Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump believes Google is trying to hurt his candidacy.
Speaking at a rally in Wisconsin on Wednesday night, Trump argued that a “Google poll” showed his campaign leading by two points over Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. He gloated that the lead comes despite the online giant hiding bad news related to Clinton.
“A new post-debate poll, the Google poll, has us leading Hillary Clinton by two points nationwide,” he said during the rally, “and that’s despite the fact that Google search engine was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton. How about that.”
Trump’s comments were earlier reported on by The Washington Post.
Trump’s Google (GOOGL) claim refers to a theory floated back in June that the search giant was intentionally bringing Internet users to results that criticized Trump. More specifically, a site called SourceFed published a video that went viral showing how Google’s auto-complete function, which helps users get to search results more quickly, reacted when “cri” was input after a candidate’s name.
In the case of Clinton, when users typed “hillary clinton cri,” it wouldn’t automatically show an option to click “Hillary Clinton criminal” in the auto-complete. However, when users searched for Trump-related items, the auto-correct would offer some negative results, including “donald trump crimes,” reports said at the time.
Other reports soon surfaced, saying that Google was manipulating users through its search engine to play a role in swaying the electorate.
Google denied those accusations, saying that it was in no way modifying its auto-complete or search results to help Clinton and hurt Trump. Google event went so far as to issue a blog post on the topic, explaining how the auto-complete function works.
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“The autocomplete algorithm is designed to avoid completing a search for a person’s name with terms that are offensive or disparaging,” wrote Tamar Yehoshua, Google Search’s vice president of product management, in the post. “We made this change a while ago following feedback that Autocomplete too often predicted offensive, hurtful or inappropriate queries about people. This filter operates according to the same rules no matter who the person is.”
Trump, though, is still peddling the idea that Google is working against him to benefit Clinton. And while he didn’t mention the “criminal” complaint by name, it’s one that doesn’t necessarily hold up.
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In Coins2Day‘s own evaluation of Google’s auto-correct on Thursday, the exact opposite of what reportedly happened in June is happening now. When Coins2Day input “hillary clinton cri” into Google’s search box, it returned auto-correct options that refer to “hillary clinton criminal memes” and “hillary clinton criminal investigation google.” When Coins2Day typed in “donald trump cri,” however, there wasn’t no mention of Donald Trump and criminality.
As The Washington Post notes, Trump’s mention of “the Google poll” is also lost in translation. The Post believes Trump was actually referring to a Google Consumer Survey conducted after Monday night’s debate by the Independent Journal Review. The poll, in other words, was conducted using Google Consumer Surveys but was not Google’s own poll.
Google declined Coins2Day‘s request for comment on Trump’s statement. Neither campaign immediately responded to a request for comment.
