Conservatives in the United States have accused Google of suppressing information about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July in order to influence the presidential election. Despite claims that Google’s autocomplete feature was not prompting searches related to the attack, the search results still provided information about the incident. High-profile figures such as Senator Ted Cruz and Elon Musk have also criticized Google for allegedly trying to erase the attempted assassination of Trump.
Google responded by stating that its autocomplete function includes protections against predictions associated with political violence and that no manual action was taken against the search queries. The tech company also noted that autocomplete was not working as intended for some searches about past presidents and the current vice president, and they are working on improvements to address these anomalies.
This controversy adds to ongoing accusations of tech companies discriminating against conservative viewpoints, with previous incidents involving Google burying content from Infowars and trying to demonetize conservative news outlets. Despite the backlash and calls for action, Google has not directly responded to the accusations made by conservatives and has emphasized that autocomplete is a tool to help users save time in their searches.
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