CV NEWS FEED // Amazon went viral last week after a woman uploaded a video on X of the Big Tech company’s artificial intelligence bot Alexa appearing to censor information that reflects well on former President Donald Trump. On the other hand, the same bot readily provided arguments in favor of voting for Vice President Kamala Harris.
As CatholicVote reported at the time:
Per data cited by Contimod last month, an estimated “71.6 million people in the United States use Amazon Alexa.” This figure amounts to about 21% of the country’s entire population. Contimod further noted that a quarter “of U.S. households had at least one Alexa device, according to Amazon.”In 2021, The Verge reported: “In 2020, Amazon determined that 25 percent of US households have at least one Alexa device, with this rising to 27 percent for Amazon Prime customers.”
Amazon told Variety that the difference in responses about Harris and Trump was due to an “error” that had since been fixed.
But this is not the first time a major American corporation has been scrutinized for an “error” that favors the Democratic nominee in November’s presidential election.
Most recently, both Meta and Google have come under fire for the way their platforms presented search results over the attempted assassination of Trump.
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-KY, has begun an investigation into Google, run by CEO Sundar Pichai, about the impact of its autocomplete feature on search results related to the July assassination attempt.
As James Lynch reported in the National Review, when users searched for Trump on Google, the “tool for its search function did not include the assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump.”
The search engine conglomerate responded to allegations of censorship via an X post stating that the lack of results happened due to the systems being “out of date” and an “algorithmic error.”
According to Lynch, Google also blamed its “flawed algorithm” for pushing stories about Harris when users searched for Trump.
Alongside Comer, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-OH, penned a letter to Pichai about the search engine results and algorithm.
“Recent reporting,” the letter stated,
has indicated that Google may now be interfering in the 2024 presidential election by censoring information about former President Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign for the presidency, including relating to the July 13 assassination attempt on him in Pennsylvania.
In response to the Committee and Select Subcommittee’s oversight, your counsel provided the Committee and Select Subcommittee with non-public information about Google’s issues with Search and Autocomplete and the company’s efforts to correct them, in addition to offering a private briefing to the Committee and Select Subcommittee this week.
Comer also requested an investigation into Meta, run by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
CatholicVote previously reported that Meta had “wrongly flagged the iconic post-assassination attempt picture of [Trump] as ‘altered’ on its platforms Facebook and Instagram.”
“The indisputably genuine July 13 picture taken by Associated Press (AP) Chief Photographer Evan Vucci shows Trump with blood on his face from a bullet wound and holding his fist out in front of an American flag,” CatholicVote noted:
Vucci took the picture mere seconds after a would-be assassin tried to take the former president’s life.
Per screenshots taken by various users, “fact checkers” on Meta’s platforms placed a warning under postings of the picture stating: “Altered Photo.”
The warning message continued: “The same altered photo was reviewed by independent fact-checkers in another post.”
Meta’s images and “fact-checking feature” are not the only concern for users. In another letter to Zuckerberg, Comer outlined a number of potential problems with Meta’s AI chatbot:
When asked if the assassination of President Trump was fictional, Meta’s bot responded that there ‘was no real assassination attempt on Donald Trump. I strive to provide accurate and reliable information, but sometimes mistakes can occur.’ The Committee requests that Meta produce all internal policies or any other documents related to how the Meta AI chatbot is designed, reviewed, managed, and updated.
In the past, Zuckerberg’s platforms had previously restricted information on the Hunter Biden laptop case as well as COVID-19-related information at the request of U.S. intelligence officials and later the Biden White House.
According to the National Review, when news of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal broke, “Facebook suppressed the New York Post’s reporting on emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop.”
Zuckerberg stated this year: “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
