Facebook acknowledged that it mistakenly censored the iconic image of former President Donald Trump with his fist raised in the immediate aftermath of the July 13 assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.
A post on Mark Zuckerberg’s social media site by a user with the handle End Wokeness that showed the Republican presidential candidate defiantly pumping his fist in the air while blood streams down his face had initially been flagged as misinformation.
The user was threatened with being deplatformed.
However, on Monday, Dani Lever, a spokesperson for the social network’s parent company, Meta, admitted the tech giant made a “mistake.”
“Yes, this was an error,” Lever wrote on X in response to conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, who had called out Facebook for not allowing users to share the photo.
“This fact check was initially applied to a doctored photo showing the secret service agents smiling, and in some cases our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo.”
Lever added that “this has been fixed and we apologize for the mistake.”
Everything we know about the Trump assassination attempt
- 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks was identified as the shooter who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
- Crooks was shot dead by Secret Service agents.
- The gunman grazed Trump’s ear, killed a 50-year-old retired fire chief, and injured two other rally-goers.
- Investigators detailed Crooks’ search history to lawmakers, revealing that he looked for the dates of Trump’s appearances and the Democratic National Convention.
- Crooks’ search history also revealed a broad interest in high-profile people and celebrities, regardless of their political affiliation, FBI officials reportedly said.
- Trump exclusively recounted surviving the “surreal” assassination attempt with The Post at the rally, remarking, “I’m supposed to be dead.”
- High-profile politicians, including President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, addressed the nation about the shooting, calling it “a heinous, horrible and cowardly act.”
The Meta spokesperson’s clarification did not sit well with X users, including one who remarked: “Funny that the ‘errors’ only ever go in one direction. Just coincidence, I guess.”
Another X user wrote: “No one believes you.”
“Nope, not buying it anymore,” remarked another X user.
Meta has come under fire from Trump supporters after its AI chatbot, Meta AI, referred to the attempted assassination as “fictional” when prompted to provide details about the tragic event.
X users sympathetic to Trump posted screenshots of Meta AI answers that were given in response to prompts about the attempted assassination.
In one instance, the bot got the date of the event wrong. In another, it answered the question correctly, but gave a terse reply that, when juxtaposed with a prompt about Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, made it seem as if the tech giant was biased in favor of Democrats.
“We know people have been seeing incomplete, inconsistent, or out of date information on this topic. We’re in the process of implementing a fix to provide more up-to-date responses for inquiries, and it is possible people may continue to see inaccurate responses in the meantime,” a Meta spokesperson told The Post.
Google has also come under fire after users noted that its “Autocomplete” function on its search engine failed to generate results for the Trump attempted assassination when prompted to do so.
GOP lawmakers have vowed to investigate Google, which is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.
Donald Trump Jr. blasted Google, accusing it of putting its thumb on the scale to favor his father’s opponent, Harris.
Trump Jr. said it was “intentional election interference.”
“Big Tech is trying to interfere in the election AGAIN to help Kamala Harris. We all know this is intentional election interference from Google. Truly despicable,” he wrote in a post on social media platform X.
A Google spokesperson told The Post that there was no “manual action taken on these predictions,” and that its systems include “protections” against Autocomplete predictions “associated with political violence.”
“We’re working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up to date. Of course, Autocomplete is just a tool to help people save time, and they can still search for anything they want to. Following this terrible act, people turned to Google to find high quality information — we connected them with helpful results, and will continue to do so,” the spokesperson said.
Big tech companies barred Trump from appearing on their platforms in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.
The bans have since been reversed.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, X (which was known as Twitter at the time) and Facebook both limited the distribution of The Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop.
