Over the past few days, some people on X have posted claims that Search is “censoring” or “banning” particular terms. That’s not happening, and we want to set the record straight.

The posts relate to our Autocomplete feature, which predicts queries to save you time. Autocomplete is just a tool to help you complete a search quickly. Regardless of what predictions it shows at any given moment, you can always search for whatever you want and get easy access to results, images and more.

Here’s what happened, why and how we responded to it.

🧵(1/5) → (2/5) First, Autocomplete wasn’t providing predictions for queries about the assassination attempt against former President Trump. That’s because it has built-in protections related to political violence — and those systems were out of date.

After the horrific events in Butler, PA, those predicted queries should have appeared but didn’t. Once the issue was flagged, we started working on improvements, and they’re already rolling out. You can see many relevant predictions now:

The Federalist was never demonetized. We worked with them to address issues on their site related to the comments section.

“We are fully aligned and continue to work with the US Government to contain the spread of COVID-19, inform citizens, and protect the health of our communities. (1/6)

https://twitter.com/Google_Comms/status/1238574670686928906

“Google is partnering with the US Government in developing a nationwide website that includes information about COVID-19 symptoms, risk and testing information. (2/6)