On July 28, 2024, there were multiple users on X who attempted to do a search for “assassination attempt on donald trump” and found that Google’s auto-complete would not complete the sentence.
From what I can tell, the original observation came from Pablo Munoz Iturrieta on July 23, 2024
A few more people picked it up on July 24 and then again on July 27.
By July 28, it spread like wildfire across thousands of X users, including Damon Imani, Drew Hernandez, Kyle Becker, Rob Schneider, Ted Cruz, Roger Marshall, Grant Cardone, Frank Fleming, Cryptid Politics, ALX, Liberal Hivemind, Michelle Tandler, Truth Justice, Michael Oxford, Ryan Fournier, Mario Nawfal, and eventually, Elon Musk.
On July 28, Google Communications responded.
So what’s the story here?
Why did MAGA, conservatives, and Republicans go crazy? Because what they witnessed was only the latest of several events that some might call confirmation bias, but they would call confirmation.
Among other things, earlier in the week the head of the FBI stated on the Congressional Record that he wasn’t sure if Trump’s ear was hit by a bullet or by “shrapnel”, despite the medical report clearly confirming it was a bullet. Was Wray simply confused, or was he deliberately trying to downplay the assassination attempt?
Regardless of his motives, the mainstream media ran with the narrative that the attempt on Trump’s life wasn’t as bad as originally reported. There were ridiculous rumors that somehow Trump had faked his ear injury (despite the blood splattered across his face). Facebook “accidentally” marked the original AP photo as a fake.
All of these “coincidences” just happened to arise at the exact time that Joe Biden announced he wasn’t running for the 2024 election and Kamala Harris was.
Was Google piling on or was it an innocent mistake on their part. As with all things having to do with Google’s algorithm, things are very grey.
Google’s documentation vaguely references that their algorithm is designed to prevent search predictions that are “dangerous” or promote “violence and gore”.
Here’s the problem. The moment that the assassination attempt happened, the search query was no longer a threat, it was a historical event. Google auto-complete does mention other living political figures such as King Charles and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia who happen to have had attempts made on their lives in the past. Now that the assassination attempt again Trump was part of history, why wouldn’t it have been in auto-complete?
There are really two possible explanations.
First, Google auto-complete suggestions may just be delayed. After all, only three weeks had passed since the assassination attempt.
This explanation quickly falls apart when you try a search on a current event. For example, as of the time I’m writing this, Kamala Harris just held a rally in Atlanta about 4 hours ago.
Sure enough, here’s what I see in my Google auto-suggest.
There’s a second, more troubling possibility. Read clearly in Google’s documentation about more Autocomplete feature-specific policies.
Notice how one of the types of auto-complete they suppress are “Elections-related predictions”. They state “We don’t allow predictions that can be interpreted as a position for or against any political figure or party”.
Is it possible that an overzealous Google employee saw that this search phrase was trending and felt that Trump was getting just a bit too much positive press attention over this incident?
The problem is, we’ll never know. As long as Google’s processes are opaque, it can claim anything and we have no choice but to believe it. But if you think back to the struggle sessions that Google had in 2016 and realize that there have been no changes at Google like there have been at X, you can’t help but wonder.
As of my writing this on July 31, 2024, it looks like Google has corrected this.
Here’s the problem. Would Google have done anything if people on X had not called this out? What other instances are there similar to this that no one has discovered yet?
Here’s the bigger problem. In Google’s response, they said “Following this terrible act, people turned to Google to find high-quality information”.
I did a search on Google News for “assassination attempt on trump” and sneaking into the results was an article by a local Washington DC radio station that had nothing to do with the assassination attempt, but on how Kamala Harris was going to “prosecute the case against Trump”.
As I wrote in my post, I’ve been around Google a long time, so I know mistakes happen. But the question to ask is: why do the mistakes always benefit one side and not the other?
If there’s one takeaway that we “deplorables” have from this incident it’s that we need to make our voices heard. Google would never have corrected this had X users not amplified it.
