Has Google Banned Donald Trump? Tech Giant Responds to Musk's Claims

New Delhi: Google has refuted claims made by Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr. regarding a purported “search ban” on Trump. The search engine has denied allegations that it is manipulating US elections 2024 through its autocomplete results.

Reacting sharply to Musk’s mention of a “Donald Duck” search, Google’s spokesperson said that their autocomplete feature is not functioning as expected for searches related to past presidents and the current vice president.

“We’re investigating these issues and working on improvements, which we plan to implement soon.” They added that the autocomplete system is dynamic and predictions may vary based on popular and trending queries", the spokesperson added.

For the unversed, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, had targeted Google, led by Sundar Pichai, saying that if the search giant is found to be meddling in the US Presidential election, they could face "a lot of trouble".  

Taking to X, Musk shared a screenshot showing that a Google search for “President Donald” led to results like “President Donald Duck” and “President Donald Regan.” Following this, he questioned whether the search giant had imposed a ban on the former US president and Republican presidential nominee.

“Wow, Google has a search ban on President Donald Trump! Election interference?” asked the X owner. Moreover, he added, Google is “getting themselves into a lot of trouble if they interfere with the election”.

Regarding queries about the assassination attempt, Google’s spokesperson clarified that their systems have built-in “protections against autocomplete predictions related to political violence,” which were working as designed before the incident.

They are now focused on updating their systems to ensure they reflect current events more accurately.

Several users on X shared screenshots showing that typing “assassination attempt on” into Google did not yield autocomplete results for the recent attempt on former President Trump. Instead, the suggestions were related to figures such as Ronald Reagan and Bob Marley.

Even when entering “assassination attempt on Trump” in Chrome’s incognito mode, no autocomplete suggestions appeared, though pressing "enter" did lead to news articles about the incident, netizens had claimed.