Former President Donald Trump has accused Meta and Google of censoring searches related to a failed assassination attempt on his life. On Tuesday, Trump called on his supporters to “go after” the two tech giants for allegedly suppressing information about the incident.
Trump’s allegations stem from several incidents. Meta’s AI software reportedly labeled the assassination attempt as “fictional.” Additionally, Facebook, which is owned by Meta, banned a photo of Trump raising his fist after the shooting. Meanwhile, Google’s search bar did not show any results related to the event in its dropdown suggestions.
Both companies have denied any bias. They attributed the issues to innocent mistakes when contacted by The Post. However, Trump dismissed these explanations in an all-caps post on his social media platform, Truth Social. He launched Truth Social after being banned from Facebook and Twitter following the January 6 Capitol riots.
“Facebook has just admitted that it wrongly censored the Trump ‘attempted assassination photo,’ and got caught. Same thing for Google,” Trump wrote. “They made it virtually impossible to find pictures or anything about this heinous act. Both are facing BIG BACKLASH OVER CENSORSHIP CLAIMS.”
He continued, “Here we go again, another attempt at RIGGING THE ELECTION!!! GO AFTER META AND GOOGLE. LET THEM KNOW WE ARE ALL WISE TO THEM, WILL BE MUCH TOUGHER THIS TIME. MAGA2024!”
Trump’s comments followed reports from users on X (formerly Twitter) that their Facebook accounts labeled the image of Trump pumping his fist after the July 13 assassination attempt as “altered.” The platform displayed a message indicating that “independent fact-checkers reviewed a similar photo and said it was altered in a way that could mislead people.”
A Facebook spokesperson admitted that incorrect fact checks had been applied to the photo. The incident caused further outrage when Meta’s AI software failed to provide accurate information about the assassination attempt, while queries about Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris yielded results.
On Tuesday, a Meta executive apologized, attributing the faulty AI results to “hallucinations” — a known issue with generative AI systems. Joel Kaplan, Meta’s VP of Global Policy, stated that the problems were being addressed.
Meanwhile, Google users were surprised to find that the search engine’s autocomplete feature did not include references to the July 13 assassination attempt. Instead, it suggested results related to the attempted assassination of former President Reagan. A Google spokesperson explained that there was no “manual action” taken on the predictions, and that their systems have “protections” against autocomplete predictions associated with political violence.