Trump Attacks Meta, Google Over Alleged Assassination Censorship

Donald Trump attacked Meta and Google on Tuesday, July 30, for allegedly restricting searches connected to the botched assassination attempt, and he asked his fans to “go after” the tech companies.

The Republican presidential candidate criticised a number of incidents, including Meta’s AI software labelling the assassination attempt “fictional,” Meta-owned Facebook banning a photo of Trump raising his fist after the shooting, and Google’s search bar failing to return any results about the incident in its dropdown window.

After being contacted by The Post, both companies denied prejudice and claimed they were harmless mistakes.

However, Trump refused to accept their excuses and addressed it on his own social media platform, Truth Social.

Trump wrote: “Facebook has just admitted that it wrongly censored the Trump ‘attempted assassination photo,” and got caught. Same thing for Google.

“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!”

The outcry comes after X users published accusations that their Facebook profiles classified the photograph of Trump pumping his fist in the air following the July 13 assassination attempt as “altered”.

It was accompanied by the message “Independent fact-checkers reviewed a similar photo and said it was altered in a way that could mislead people.”

A firm spokesperson admitted that faulty fact-checking was used on the photo.

On Tuesday, a Meta executive apologised for the errors and blamed the AI tool’s incorrect results on “hallucinations”.

“These types of responses are referred to as hallucinations, which is an industry-wide issue we see across all generative AI systems, and is an ongoing challenge for how AI handles real-time events going forward,” said Joel Kaplan, VP of Global Policy.

Kaplan added that “both of these issues are being addressed.”

A Gentle Reminder: Every obstacle is a stepping stone, every morning; a chance to go again, and those little steps take you closer to your dream.

Nnamdi Okoli