The House Oversight and Accountability Committee on Wednesday said it has opened an investigation into whether the Google search engine misled Americans about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
Committee Chairman James Comer revealed that Google told his staff last week that its search engine's autocomplete feature "omitted the Trump assassination attempt" from relevant searches because the Big Tech behemoth failed to update "a safety protocol" against violence to recognize Trump had, in fact, been shot July 13 during his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Whether unintentional or not, Comer said the problem added to a pattern of Big Tech improperly influencing elections that dates to efforts in 2020 to suppress accurate stories about politically damaging evidence from Hunter Biden's laptop.
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"Americans rely upon prominent Internet search engines such as Google to gather news and information critical to their understanding of national politics and events — and never more so than during a Presidential election season," Comer wrote in a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai that also cited a judge's recent decision that Google has run an illegal monopoly with its search engine.
"On behalf of the American people, the Committee is dedicated to fully understanding when and how information is being suppressed or modified, whether it be due to technical error, a policy intended to ensure safety, or a specific intent to mislead," Comer added.
Comer also sent a letter to Meta, the parent company of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg, raising similar concerns that the platform's AI chatbot had claimed there “was no real assassination attempt on Donald Trump."
The news of the congressional investigations came the same day Google faced new criticism over why it allowed the Kamala Harris campaign pay to manipulate news headlines to make them look more favorable to the Democrat candidate.
Meanwhile a Daily Mail poll found that 1 in 3 Republicans believe the FBI was behind the assassination attempt. And Sen. Roger Marshall called for executives at Google to be subpoenaed and appear before the Senate Homeland Committee over the tech giant’s search autocomplete feature omitting the inclusion of the Trump assassination, despite showing search suggestions for other famous assassination attempts throughout history.
Weeks after the assassination attempt that left President @realDonaldTrump within centimeters of his life, @Google is still defending its misinformation, declaring the assassination attempt a ‘hypothetical act of political violence.'
Google's top executives must come before the… pic.twitter.com/sXypavwOsl — Dr. Roger Marshall (@RogerMarshallMD) August 14, 2024
