Why are conservatives claiming Google is covering up the shooting of Trump? |

Google has come under fire from conservatives in the United States amid claims that the tech giant is suppressing information about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in order to influence the presidential election.

Trump, who is running for a second term in the White House on the Republican Party ticket, narrowly escaped being killed when a lone gunman opened fire at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on July 13.

The attack, which killed one rally attendee, injured two others, and bloodied the former president’s ear, has spawned a number of unsubstantiated claims and conspiracy theories.

The latest revolves around Google Search’s autocomplete feature, which is designed to help users save time by predicting their search query based on the opening letters or words that are inputted.

Why is Google’s autocomplete function under fire?

Over the weekend, some internet users noticed that writing about assassination attempts in the Google search bar did not automatically prompt search queries about the shooting of Trump.

Users were instead prompted to search for information about attempted assassinations of other famous figures, including former US Presidents Ronald Reagan and Harry Truman and Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico.

Al Jazeera recreated similar results on Tuesday.

The apparent anomaly with autocomplete does not affect the search results available to users seeking out information about the attack.

Entering keywords related to Trump’s attempted assassination into Google still produces news articles, YouTube links, and a Wikipedia page, among other results, as would be expected.

What are conservatives saying about the issue?

Conservatives and Republicans have seized on autocomplete’s treatment of the attack as evidence of Google trying to suppress information that could affect the outcome of the US presidential election in November.

Screenshots and videos of autocomplete’s results were shared by a number of high-profile X accounts on Sunday, including Libs of TikTok, which is known for its mocking criticism of liberals and Democrats, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

“Google needs to be hauled in front of Congress to answer for this. Orwellian,” Libs of TikTok said to its 3.3 million followers in a post accompanied by a video of the autocomplete results.

“They are gas-lighting the American people & trying to erase the attempted assassination of Trump,” Cruz said in a post accusing Google of engaging in “active election interference”.

This…is…insane.

⁦@Google⁩ is engaged in active election interference.

They are gas-lighting the American people & trying to erase the attempted assassination of Trump. pic.twitter.com/g2h8DzkDON

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) July 28, 2024

Kansas Senator Roger Marshall also accused Google of suppressing information and said he would be making an “official inquiry” with the tech company.

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X and Tesla, amplified the narrative with a number of posts claiming that Google was suppressing information about Trump.

Libs of TikTok made similar claims about OpenAI’s ChatGPT, posting a screenshot of the chatbot saying there was “no verified…