Former President Trump on Tuesday slammed Meta and Google for censoring searches related to the assassination attempt on him, urging his supporters to “go after” the two tech giants.
The Republican presidential candidate took issue with a series of bizarre incidents, including Mehta’s AI software “fictionalizing” the assassination attempt, Mehta-owned Facebook banning the iconic photo of Trump raising his fist after the shooting, and Google’s failure to show any results related to the tragic incident in a drop-down window on its search bar.
When contacted by The Washington Post, both companies denied any bias and instead claimed it was an innocent mistake.
Trump wouldn’t do that. Posting cap-full on his social media platform “Truth Social”It launched after being banned by Facebook and Twitter following the January 6 riot at the Capitol.
“Facebook has admitted that they wrongly censored an ‘assassination attempt photo’ of President Trump and got caught. So has Google,” Trump wrote. “They made it virtually impossible to find any photos or anything related to this heinous act. Both companies are facing significant backlash over their alleged censorship.”
He continued, “Another attempt to rig the election!!! Go after Meta and Google. Let them know we know what they’re up to. We’ll be tougher this time. MAGA2024!”
The uproar began after X users reported that a Facebook account had labeled an image of Trump raising his fist after the July 13 assassination attempt as “altered.”
The message read, “Independent fact-checkers have reviewed similar photos and noted that they have been altered in a misleading way.”
A company spokesperson acknowledged that the photo had been incorrectly fact-checked.
Further outrage followed after the Facebook incident when Meta’s AI software gave no information about the assassination attempt or gave incorrect results, but answered questions about presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
A representative for Meta issued another apology for the controversy surrounding the company’s AI tools.
“We understand that you may have found incomplete, contradictory, or outdated information on this matter,” a Meta representative said in a statement about the controversy. “We are making corrections to provide more up-to-date answers to inquiries, but in the meantime, you may continue to see inaccurate answers.”
On Monday, Google users said they were shocked to find that the website’s autocomplete feature omitted references to the July 13 assassination attempt.
Instead, the search engine recommended other results, such as the assassination attempt on former President Reagan.
The keyword “Trump assassination attempt” did not yield any additional results.
A Google spokesperson told The Washington Post that “no manual action was taken in response to these predictions” and that the company’s systems have “protections” built into them against autocomplete predictions “related to political violence.”
“We are working on improvements to make our systems more up to date. Of course, autocomplete is just a tool to save people time and users can continue to search for anything. After this egregious act, people have turned to Google to find quality information. We connect people with useful results and will continue to do so,” the spokesperson added.
