(Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Is it a bug or deliberate? Donald Trump and his supporters are calling out Google and Facebook for allegedly censoring information about him and his presidential campaign. But the two tech companies say the content issues are accidental.
The censorship charges emerged when some users noticed that Google Search’s autocomplete function was failing to work on Donald Trump queries. This prompted X owner and Trump supporter Elon Musk to tweet: “Wow, Google has a search ban on President Donald Trump! Election interference?”
In response, Google says the autocomplete function didn't work for Trump queries for two reasons. The first one deals with a company safeguard that prevents autocomplete from appearing on searches involving political violence. This apparently kicked in following the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump.
“After the horrific events in Butler, PA, those predicted queries should have appeared but didn’t,” the company said in a tweet. “Once the issue was flagged, we started working on improvements, and they’re already rolling out.”
Google also blamed the autocomplete failure on a software bug, which “spanned the political spectrum” and affected searches for past US presidents including Barack Obama. “Typing ‘vice president k’ was also showing no predictions. We’ve made an update that has improved these predictions across the board,” the company 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," Google added.
Meanwhile, Facebook and its parent Meta have faced similar accusations about content blocking. Some users spotted Meta's AI chatbot refusing to answer questions about the Trump shooting. Others encountered Facebook stopping them from sharing a photo of Trump taken seconds after the assassination attempt with his fist in the air, flagging it as an “altered photo.”
In its own post, Meta also blamed the problems on a bug and content moderation. “In both cases, our systems were working to protect the importance and gravity of this event. And while neither was the result of bias, it was unfortunate and we understand why it could leave people with that impression,” the company said.
Meta accidentally blocked the Trump image because other users had taken the same photo and doctored it to make it seem like the Secret Service agents surrounding the former president were smiling. "Given the similarities between the doctored photo and the original image – which are only subtly (although importantly) different – our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo, too. Our teams worked to quickly correct this mistake,” the company said.
Meta also decided to stop its chatbot from supplying answers about the Trump assassination, saying, “rather than have Meta AI give incorrect information about the attempted assassination, we programmed it to simply not answer questions about it after it happened – and instead give a generic response about how it couldn’t provide any information.”
Despite the explanations, Trump himself remains convinced both Google and Facebook are deliberately trying to censor his campaign. In a post on Truth Social, the former president wrote: “Facebook has just admitted that it wrongly censored the Trump ‘attempted assassination photo,’ and got caught. Same thing for Google.”
He then called on supporters to “go after” the two companies. “Both are facing BIG BACKLASH OVER CENSORSHIP CLAIMS," added Trump, who's previously threatened to jail Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.