Google has sometimes gotten in trouble for the phrases that automatically appear when you’re trying to type in a new search. Even if some of them make for amusing celebrity interviews, others have sometimes steered users toward problematic concepts and fake news in addition to harmless things like movie and video game spoilers. The suggestions are based on what other people are searching for, after all.
But in the buildup to the 2020 US presidential election, Google is changing its autocomplete policies to theoretically weed out one particular category of suggestion: “Election related predictions” that could be interpreted as favoring a particular candidate or political party.
The new policy is extremely short, so I’ll just give you the whole thing right here:
Elections related predictions
We don’t allow predictions that could be interpreted as a position for or against any candidate or political party, nor which could be interpreted as claims about the participation in or integrity of the electoral process.
Mind you, Google already claimed in 2016 that “autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause,” back when it was accused of hiding negative autocomplete results about Hillary Clinton. It sounds like this will be a bit different, though: instead of making sure that searches for political candidates and parties aren’t biased in any way, Google will simply be removing search suggestions that could favor either party or candidate.
The company offered a few examples in a blog post today, and they seem heavy-handed in how “balanced” they’re trying to be: Google will apparently remove both the phrases “You can vote by phone” and “You can’t vote by phone,” even though one of those things is true and the other is a lie.
Google tells The Verge this will mostly be automatically, proactively enforced:
With Autocomplete, we primarily rely on automated systems to approximate our policies and prevent violating predictions from appearing. If any predictions slip through, and if we get reports or otherwise identify violations, then our trust and safety team enforces those policies.
Also, similar but unbiased searches like “can you vote by phone?” may still get autocompleted. If you see a prediction that violates Google’s policies, you can report them here.
Update, 7:16 PM ET: Added Google’s clarification that this will mostly be automatically and proactively enforced by its systems.
