months ago

They are still flagging all conservative emails and text as spam. It’s very irritating.

Clark Kent
Clark Kent
3 months ago

“Who controls the Present controls the Past.
Who controls the Past controls the Future.” — Orwell

Rob citizenship
Rob citizenship
3 months ago

The right word to use to describe everyone who stood up to these Big Tech companies. over this Donald Trump assassination attempt ” memory- hole ” matter is Praise ! This is something that says. Victory – for Truth and the defense of Liberty . Great that you wrote this article Mr. Shirley . Anyone who thinks that the technology can be used for anything other than presenting the facts — just got put in their place , just got a loud and clear message sent to them .And that is very good ! This article should be appreciated. by every American citizen who understands the value of truth Well done Andrew . In the spirit of respect for Principles , in the spirit of defending the qualities that make for good character and how Courage and Integrity contribute to the National Character .

Stephen Russell
Stephen Russell
3 months ago

Big Tech behind assisination plots??

larry
larry
3 months ago

I just tested the Google auto complete “the attempted assassination of ___ and as of now, it is still not suggesting “Trump”.

ARNOLD DEANDA
ARNOLD DEANDA
3 months ago

One thing came across very clear. There are federal agencies funded by the people that are not for the service of the funders.

Melinda
Melinda
3 months ago

Yes, what else aren’t they telling us? Like the MSM, whose reporting is highly selective.

Melody Hennessee
Melody Hennessee
3 months ago

As of 8/14 at 2 p.m. … the DuckDuckGo search engine shows a list without Trump.
And you wonder why we do not trust mainstream media. Silly me, I though DuckDuckGo was better.

Frank Pecarich
Frank Pecarich
3 months ago

This idea that the media is made up of unselfconsciously liberal elites who don’t even recognize the biases they have against conservative policies and conservatives in general goes back decades, to when newsrooms were more or less homogenous in nearly every way. Each and every instance where the media engages in bias helps to chip away at the trust they once held; all conservatives ever did was point out the truth. Now, we all have to live with the consequences to the bias the media rarely acknowledges, and the victim is the truth.

James Marker
James Marker
3 months ago

Which is it AMAC?
I understand about the hobgoblin, but there is a point at which readers get the sense everything is being thrown against the wall in the hope that something sticks
https://amac.us/newsline/elections/trump-elon-and-the-great-silicon-valley-maga-awakening/

Randall L. Beatty
Randall L. Beatty
3 months ago

Most of the big tech companies along with the media here will try to erase anything in this country so nothing is left for generations to see just how corrupt things got here communist countries do the same.

conservativegrl
conservativegrl
3 months ago

One word for google: BULLPUCKY!!! Some members of Congress the ones with the Jackass as their emblem, have been calling for the ARREST OF ELON MUSK because of the interview!!!!!! We need to PAY ATTENTION to the people around us who would so blatantly call for the ARREST of anybody doing an interview that somebody does not agree with! The calling for the OVERTURN OF OUR GOVERNMENT IS AGAINST THE LAW, YES. BUT THAT IS NOT WAY ELON & THE DONALD were discussing!! DID YOU LISTEN?!?! We still have the Constitution of the United States, Amend. #2 in force, don’t we?!?!!? Democrats are getting very scary lately!!

Jim Haas
Jim Haas
3 months ago

I was aware of the true information long ago, but I rarely use “X”..

Robert Zuccaro
Robert Zuccaro
3 months ago

Looking to the internet for facts is virtually pointless. I learned that a long time ago when I looked up “climate change” and all I got was an “inconvenient truth” and fabricated “hockey sticks” about the earth ending in 1999… and 2001… 2002… 2010… next week…

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