When we first learned that Google’s autocomplete function in its search engine appeared to be blocking suggestions about Donald Trump’s attempted assassination (or even his name), the company assured us that those results were simply “an anomaly” in the code. But the House Judiciary Committee has been digging into the question more deeply and asked parent company Alphabet’s legal counsel to explain further. The answers the committee received weren’t exactly definitive, but they may provide a bit of additional clarity. First of all, the search engine absolutely was blocking autofill from pointing users to articles about the assassination attempt. But was it out of some bias against Trump? According to them, the system was performing as designed, but the design was overly broad. We’ll look into it a bit further here this evening. (National Review)
An attorney for Google’s parent…
