Former President Trump told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo last week that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called him to apologize after Facebook mislabeled a viral photo of the former president.
The photo, which showed Trump raising his fist after his ear was slashed in an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, was initially flagged as false by social media sites.
“So Mark Zuckerberg called me. First of all, he called me twice. He called me after the event and said it was really great,” Trump told Bartiromo during an interview on “Mornings with Maria” that aired Thursday. “It was really brave. And then he announced that he wasn’t going to endorse any Democrats, in honor of what I did that day. What I did was … I think it was a normal response for me.”
“He actually apologized. He said he made a mistake … and is correcting the mistake,” Trump said, adding that Google never called him after its search engine’s autocomplete feature. Could not display results Regarding the attempted assassination of President Trump.
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Former President Trump is surrounded by Secret Service agents at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
In a statement on July 30, Joel Kaplan, Meta’s vice president of global policy, said Meta mistakenly applied a fact-check label to the assassination attempt photo because the social media giant’s AI detection tools “experienced issues related to the circulation of a doctored photo that appeared to show former President Trump raising his fist and a Secret Service agent smiling.” The photo quickly went viral and was published by news outlets around the world.
“Because the photo had been altered, a fact-check label was initially correctly applied,” Kaplan explained. “When a fact-check label is applied, our technology detects content that is identical or nearly identical to what a fact-checker assessed and adds a label to that content as well. Because the altered photo and the original image have similarities with only slight (but important) differences, our system incorrectly applied a fact check to the actual photo as well. Our team worked quickly to correct this mistake.”
Former President Trump was quickly escorted off the stage during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Meta spokesman Andy Stone also clarified in a Friday post on X that Zuckerberg has never endorsed a candidate in the 2024 presidential election. “Mark has already publicly stated that, as he has in previous elections, he is not endorsing either candidate,” Stone wrote. The company declined to comment further.
Additionally, Meta’s AI chatbot initially refused to answer questions about the shooting.
Kaplan said both errors were “unfortunate, though not motivated by bias,” and that the company understands “why people may have had that impression.” Kaplan said the issue stems from the volume of information in breaking news situations that can overwhelm the AI chat feature.
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A Facebook account labeled an image of Trump raising his fist after being shot as “altered.” (X Screenshot)
“Rather than having the meta AI provide false information about the assassination attempt, we programmed it to not answer questions about it after it had happened, and instead gave a general response that it couldn’t provide any information. As a result, some people reported that our AI was refusing to talk about the incident. We have since updated the response the meta AI was providing about the assassination attempt, but we should have done so sooner,” Kaplan said.
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Google’s AI chatbot “Gemini” Refusal to answer questions of the shooting that killed 50-year-old father and volunteer fire chief Corey Comperatore and seriously injured two others, 74-year-old James Copenhaver and 57-year-old David Duch.
The screenshot shows Google search results related to the assassination attempt on former President Trump. (Google/Screenshot)
“Currently, I can’t help you with answers regarding elections or politicians,” Gemini told Fox News Digital when asked about the recent assassination attempt. “While I would never knowingly share inaccurate information, I do make mistakes, so while I’m working on improving, try doing a Google search.”
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A Google spokesperson previously told Fox News Digital that Gemini was “working as intended.”
“As we announced last year, we limit “Answers to election-related queries across the Gemini app and web experience. Clicking on the blue links in the answers will take you to accurate, up-to-date search results,” the spokesperson said.
FOX Business’ Louis Casiano and Lindsay Koenick contributed to this report.
