Facebook has admitted it mistakenly censored the iconic image of former President Donald Trump with a raised fist shortly after the July 13 assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.
A post on Mark Zuckerberg’s social media page by a user with the handle End Wokeness that showed the Republican presidential candidate defiantly pumping his fist in the air as blood streamed down his face was initially flagged as misinformation.
The user was threatened with being deplatformed.
However, on Monday, Dani Lever, a spokesman for the social network’s parent company Meta, admitted the tech giant made a “mistake”.
“Yes, that was a mistake,” Lever wrote on X in response to conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, who had called out Facebook for not allowing users to share the photo.
Yes, that was a mistake. This fact check was initially applied to an edited photo showing Secret Service agents smiling, and in some cases our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo. This has been fixed and we apologize for the error.
— Dani Lever (@Dani_Lever) July 29, 2024
“This fact check was initially applied to a vetted photo showing Secret Service agents smiling, and in some cases our systems mistakenly applied that fact check to the real photo.”
Lever added that “this has been fixed and we apologize for the error”.
Everything we know about the assassination of Trump
- 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks has been identified as the gunman who tried to kill Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
- Crooks was shot dead by Secret Service agents.
- The gunman grazed Trump’s ear, killed a 50-year-old retired fire chief and wounded two other rally attendees.
- Investigators detailed Crooks’ search history to lawmakers, revealing that he requested the dates of Trump appearances and the Democratic National Convention.
- Crooks’ search history also revealed a broad interest in high-profile people and celebrities, regardless of their political affiliation, FBI officials said.
- Trump exclusively recounted surviving the “surreal” assassination attempt with The Post at the rally, saying, “I’m supposed to be dead.”
- High-profile politicians, including President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, addressed the nation about the shooting, calling it “a despicable, horrific and cowardly act.”
Meta’s spokesperson’s clarification did not go down well with X users, with one commenting: “It’s funny how ‘errors’ only go one way. Just a coincidence, I guess.”
Another X user wrote: “Nobody trusts you.”
“No, I don’t buy it anymore,” said another X user.
Meta has come under fire from Trump supporters after its AI chatbot, Meta AI, referred to the attempted assassination as “fictitious” when prompted to provide details about the tragic event.
X Trump-friendly users posted screenshots of the Meta AI responses that were given in response to the assassination attempt requests.
In one case, the bot got the date of the event wrong. In another, he answered the question correctly, but gave a short answer that, when faced with a warning about Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, made it seem like the tech giant was biased in favor of Democrats.
“We know people have seen incomplete, inconsistent or outdated information on this topic. We are in the process of implementing a fix to provide more up-to-date answers to questions, and it is possible that people may continue to see incorrect answers in the meantime,” a Meta spokesperson told The Post.
Google has also come under fire after users pointed out that its “Autocomplete” feature in its search engine failed to generate results about the Trump assassination attempt when asked to do so.
GOP lawmakers have vowed to investigate Google, which is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.
Donald Trump Jr. attacked Google, accusing him of tipping the scales to favor his father’s opponent, Harris.
Trump Jr. said it was “intentional election interference.”
“Big Tech is trying to meddle in the election again to help Kamala Harris. We all know this is deliberate election interference by Google. Really disgusting”, he wrote in a post on the X social media platform.
A Google spokesperson told The Post that there was no “manual action taken on these predictions” and that its systems include “protections” against Autocomplete predictions “related to political violence.”
“We are working on improvements to ensure our systems are more up-to-date. Of course, Autocomplete is just a tool to help people save time, and they can still search for anything they want. After this horrific act, people turned to Google to find high-quality information – we connected them with useful results and will continue to do so,” the spokesperson said.
Major tech companies banned Trump from appearing on their platforms after the January 6, 2021 riots at the US Capitol.
The bans have since been lifted.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, X (which was known as Twitter at the time) and Facebook both restricted distribution of The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
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Image Source : nypost.com