Former US President Donald Trump has slammed Google over reports of censoring news and images of the Republican presidential candidate. “Google has been very bad. They have been very irresponsible and I think Google is close to being shut down because I don’t think Congress will approve of it. I really don’t think so. Google has to be careful,” Trump said in an interview to Fox News.
Earlier this week, Trump had alleged that it was nearly impossible to find photos or anything about the failed assassination attempt on July 13 on Google. However, Google denied these allegations.
“Over the past few days, some people on X have claimed that Search is ‘censoring’ or ‘restricting’ certain terms. That’s not happening, and we want to set the record straight. These posts are related 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 That’s because it has built-in protections related to political violence — and those systems were out of date.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, predictive queries should have appeared but did not, it said. “Once the issue was flagged, we began working on fixes, and they have already begun,” it said. “Secondly, people posted about how AutoComplete was not showing relevant predictions for ‘President Donald.’ This particular issue was a bug that spread across the political spectrum, also affecting queries for several past presidents, such as former President Obama, as you can see in the attached image.
Typing in ‘vice president’ also showed no forecasts. We’ve made an update that has improved all forecasts,” it said. It said some people also posted that searching for “Donald Trump” returned news reports related to “Kamala Harris”.
These labels are automatically generated based on related news topics, and change over time. “They also cover the political spectrum: for example, a search for ‘Kamala Harris’ showed top stories labeled with ‘Donald Trump’, because many articles cover them both together. You can see this happening across many 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 labeling systems are algorithmic, it said. “While our systems work very well most of the time, you may find predictions that may be unexpected or incomplete, and may contain bugs. Many platforms, including the ones we’re posting on now, will show strange or incomplete predictions at times. For our part, when problems arise, we’ll make improvements so you can find what you’re looking for quickly and easily. We appreciate feedback,” it explained.
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