Amid reports of Google being biased against former US President Donald Trump, the latter lashed out at the tech giant on Saturday for censoring details about an assassination attempt on his life during a Pennsylvania campaign rally last month.
Speaking to an international media outlet, the Republican nominee for the 2024 Presidential Election criticized the global tech company, accusing it of irresponsibility.
"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 said.
'Google refuted allegations'
Significantly, Trump's statement comes after Google earlier refuted allegations that it is meddling in the election process via auto-complete results.
“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 wasn’t providing predictions for queries about the assassination attempt against former President Trump due to built-in protections related to political violence — and those systems were out of date,” Google said in a social media post while also adding that the autocomplete wasn’t providing predictions for queries about the assassination attempt against former President Trump was due to built-in protections related to political violence — and those systems were out of date.
“Once the issue was flagged, we started working on improvements, and they’re already rolling out,” it added.
Meanwhile, the Google also clarified why autocomplete was not showing relevant predictions for 'President Trump'. "This particular issue was a bug that spanned the political spectrum, also affecting queries for several past presidents, such as former President Obama. Typing ‘vice president k’ was also showing no predictions. We’ve made an update that has improved these predictions across the board,” it said.
Additionally, Google also addressed claims that searches for “Donald Trump” returned news stories related to “Kamala Harris.” The company explained, “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 labeled with ‘Donald Trump’ because many articles cover the two of them together. This happens 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 further elaborated, “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.”
(With inputs from PTI)
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