House lawmakers expanded their investigation into Google and Meta’s handling of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, demanding on Wednesday that the Big Tech companies hand over more information on their internal policies and programming.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) wrote letters to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google Sundar Pichai seeking documentation on their technological processes related to the attack on Trump at his campaign rally in western Pennsylvania last month. The tech companies have been hit with allegations of censorship after users found that Google search results failed to autocomplete queries for the attempted assassination and Meta’s AI bot describing the attack as fictional.
“On behalf of the American people, the Committee is dedicated to fully understanding when and how information is being suppressed or modified by social media companies, whether it be due to technical error, a policy intended to ensure safety, or a specific intent to mislead,” Comer wrote in both letters.
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In his letter to Pichai, Comer specifically asked for policies and documents on Google Search and how its autocomplete function is designed to respond to newsworthy events.
Google has already responded to questions in a briefing with lawmakers about why information on the attack was omitted from autocomplete results, saying it was due to a safety protocol put in place about political assassinations.
“The briefing, however, raised additional questions especially against the backdrop of an alarming pattern of speech suppression and censorship peddled through technology and social media companies,” Comer wrote.
In the letter to Zuckerberg, Comer noted reports that Meta’s AI chatbot responded to questions by saying that there “was no real assassination attempt on Donald Trump.”
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Meta said that it had attempted to program its AI not to respond to questions so as not to spread false information, but that some users received incorrect answers.
Comer said that the committee still had concerns and requested that Meta provide information on how it designs its chatbot “to avoid query results that Meta desires to limit or preclude because it views them to be harmful or dangerous.”
The letters both referenced the widespread censorship of the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop leading up to the 2020 election. Facebook restricted the distribution of the story, which Zuckerberg later said was due in part because the FBI suggested to him that it was Russian disinformation. The laptop was later verified, though months after the presidential election.
