Staff Reports
The tangled web between former President Donald Trump and Silicon Valley’s tech giants has reached a new level of absurdity that even the most jaded political observers couldn’t have anticipated. In a glaring display of bias, Google has seemingly chosen to pretend the attempted assassination of Trump never happened, all while the mainstream media remains strangely quiet. It appears that when it comes to the tech behemoth’s relationship with Trump, there are lines they’re just unwilling to cross, like, you know, acknowledging criminal attempts against a former president.
Several weeks after a shooting incident during a Pennsylvania rally, users began to notice something peculiar: when they started typing “the assassination attempt of” in Google’s search bar, crickets ensued. Fewer suggestions arrived than a forgotten birthday card. The former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., wasted no time in pointing out that this “‘disappearing act’ was nothing short of election interference,” accusing the tech overlords of doing what they do best: manipulating information to shape narratives.
It gets so much worse.
Google is not only censoring news about the Trump assassinat*on attempt, it is redirecting Trump campaign searchers to Kamala Harris puff pieces.
Big Tech is now the biggest threat to democracypic.twitter.com/VjhWNs5SdP
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) July 29, 2024
When the New York Post conducted its little experiment with Google’s Autocomplete feature, the results were less than enlightening for freedom-loving Americans. Typing in the names of former presidents like Lincoln and Kennedy yielded all sorts of historical context about their infamous assassination attempts. In contrast, Trump’s name—when paired with the word “assassination”—was met with the digital equivalent of being ignored at a party. There are no options, no context, just silence. It seems Google has decided that when it comes to signaling their disdain for Trump, the best course of action is to pretend an assassination attempt simply didn’t happen.
This blatant disregard didn’t go unnoticed within the hallowed halls of Congress. Texas Congressman Chip Roy and others quickly jumped on the bandwagon, sharing their own searches and screenshots to expose Google’s questionable practices. The outrage is palpable, with calls for investigations piling on like unwanted holiday gifts. The idea that a tech company might influence electoral outcomes is enough to make any patriot’s blood boil. Is Google trying to present a skewed narrative in favor of Kamala Harris while suppressing information about Trump? According to numerous conservatives, the evidence suggests they’ve got their finger on the scale, tipping it in favor of liberalism.
In a bizarre twist of irony, a Google representative insisted that their Autocomplete settings differentiate political violence from everyday queries—because who wouldn’t want to suppress information about a life-threatening attack on the former leader of the free world? Something about their claims feels eerily similar to gaslighting, with their assertion that no manual adjustments were made hardly holding water in the mind of anyone concerned with free speech and the dissemination of information. As the senator put it, an inquiry is now their official response because clearly, the average American deserves an explanation for tech giants deciding which historical events fit their ideological narrative.
At the end of the day, if you ever wondered what it would look like when Silicon Valley takes a side, look no further than the erasure of a serious attack on Trump from your search results. One small step for Google, potentially one giant leap for losing more Americans’ trust in technology. The fight for transparency in an overly digital world just took a turn, and tech leaders might want to brace themselves for their own shootout at the OK Corral.
