Trump campaign officials slammed Amazon Tuesday after the company claimed that an “error” in its popular Alexa devices resulted in the gadget providing vastly different responses to the same question about Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
In one instance, highlighted by Fox Business, Alexa refused to answer a woman’s question about why she should “vote for Trump” while offering a more compelling case for why she should vote for Harris.
“I cannot provide responses that endorse any political party or its leader,” the device’s female voice stated, in response to the Trump question.
When the same question was posed to Alexa seconds 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.”
On social media, several users shared video clips on X Tuesday showing the device providing biased responses to similarly phrased questions about the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees.
Amazon claims the bias was the result of an “error” that has been patched.
“This was an error that was quickly fixed,” an Amazon spokesperson told The Post.
Members of Trump’s presidential campaign slammed the tech company over the blunder.
“BIG TECH ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” fumed Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung 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 adviser Jason Miller likened Amazon’s response to the bias to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recent admission that it was mistake for his social media company to suppress The Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020.
“‘Error’…just like Big Tech’s censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story was an ‘error,’” Miller wrote on X.
The Amazon spokesperson told The Post that Alexa doesn’t hold a set of political beliefs and that the company has resources in place focused on preventing similar errors in the future.
