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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Read my other comment and stop rage-stroking.

When I specify exactly what I input and what I see, I am not "pretending not to see" anything. I have carefully elucidated the scenarios in which I think it's plausible there is skullduggery going on, and those in which it is less plausible, and why. It's possible I miss something or am wrong in my analysis, but so far I haven't seen anything to convince me that "Google engineers are giggle-giggle-tee-heeing over erasing certain Trump-related search phrases" beats "Google search sucks." If I set out to prove Google is "against" a certain person or event or trend, I would need to do a bunch of searches with different keywords, and then compare with similar searches of equivalent things, and even then account for the unpredictability of LLMs.

None of this is pretending anything. I am easily able to believe that most Google employees hate Donald Trump and would absolutely reengineer the entire site to make him lose if (1) they thought it would work (2) they thought they could get away with it. But you reading tea leaves (or more likely, the latest thing circulating on Telegram about how Google is messing with Trump-related search terms) is not uncovering some plain conspiracy that only those in denial can't see.

FWIW, I tried doing other related searches and got similar results, e.g. "Reagan a" and it's already suggesting "Reagan assassination attempt". Whereas even "Trump assassinatio" still doesn't autocomplete.

I don't have a particularly conspiratorial mindset and I fail to see how fiddling with autocomplete results serves any particular purpose. But it does seem like they have been fiddled with.

"Trump poli" doesn't autocomplete either- you'd expect "Trump police"(he likes to tout police endorsements) and "Trump policy/ies". On the other hand "Trump for" autocompletes to "Trump foreign policy". "Trump Ame" autocompletes to "Trump American Dream TV show". "Trump law" autocompletes to "Trump lawyer" and "Trump lawn sign". "Trump pr" autocompletes as "Trump presidency" and "Trump presidential library". "Trump ag" autocompletes as "Trump age" and not "Trump agenda".

It looks like it's been fiddled with a little bit, I guess. But I'm surprised I don't see "Trump project 2025" in the suggestions.