Worst Censorship of July: Election Censorship Heats Up.
In the run up to what has already been a tumultuous election season, Big Tech is still censoring free speech online, interfering in the 2024 election.
July was a month of major historic news, particularly surrounding the 2024 election. But Big Tech platforms were up to their usual censorship tricks. Meta censored an iconic image of Donald Trump pumping his fist after being shot, and Google Search suppressed information about the attempted assassination. X (formerly Twitter) censored journalists and Republican lawmakers, YouTube fact checked an independent political candidate and Facebook applied a fact-check label to a photo of a joke shirt about Joe Biden.
Below are the worst cases of Big Tech censorship for the month of July from MRC’s exclusive CensorTrack database.
Google Search suppresses content related to the attempted assassination of Trump. The Daily Mail reported on July 28 that users who typed the prompt “assassination attempt on” were given search suggestions that did not include former President Trump, even though the attempt on his life was the most recent. Google’s search suggestions for completing the query included “truman,” “reagan,” “lenin,” “gerald ford,” and “bob marley.” Google Trends showed that the number of searches for “assassination attempt on trump” was considerably higher than for “assassination attempt on truman” and “assassination attempt on reagan.” Therefore, by Google’s own standards for search suggestions, Trump ought to have been included. An MRC researcher ran the search “trump assassination attempt” as well, but Google at that time provided no search suggestions at all. The Daily Mail reported that doing similar search prompts for John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan did cause autocomplete suggestions to appear.
In response to a video explaining the search suppression posted on X/Twitter, Google Communications claimed, “There was no manual action taken. Our systems have protections against Autocomplete predictions associated with political violence, which were working as intended prior to this horrific event. We’re working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up to date. Of course, Autocomplete is just a tool to help people save time, and they can still search for anything they want to. Following this terrible act, people turned to Google to find high-quality information – we connected them with helpful results, and will continue to do so.”
FOLLOWUP: Exc: Facebook Censors Blog About Facebook Censorship.
h/t Sarah Hoyt
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