Congress opens probe into whether Google search misled Americans on Trump assassination

Already facing a potential breakup from a devastating antitrust court ruling, Google got more bad news Wednesday when the main congressional oversight committee announced it had opened a probe into whether the search engine misled Americans about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump last month.

House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., revealed that Google told his staff last week that its search engine's autocomplete feature "omitted the Trump assassination attempt" from relevant searches because the firm failed to update "a safety protocol" against violence to recognize the former president had, in fact, been shot July 13 during an assassination attempt in Butler, Pa.

Whether unintentional or not, Comer said the problem added to a pattern of Big Tech improperly influencing elections that dates to efforts in 2020 to suppress accurate stories about politically damaging evidence from Hunter Biden's laptop.

"Americans rely upon prominent internet search engines such as Google to gather news and information critical to their understanding of national politics and events—and never more so than during a Presidential election season," Comer wrote in a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai that also cited the judge's recent decision that Google has run an illegal monopoly with its search engine.

"On behalf of the American people, the Committee is dedicated to fully understanding when and how information is being suppressed or modified, whether it be due to technical error, a policy intended to ensure safety, or a specific intent to mislead," he added.

You can read the full letter here.

Comer sent a similar letter to the parent company of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg raising similar concerns that the platform's AI chatbot had claimed there “was no real assassination attempt on Donald Trump."

You can read that letter here.

The revelation of a new congressional inquiry came the same day Google faced new questions about why it let Kamala Harris' campaign pay to manipulate news headlines to make them look more favorable to her campaign.