Is Google Blocking Donald Trump Assassination Attempt? What We Know

A number of Republican figures have noted that Google‘s search is not showing results for the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in its autocomplete feature, and Google has told Newsweek “we’re working on improvements.”

Users of the popular search engine are not seeing the recent shooting against the former president in Pennsylvania as a drop down option when typed in Google’s search bar.

Newsweek confirmed that mentions of the July 13 shooting do not come up on Google even when “assassination attempt of Tr” are typed in. Instead, the first result of the autocomplete feature is the attempted assassination of former president Harry S. Truman in 1950.

A spokesperson for Google denies that any “manual action” has taken been on the autocomplete predictions surrounding the assassination attempt of Trump.

Instead, Google’s systems have protections against autocomplete predictions associated with political violence, which were “working as intended prior to this horrific event occurring” in Pennsylvania.

“We’re working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up to date,” the spokesperson told Newsweek.

“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.”

Google still directs searchers to accounts of the assassination if they type in the full query, without autocomplete.

A number of GOP figures have accused Google of trying to “interfere” in the 2024 election by “suppressing” search results related to Trump.

Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son, posted on X, formerly Twitter while sharing a screengrab of Google’s autocomplete predictions: “Big Tech is trying to interfere in the election AGAIN to help Kamala Harris. We all know this is intentional election interference from Google. Truly despicable.”

Kansas Senator Roger Marshall said he would be making an “official inquiry” about the lack of mention of the assassination attempt against Trump in Google’s autocomplete section.

“Why is Google suppressing the search about the Trump assassination attempt? These are all screenshots from this morning,” Marshall posted. “Has there been a dramatic increase in Truman biographers in the last two weeks?”

The End Wokeness account, which has more than 2.8 million followers on X, added: “Google really wants us to forget what we all saw with our own eyes 2 weeks ago.”

In July 2021, Trump filed a lawsuit against Google, Twitter and Facebook alleging the tech companies were unlawfully silencing conservative voices.

“We are demanding an end to the shadow-banning, a stop to the silencing, and a stop to the blacklisting, banishing, and canceling that you know so well,” Trump said at the time.

The lawsuits were later dismissed in the courts.