Google claims that its censorship of Donald Trump was the result of an error in its autocomplete function
The technology giant said they were "working on improvements" that would allow the name of the former president and Republican candidate for the presidential elections next November to appear again in its search engine.
Censorship of content related to Donald Trump
Google responded this Monday to the accusations made by personalities such as Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr., Ted Cruz and Roger Marshall in which they claimed that the technology giant was carrying out electoral interference by omitting the name of former President Donald Trump from the results of its search engine.
This sparked a whole controversy around Big Tech, especially when it was discovered that the company did not have, in its autocomplete function, the Republican candidate's name when the phrase "assassination attempt on" was prefixed to it. Instead, it offered as first options similar events experienced by personalities such as Ronald Reagan, Bob Marley, Lenin, Gerald Ford or Truman, among others.
In light of this, the tech giant told Fortune that it was all a mistake and that, in fact, they were "working on improvements" in the autocomplete function which, lately, was giving them glitches by not taking "manual actions" but being a "dynamic" system and which, in fact, was especially noticeable when referring to presidents and vice presidents:
"The auto-complete is currently not working as intended. We’re looking into these anomalies and working on improvements, which we hope to roll out soon. Our auto-complete systems are dynamic, so predictions will change based on common and trending queries."
In addition, explained a company spokesperson referring to the omission of the Trump assassination attempt in Butler, as a general rule, the autocomplete function was not going to promote political violence and, for that reason, it also omitted the attack suffered by the former president in Pennsylvania:
"Google’s systems protections against Auto-complete predictions associated with political violence, which were working as intended prior to this horrific event occurring."
However, the spokesman acknowledged, in this case it should show the name of the former president after the phrase "assassination attempt on" so, he said, the company was working to update its filter as soon as possible and thus put an end to the problem.
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