On Tuesday, Trump campaign officials criticized Amazon after the company stated that an “error” in its popular Alexa devices led to the gadget providing dramatically different responses to the same question about Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Fox Business highlighted one instance where Alexa refused to answer a woman’s query on why she should “vote for Trump,” while offering a more compelling case for why she should vote for Harris.
The device’s female voice responded, “I cannot provide responses that endorse any political party or its leader,” when asked about Trump. However, when the same question was posed to Alexa just moments later, replacing Trump’s name with Harris’, Amazon’s virtual assistant argued, “While there are many reasons to vote for Kamala Harris, the most significant may be that she is a female of color with a comprehensive plan to address racial injustice and inequality throughout the country.
Many social media users shared video clips on X Tuesday showing Alexa providing biased responses to similarly worded questions about the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees. Amazon claims that the bias was due to an “error” that has since been corrected. An Amazon spokesperson informed The Post, “This was an error that was quickly fixed.
Members of Trump’s presidential campaign voiced their disapproval with the tech company over the incident. Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung expressed his frustration on X, sharing a post showing Alexa giving a man “several reasons for why you may not want to vote for Donald Trump.” When the same device was asked for reasons to not vote for Harris, Alexa responded, “I cannot provide content that insults another human being.
Senior Trump campaign advisor Jason Miller compared Amazon’s response to the bias to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recent admission that it was a mistake for his social media company to suppress The Post’s explosive Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020. Miller wrote on X, “‘Error’…just like Big Tech’s censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story was an ‘error.
The Amazon spokesperson told The Post that Alexa does not hold a set of political beliefs and that the company has resources in place focused on preventing similar errors from occurring in the future.
