Facebook has acknowledged that it mistakenly censored an iconic image of former President Donald Trump with his fist raised in the aftermath of the July 13 assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.
A post on Republican presidential candidate Mark Zuckerberg’s social media site by a user using the handle “End Wokeness,” which showed him with his fist raised in the air and blood streaming from his face, was initially flagged as misinformation.
Users were threatened with being removed from the platform.
But on Monday, Dani Lebar, a spokesman for Meta, the social network’s parent company, acknowledged that the tech giant had made a “mistake.”
“Yes, this was a mistake,” Lever wrote on X in response to conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, who accused Facebook of not allowing users to share the photo.
“This fact check was initially applied to photoshopped photos of Secret Service agents smiling, but in some cases our systems were incorrectly applying the fact check to real photos.”
“The issue has now been corrected and we apologise for the mistake,” Lever added.
What we know about the attempted assassination of President Trump
- 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks has been identified as the shooter who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
- Crooks was shot and killed by a Secret Service agent.
- The gunman grazed President Trump’s ear, killed a 50-year-old former fire chief and wounded two other people at the rally.
- Investigators detailed Crooks’ search history to lawmakers, revealing that he sought out dates for speeches by President Trump and the Democratic National Convention.
- FBI officials said the criminal’s search history also revealed a broad interest in famous people and celebrities, regardless of political affiliation.
- “I was supposed to be dead,” Trump told The Washington Post exclusively at the rally, describing how he survived the “surreal” assassination attempt.
- Prominent politicians, including President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, addressed the nation about the shooting, calling it a “heinous, horrific and despicable act.”
The Meta spokesperson’s explanation didn’t sit well with X users, with one commenting: “It’s weird that the ‘error’ only always happens one way. I think it’s just a coincidence.”
Another X user wrote: “No one will believe you.”
“Nah I won’t be buying it again,” commented another X user.
Meta has come under fire from Trump supporters after its AI chatbot, Meta AI, described the assassination attempt as “fictional” when asked for details about the tragic incident.
An X-user sympathetic to Trump posted screenshots of Meta AI’s responses to questions about the assassination attempt.
In one instance, the bot got the date of an event wrong, and in another, it answered the question correctly but with a terse response that, when juxtaposed with a question about Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, made the tech giant appear biased toward Democrats.
“We understand you may have found incomplete, contradictory or outdated information on this subject. We are working to make corrections to provide more up-to-date answers to inquiries, but in the meantime you may continue to see inaccurate answers,” a Mehta spokesperson told The Post.
Google has also come under fire after users pointed out that its search engine’s “autocomplete” feature did not produce results about the assassination attempt on Trump, despite being told to do so.
Republican lawmakers have vowed to investigate Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.
Donald Trump Jr. slammed Google, accusing the company of tipping the scales in favor of Harris, his father’s opponent.
Trump Jr. called it “deliberate election interference.”
“Big Tech is once again trying to interfere in our election to help Kamala Harris. We all know this is deliberate election interference by Google. This is truly despicable,” he said in a post on social media platform X.
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 said.
Major tech companies have banned Trump from appearing on their platforms following the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
The ban was later lifted.
In the lead up to the 2020 election, both X (then known as Twitter) and Facebook restricted distribution of a Washington Post article on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
