Claim: Elon Musk alleged that Google has banned searches for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, preventing users from finding relevant results when searching for Trump’s name.
Fact: Musk’s assertion is false. Donald J Trump can be searched on Google in the United States of America; his name has not been banned.
On 29 July 2024, Elon Musk, owner of X, Tesla, and SpaceX, published a tweet claiming that Google had placed a ‘search ban’ on Republican presidential candidate Donald J Trump. This tweet includes a screenshot of the search bar on Google and shows that when “president donald”, is typed the search engine shows the phrases “president donald duck”, and “president donald regan”, and not “president donald trump”. Musk used this screenshot to substantiate his claim.
Fact or Fiction?
On 30 July 2024, Fortune magazine published an article titled “Google responds to Elon Musk’s accusations of a ‘search ban’ on Trump: ‘We’re working on improvements’ to auto-complete results”. The article states that some users published photos of their Google search suggestions on X, on 28 July. These photos show the user searching “assassination attempt on” and the suggestions appearing were all related to President Reagan, Bob Marley and other figures and there was no mention of Donald J Trump. A day later, Musk also shared a similar tweet, which reached more than 110 million views.
Google spoke to Fortune magazine on this issue and stated that the company did not take any manual action on the autocomplete predictions, and will be working on improvements to this feature. The spokesperson further added that autocomplete may not be working as intended but their team is looking into the anomalies and working on improvements which are to be rolled out soon. “Our autocomplete systems are dynamic, so predictions will change based on common and trending queries,” they said. It is clear that Google claims to not have placed any kind of ban on searching the name of or details regarding Donald J Trump.
In addition, Soch Fact Check reached out to 5 individuals based in North Carolina, Arizona, Oklahoma and Massachusetts. They found that after typing “President Donald”, Donald Trump’s name was auto-suggested. We also found that upon searching “Donald Trump”, they were shown comprehensive search results about the republican presidential candidate.
Virality
Musk’s tweet received more than 110 million views. Another tweet repeating the claim received 3.5 million views. Another tweet repeating the claim receives more than 44.2 million views.
The claim was also shared on Facebook. Some of the posts can be found here, here, and here. Searching the key terms “Google” “Ban” and “Trump”, showed us that more than 2,700 people were talking about it at that time.
Conclusion: Google has not placed a search ban on Donald Trump.
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Background image in cover photo: Google
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