Former President Donald Trump has urged his supporters to “GO AFTER” Meta and Google over claims that the Big Tech companies “censored” information about the assassination attempt on his life during a Pennsylvania campaign rally last month.
“They made it virtually impossible to find pictures or anything about this heinous act,” Trump posted Tuesday morning on his social platform, Truth Social. “Here we go again, another attempt at RIGGING THE ELECTION!!! ! GO AFTER META AND GOOGLE. LET THEM KNOW WE ARE ALL WISE TO THEM, WILL BE MUCH TOUGHER THIS TIME.”
Trump’s complaint came after X users noticed that a photo of Trump, triumphantly pounding his fist in the air right after surviving the assassination attempt, was falsely flagged as “doctored” on Facebook. Google similarly came under fire from GOP supporters after users noticed that its “autocomplete” function failed to suggest results for the attempted assassination, even when users prompted it with “assassination attempt on Tru.”
Both platforms denied any malicious intent. Meta said its fact-checking filter had initially been applied to an altered photo showing Secret Service agents smiling as they helped Trump get off the campaign rally stage after he was shot. The filter was, however, incorrectly applied to the real photo as well, an error that a spokesperson said had been fixed. Google noted that its filters were intended to prevent searches encouraging political violence, and said it was committed to improving autocomplete to stay more up-to-date with news.
Still, several figures in Silicon Valley, skeptical of the platforms’ response, cheered on Trump’s message to pursue Meta and Google.
“Tech guys don’t use Google Search anymore,” Balaji Srinivasan, an investor and former CTO of crypto exchange Coinbase, wrote on X Wednesday evening. “It’s not just censored. It sucks.”
Srinivasan did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment by press time.
Elon Musk, who owns X and has endorsed Trump repeatedly, posted on Wednesday that he “just did a search for ‘Trump Rally’ on Google, and Kamala was the top result!”
A Fortune reporter typed in “Trump rally” on Chrome using incognito mode, and suggestions for “Kamala Harris rally in Atlanta” were the first to pop up. However, every article in the carousel mentioned “Trump” and “rally” in the headline. The next carousel was “Trump rally in Pennsylvania.”
Google’s communications team wrote in an X thread that their goal was to help people get the most relevant results from a query.
“These labels are automatically generated based on related news topics, and they change over time,” the team wrote. “They span the political spectrum as well: For example, a search for ‘Kamala Harris’ showed Top Stories labeled with ‘Donald Trump,’ because many articles cover the two of them together.”
Neither Google CEO Sundar Pichai nor Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has endorsed a candidate in the 2024 presidential race.
Still, Musk—who did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment—has utilized the situation to flex X’s strength, and has posted his platform’s outperformance over Facebook and Instagram.
This is unrelated to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Musk’s rivalry, however. Musk’s comments reify what is turning out to be an unusually tense election season in Silicon Valley, filled with surprise endorsements and vitriolic X debates. Over the past few weeks, billionaire venture capitalists, startup founders, and high-profile tech celebrities have been dividing into political camps, spending millions to best each other and sway the presidential election in November.
Here’s a look at who the biggest names in the Valley support.
Donald Trump supporters
Many tech leaders who support Trump are also leaders in the crypto space. That’s because Trump, who just attended Bitcoin’s annual conference in Nashville, has branded himself as the crypto president. At that conference, he vowed to make the U.S. a crypto “superpower,” fire the chairperson of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and create a national reserve of Bitcoin.
Most crypto heavyweights have backed the Republican nominee. Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen, cofounders of tech venture capital firm a16z and among the world’s largest investors in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, announced their endorsement of Trump on a podcast.
“For little tech, we think Donald Trump is actually the right choice. Sorry, Mum, I know you’re going to be mad at me for this, but we had to do it,” Horowitz said. On that same podcast, Andreessen said the Democrats’ insistence on regulating crypto was what made him flip: “My big concern is what we saw in crypto was the foreshadowing of what’s going to happen in AI.”
ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood, who has invested heavily in crypto, also announced her endorsement for Trump.
The Winklevoss twins, who founded crypto exchange Gemini, have supported Trump as well, donating $1 million each to the candidate. Meanwhile, crypto-related political action committees have spent over $28.5 million in support of crypto-friendly Republicans—and against skeptical Democrats—in congressional races, according to an OpenSecrets analysis of campaign data published as of July 20.
On Wednesday evening, David Marcus, cocreator of Diem, a crypto project initiated by Facebook, posted on X that he was “crossing the Rubicon” and switching from being a Democrat to supporting Trump.
Trump has also won broad support from other tech leaders. David Sacks, the venture capital investor and former PayPal COO who cohosts the All-In podcast, organized a fundraiser for Trump that reportedly raked in $12 million.
Sequoia Capital’s Shaun Maguire previously told Fortune he lost friends and “disappointed family” after his X announcement that he was donating $300,000 to the Trump campaign. “But that’s okay, I was expecting it. It’s sad we live in a time of such extreme polarization.”
Kamala Harris supporters
Several titans in the tech industry support Vice President Kamala Harris, who is poised to win the Democratic nomination.
Reid Hoffman, investor and cofounder of LinkedIn and InflectionAI, is a longtime Democratic donor and has invested $7 million in Future Forward, a leading Democratic super PAC, this year. He has also reportedly been calling friends and donors to get them into the campaign.
Additionally, on Wednesday, more than 100 venture capitalists announced a pledge to vote for Harris in November and solicit donations for her presidential campaign.
The group, VCsforKamala, includes Hoffman; venture capitalist Vinod Khosla; Mark Cuban, minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks; and angel investor Ron Conway.
“We are pro-business, pro–American dream, pro-entrepreneurship, and pro–technological progress,” the group said in a statement, which they posted to their website.
More than 500 people have signed the VCsforKamala pledge to vote for Harris. All of them appear to be venture capital investors, founders, or tech leaders.
Outside venture capital, Harris has the support of Reed Hastings, cofounder and executive chairman of Netflix, who has donated $7 million to her campaign. Aaron Levie, CEO of content management software firm Box, has also endorsed Harris, but told Politico he and other executives are waiting to see details of Harris’s tech plans before donating to her campaign.
Former Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said she was “thrilled” to support Harris in an Instagram post. Philanthropist Melinda French Gates, ex-wife of Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, announced she is supporting the vice president on a CBS morning show because she has an “inspiring vision for America.” Her ex-husband has said that he doesn’t endorse anyone, because he is “so associated with the foundation that works with any administration.”
French Gates, however, said Harris has been “outspoken” on topics close to her.
“[Harris] has believed in women’s reproductive freedom from the beginning of her career, and that got rolled back under previous administrations. She knows what society is up against now. She’s for paid family medical leave. She’s for caregiving … She has always been outspoken on these topics, and I think she’s a woman of our time,” French Gates said.
