Catherine Salgado
Catherine Salgado is a contributing writer with Media Research Center’s NewsBusters’ Free Speech America.
Two congressional lawmakers took aim at Big Tech’s apparent attempts at “erasing” the Trump assassination attempt from the internet – and possible government censorship collusion to do so.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) separately sent letters to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Google challenging Meta and Google’s censorship of images and information related to the assassination attempt on Trump. Gaetz and Marshall called out the tech companies in the letters for their apparent election interference efforts.
Gaetz wrote to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on July 31 asking for any communications the department had had with Big Tech companies between July 13 and July 31. He cited scandals at DHS, including its habit of colluding with Big Tech to censor speech and the Director of the Secret Service stepping down after failing to protect former president Donald Trump.
“These two major scandals at DHS have a single focal point which is the apparent Big Tech censorship and the digital ‘erasing’ of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump,” Gaetz wrote.
The congressman highlighted the widely reported cases of Meta and Google censorship. “Numerous news outlets have reported various irregularities in search results and home pages,” Gaetz wrote. “For example, Facebook has acknowledged that it censored an authentic photograph of Donald Trump as ‘false information’ and Google has acknowledged that it excludes and does not autocomplete results for searches relating to the Trump assassination attempt.”
Sen. Marshall wrote his letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressing Google’s explanation that it took “no manual action” to suppress search suggestions for the words “assassination attempt on.” The search engine suggested the names of other presidents but not Trump. Marshall stated that Google’s excuse is “woefully inadequate, disingenuous, and misleading.” He argued, “If the autocomplete function is truly reflective of the recent searches completed on Google, the self-learning algorithms should have easily adjusted their autocomplete function during a massive increase in search queries over the last two weeks.”
Marshall also noted that Google employees have reported political bias as a “company standard” before, and that “some of my Republican colleagues have raised concerns regarding recommendation system algorithms under the umbrella of Alphabet and the bias of content they provide to operators seeking information.” He requested information on Google’s search algorithms, ranking and autocomplete functions.
This article was originally published by MRC NewsBusters.
