Is Google Biased Against Donald Trump? // As the search engine giant is hit with monopoly claims, conservatives make their own attack

“Wow, Google has a search ban on President Donald Trump! Election interference?”

—Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a supporter of Trump, discussing the fact that for some time, Google’s autocomplete feature wouldn’t suggest Trump’s name when “President Donald” was typed.

Once upon a time, people either looked up facts in books or they simply didn’t know them. In the age before the internet, finding out some technical detail about the process of making coal or the year pencils were first produced required going to a library, searching around, sometimes for hours, and then finally finding the answer on a printed page in a book.
Now people just give a couple of taps on a device and all the information is there.
What that has done to human cognition and memory—especially among children given these devices—is an ongoing discussion among researchers and others. But whatever the truth is about that, it indicates how the companies that control the online sources of information can control how people find out about things and which things they find out about.
Last week, one of the world’s biggest sources of online information had its control challenged. A federal judge in the US ruled that the corporation Google has acted as a monopolist when it comes to Google Search, the search engine that made the company’s fame and then its fortune. Google, the judge said—in a decision that was similar to European decisions about the company—has quashed competition through several business practices, including making deals with several cellphone companies to make its search engine the default one their devices use.
But at the same time that this legal attack on Google was going on, conservative figures and politicians were attacking Google on a different front, claiming that the company was biased against conservatives and particularly against former US President Donald Trump.

President Donald Duck
The complaints that emerged centered around both Google Search and the autocomplete system that suggests possible searches as a person types, before they have even hit the Enter or Return key.
The three issues that people noticed were:
When typing “assassination attempt on,” the autocomplete function would suggest “assassination attempt on Truman,” even though there was a recent assassination attempt against Trump.
When typing “President Donald,” autocomplete would suggest “President Donald Duck” or “President Donald Regan” [sic], complete with a little picture of Ronald Reagan, but not “President Donald Trump.”
When searching “Donald Trump” on Google, news articles that were brought up would be about Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, while searching for “Kamala Harris” would just return news articles about Kamala Harris.
These points were made by a number of people online, and Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) sent an official letter with questions about the first of the cases to Google.
Google had said that that first issue, about “assassination attempt on,” was due to an automatic system that they have in place to avoid showing autocomplete responses about recent acts of violence. Senator Marshall’s letter asked them these questions:
“1. Why did Google’s search suggestion function create automated entries for ‘assassination attempt on President Truman’ but not ‘assassination attempt on President Trump’?
“2. Who oversees the algorithmic search function at Google?
“3. Can you discuss why you believe hiding violent search results is better for the public discourse than offering up-to-date information?
“4. What decisions were made at Google in the aftermath of the July 13th assassination attempt in regards to searches for the July 13th attack on President Trump?
“5. Please provide any written correspondence between employees at Google regarding updating the search function in response to the July 13th attack.
“6. If autocomplete systems have protections against ‘political violence,’ why does the system make suggestions after querying the words ‘political violence’?
“7. What are some other global instances in which Google took the same precautions as they have with the events of July 13th?
“8. What is Google’s timeline for making the attempted assassination of Donald Trump a search topic, similar to that of the attempted assassination of Harry Truman, on Google?”

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