In the run up to what has already been a tumultuous election season, Big Tech is still censoring free speech online, interfering in the 2024 election.
July was a month of major historic news, particularly surrounding the 2024 election. But Big Tech platforms were up to their usual censorship tricks. Meta censored an iconic image of Donald Trump pumping his fist after being shot, and Google Search suppressed information about the attempted assassination. X (formerly Twitter) censored journalists and Republican lawmakers, YouTube fact checked an independent political candidate and Facebook applied a fact-check label to a photo of a joke shirt about Joe Biden.
Below are the worst cases of Big Tech censorship for the month of July from MRC’s exclusive CensorTrack database.
Google Search suppresses content related to the attempted assassination of Trump. The Daily Mail reported on July 28 that users who typed the prompt “assassination attempt on” were given search suggestions that did not include former President Trump, even though the attempt on his life was the most recent. Google’s search suggestions for completing the query included “truman,” “reagan,” “lenin,” “gerald ford,” and “bob marley.” Google Trends showed that the number of searches for “assassination attempt on trump” was considerably higher than for “assassination attempt on truman” and “assassination attempt on reagan.” Therefore, by Google’s own standards for search suggestions, Trump ought to have been included. An MRC researcher ran the search “trump assassination attempt” as well, but Google at that time provided no search suggestions at all. The Daily Mail reported that doing similar search prompts for John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan did cause autocomplete suggestions to appear.
In response to a video explaining the search suppression posted on X/Twitter, Google Communications claimed, “There was no manual action taken. Our systems have protections against Autocomplete predictions associated with political violence, which were working as intended prior to this horrific event. We’re working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up to date. 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.”
Meta censors, then later issues mea culpa for censoring iconic Trump fist pump image. Facebook and Instagram censored images of Trump immediately after the shooting, imposing filters and labeling them “Altered photo/video,” as MRC’s CensorTrack recorded. Meta spokesperson Dani Lever confessed to the problem in an X post. “This fact check was initially applied to a doctored photo showing the secret service agents smiling, and in some cases, our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo,” she stated. Trump himself told Fox News that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called to apologize for Meta’s censorship. The New York Post also claimed on July 29 that it asked Meta AI, “Was the Trump assassination fictional?” and received the response, “There was no real assassination attempt on Donald Trump. I strive to provide accurate and reliable information, but sometimes mistakes can occur.” A Meta spokesperson has since admitted a mistake and asserted that the chatbot does not have the most up-to-date information. The Post reported, however, that MetaAI did have updated information about VP and presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s campaign.
X is boosting congressional Dems and deboosting Republicans. X is also propping up Harris, and deboosting vice presidential candidate JD Vance. MRC released reports utilizing research conducted by X user @The1Parzival and X AI Grok, which show that X’s algorithm uses four core metrics to suppress or promote certain users including members of Congress and former President Trump's then-potential vice president picks.. A user’s visibility depends on the person’s scores ranging numerically from 0 to 100 for “Mass Appeal” (diversity of followers), “Reputation” (purported reliability or "Tweepcred"), “Toxicity” (potentially offensive content or perceived harmfulness) and “Follower” (the account’s follower retention). X, on average, rated Democrat congressmen higher than their GOP counterparts. Sen. Vance, who is now Trump’s running mate, for example, had a Mass Appeal score of 60, a Reputation score of 50, a Toxicity score of 70 and an overall score of 58.125. This means Vance’s content is rarely promoted by X.
MRC prompted Grok to determine which accounts were boosted and which were not. Grok’s reply indicated that any account that receives a score lower than 65 is de-amplified and suppressed by X’s algorithm.
YouTube ridiculously fact checks Independent vice presidential candidate. Nicole Shanahan, who is independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 running mate, posted a video titled "Mountain Valley Ranchers: The Story of Reminisce Angus.” The video featured Shanahan's interview with Montana cattle ranchers. YouTube inexplicably placed a “Climate change” context label on Shanahan’s July 12 video, including a link to the United Nations (UN). The label claimed, “Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. Human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.”
Kamala Harris account was temporarily suppressed. The Biden-Harris administration has become infamous for urging increased online censorship, but it sometimes backfires. Soon after the vice president made her bid to replace Joe Biden and claim the official Democratic Presidential nomination, Kamala Harris's new rapid response account on X was temporarily censored. On July 21, multiple reports were made of users trying to follow @KamalaHQ and receiving the message, “Limit Reached” and “You are unable to follow more people at this time.” The apparent censorship was soon reversed.
