The House Judiciary Committee and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Monday sent a letter to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, addressing concerns about Google’s alleged effort to interfere in the 2024 presidential election.
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This particular episode centers on allegations that the search engine company attempted to suppress information about the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. The lawmakers demanded a full explanation and assurance from Google to prevent further issues and requested a briefing to discuss the matter.
“We have obtained documents showing how social media companies engaged with the Executive Branch to censor true information about the Biden family’s corruption in advance of the 2020 presidential election,” the letter said, referencing the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and other information that could have damaged President Joe Biden’s chances of winning the election.
“Recent reporting has indicated that Google may now be interfering in the 2024 presidential election by censoring information about former President Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign for the presidency,” the lawmakers wrote.
The letter also notes that the company “admitted to the Committee and Select Subcommittee that after the July 13 assassination attempt on President Trump, ‘predictions for queries about the assassination attempt against former President Trump’ ‘should have appeared but didn’t.'”
The company also acknowledged that “Autocomplete was not showing President Trump’s name in response to searches for ‘President Donald’ and similar terms.”
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The company 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.”
Lawmakers demanded that the company be prepared to provide information relevant to the matter that will be discussed in a hearing.
On the list were questions related to how Google’s leadership learned about the Autocomplete failure and communications with Executive Branch officials about the error. The lawmakers asked for information about the impact of the error on people’s ability to get information about the assassination attempt.
Last week, Republican Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) announced that he was launching a Senate investigation into the suppression of information about the Trump shooting.
Marshall argued that “[o]mitting suggestions to the most obvious and recent victim of an assassination attempt shows a willful discrimination against President Trump and users of your search engine.”
The lawmaker also asserted that Google has displayed a clear bias in favor of the left at the expense of conservatives. “Google, the largest Search Engine Operator in the world, has become a propaganda wing of the Biden-Harris Administration and the radical left,” he wrote.
Marshall acknowledged Google’s denial in their “clarification,” but argued that it was not good enough.
However, this clarification is woefully inadequate, disingenuous, and misleading. If the autocomplete function is truly reflective of the recent searches completed on Google, the self-learning algorithms should have easily adjusted their autocomplete function during a massive increase in search queries over the last two weeks.
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Google has a troubling history of producing biased search results and has been accused on multiple occasions of interfering in U.S. elections to help Democrats.