Former president Joe Biden’s reign in the Oval Office was completely removed from the Google search results for the term “US Presidents” for a time on Thursday morning.
The glitch was fixed around 2:00am Eastern time, it’s not clear for how long Biden was written out of Google’s history. The list gave President Donald Trump has having served as the last two presidents of the United States before normal service resumes, naming president’s Obama, W. Bush, Clinton etc.
The erasing of the Biden administration was first noticed by BlueSky users, many of whom believed it was big tech’s latest attempt to cosy up to Trump.
On Monday, the biggest names in Silicon Valley, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai joined ‘First Buddy’ Elon Musk to watch Trump become inaugurated as the 47th president. Musk later stole the headlines following an appearance at a rally in which he made an “odd salute.”
The outrage on the liberal enclave of BlueSky was palpable in the early hours of Thursday.
“If this stands, this will be one of the boldest and most dangerous moments in the existence of the Internet, as it will be a clear show of force that those in opposition will disappear completely,” wrote one user.
“Joe Biden was deleted from Google list of Presidents. My guess is it is a high level hack?,” said another.
“Google United States Presidents and Biden is not on there. This is bigger than social media,” wrote another.
In the days leading up to the search glitch, millions of Meta users began complaining that their accounts were forced to follow President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, and were forbidden from unfollowing.
“I, like others, repeatedly unfollowed Trump and Vance on Monday, only to discover that I was following them again,” said Facebook user Anna Springer on Threads, which is also owned by Meta. “Not sure if it was just a glitch or something intentional, but it definitely happened.”
Meta communications director Andy Stone offered a defense in a post on X.
“People were not made to automatically follow any of the official Facebook or Instagram accounts for the President, Vice President or First Lady,” Stone said on X. “Those accounts are managed by the White House so with a new administration, the content on those pages changes.”“It may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through as these accounts change hands,” Stone said on Threads.
