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.
