Trump hits out at Google over claims that it was censoring news related to him

PTI, Aug 3, 2024, 9:09 AM IST

Washington: Former US president Donald Trump has lashed out at Google over reports that was censoring news and photos of the Republican presidential candidate.

“Google has been very bad. They’ve been very irresponsible and I have a feeling that Google is going to be close to shut down because I don’t think Congress is going to take it. I really don’t think so. Google has to be careful,” Trump told Fox News in an interview.

Early this week, Trump alleged that it was virtually impossible to find pictures or anything about the failed assassination bid on him on July 13 on Google. Google, however, denied those allegations.

“Over the past few days, some people on X have posted claims that search is ‘censoring’ or ‘banning’ particular terms. That’s not happening, and we want to set the record straight. The posts relate to our Autocomplete feature, which predicts queries to save you time. Autocomplete,” it said in a social media post.

Google said autocomplete wasn’t providing predictions for queries about the assassination attempt against former President Trump. That’s because it has built-in protections related to political violence — and those systems were out of date. After the horrific events in Butler, Pennsylvania, those predicted queries should have appeared but didn’t, it said.

“Once the issue was flagged, we started working on improvements, and they’re already rolling out,” it said.

“Secondly, people posted about how Autocomplete wasn’t showing relevant predictions for ‘President Donald’. This particular issue was a bug that spanned the political spectrum, also affecting queries for several past presidents, such as former President Obama, as you can see in the attached image. Typing ‘vice president k’ was also showing no predictions. We’ve made an update that has improved these predictions across the board,” it said.

Some people, it said, also posted that searches for “Donald Trump” returned news stories related to “Kamala Harris.” These labels are automatically generated based on related news topics, and they change over time.

“They span the political spectrum as well: For example, a search for ‘Kamala Harris’ showed Top Stories labelled with ‘Donald Trump’, because many articles cover the two of them together. You can see this happening across a range of topics, like the Olympics, other public figures, companies, and more. Our goal is to help people get relevant results for their query,” Google said.

Overall, these types of prediction and labelling systems are algorithmic, it said.

“While our systems work very well most of the time, you can find predictions that may be unexpected or imperfect, and bugs will occur. Many platforms, including the one we’re posting on now, will show strange or incomplete predictions at various times. For our part, when issues come up, we will make improvements so you can find what you’re looking for, quickly and easily. We appreciate the feedback,” it explained.