After he used his own platform X to garner 130 million views on a deep fake video of Vice President Kamala Harris saying she's 'a diversity hire,' tech billionaire Elon Musk hefted accusations against Google on Sunday, saying that the company had put a “search ban” on former President Donald Trump.
In a post to his social media company X over the weekend, Musk included an image of a Google search box with the words “President Donald” typed into it.
However, the top autocomplete responses were “Donald Duck” and “President Donald Regan.”
“Wow, Google has a search ban on President Donald Trump!” Musk claimed in his post. “Election interference?” For his own part, after retweeting the parody video of Harris, which was not initially presented as parody, Musk later added that it was a joke. Many users suggested he might have violated his own platform's terms of service, which says users “may not share synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.”
Still when it comes to Google, which he does not own, Musk has continued to repost other photos and videos that show users attempting to search“President Donald Trump” and instead getting things like news about Vice President Kamala Harris.
Google has discussed the issue, which it said was caused by “anomalies” causing autocomplete not to work as intended “for some searches about the names of several past presidents and the current vice president,” CBS News reported.
CBS reported that it had issues searching for Harris, showing in a report that after typing “Vice President K” into the search engine on Monday, several results would come up, including “William R. King,” but not “Vice President Kamala Harris.”
Google did not share any further details on the anomalies, though it did say they were technical and that the company has not yet taken any manual actions to change its autocomplete.
Despite the criticism from Musk and his claim that Trump was placed on a “search ban,” the company said that its autocomplete feature is supposed to be a shortcut and that users can still search for whatever they want independently of it.
“We’re looking into these anomalies and working on improvements, which we hope to roll out soon,” Google said in its statement. “Our autocomplete systems are dynamic, so predictions will change based on common and trending queries.”
As of Tuesday morning, entering “President Donald” into the search engine returned an autocomplete for “President Donald Trump.”