Google Says ‘Bug’ Kept Donald Trump Out of Auto-Generated Search Suggestions, Pushed Users to Stories About Kamala Harris

Google told House Republicans that various bugs prevented information about Donald Trump from auto-completing when users tried to search for information about the former president or the assassination attempt against him. The search engine also claimed those bugs caused searches for Trump to generate articles about Vice President Kamala Harris.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote Monday that the committee would meet with Google staff this week over concerns that “Google may now be interfering in the 2024 presidential election by censoring information about former President Donald Trump.”

“Alphabet also admitted to the Committee and Select Subcommittee that Autocomplete was not showing President Trump’s name in response to searches for ‘President Donald’ and similar terms. Alphabet claims ‘that this particular issue was caused by a bug’ and has been fixed by a recent update,” Jordan wrote, in reference to Google’s parent company.

Jordan called it a “vague excuse” and told Google to prepared to answer more specific questions, including “How can the American people be confident that a similar issue, whether intentional or not, will not occur again?”

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The commitee’s letter to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google had finally corrected the issue, where searching for information about attempted assassinations would return results about attempts on other presidents, but not Trump’s. 

The company faulted “built-in protections around political violence” that were “out of date.” Regardless of the cause, search results were impacted from the July 13th shooting through at least July 29. Google told The Daily Wire at the time that, while the bug suppressed auto-complete, users could still access information about the assassination attempt by searching manually.

But even manual searches for Trump frequently “returned news labels and stories about Vice President Harris,” Jordan wrote.

“Alphabet claimed that this error was the result of its algorithm that automatically generates and displays labels about news topics related to a Google Search inquiry,” Jordan wrote, noting that the company claimed search results “may be unexpected or imperfect, and bugs will occur.”

Jordan suggested that the errors tended to favor one political party, asking “Does the company seek to elevate liberal news outlets more prominently over conservative outlets in order to favor Democratic candidates? If not, what steps does the company take to audit how the algorithm is functioning?”

Jordan said Google has an ongoing obligation to produce to Congress documents pursuant to a February 2023 subpoena, even if the documents were created after the subpoena was received.

The Judiciary Committee has investigated political bias among big tech companies and digital advertisers, saying that an advertising association known as the Global Alliance for Responsible Media might have violated anti-trust laws by discouraging companies from advertising with conservative media sources and purporting to speak with one voice on behalf of advertisers in order to leverage changes in tech platforms that helped Democrats.

Related: House Committee Expands Probe Into Anti-Conservative Advertising Collusion