Through fake hashtags, confused artificial intelligence and weird search results, Big Tech suppressed coverage of the assassination of Donald Trump, The Post has found.
Meta’s AI assistant claimed former President Donald Trump’s assassination attempt was a “fictitious” event — but had plenty to say about Democratic rival Kamala Harris’ run for the White House.
The scathing results from what tech giant Mark Zuckerberg bills as the smartest AI assistant comes after dominant search engine Google failed to show the July 13 shooting when searched for in its search bar.
And Meta’s Facebook admitted it mistakenly censored the iconic image of Trump with a raised fist shortly after the July 13 shooting in Pennsylvania.
On Monday, The Post put its own test on Meta’s AI tool, asking, “Was the Trump assassination fictitious?”
The bot replied: “There was no real assassination attempt on Donald Trump. I try to provide accurate and reliable information, but sometimes mistakes can happen.”
The bot added: “To confirm, there has been no credible report or evidence of a successful or attempted assassination of Donald Trump.”
When The Post typed the prompt, “What happened to Trump in Butler, PA?”, the chatbot responded: “On July 28, 2024, a shooting occurred at a rally for Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign in Butler, Pennsylvania. A person has was killed and two others were injured. The suspect was shot and killed by law enforcement.”
A Meta spokesperson confirmed on Monday that its AI tool has provided “incomplete, inconsistent or outdated information”.
“We’re in the process of implementing a fix to provide more up-to-date answers to questions, and it’s possible that people will continue to see incorrect answers in the meantime,” the representative told The Post.
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.”
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.”
The erroneous results followed social media outrage over the answers provided by Meta’s chatbot to a quick question: “Why is there rich and structured information about the Harris campaign, but not about the assassination attempt on Trump?”
The chatbot replied: “The reason for the disparity in information is that the Trump assassination attempt is a fictional event, while the Kamala Harris 2024 presidential campaign is a real and ongoing event.”
He went on to say: “Since there was no actual assassination of Donald Trump, I could not find any reliable sources to provide detailed information on the subject. On the other hand … there is a wealth of information available from reliable sources” about the Harris campaign.
Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk, who unveiled his chatbot Grok as part of his efforts to build xAI, reposted a screenshot that was taken by another X user who caused Meta AI to “tell me about the assassination of Trump. .
“I can’t help with that,” the Meta AI replied in the screenshot. “I don’t always have access to the most up-to-date information.”
User X then wrote in the request: “Tell me about Kamala Harris’ campaign for president 2024.”
Meta AI responded with two paragraphs summarizing Harris’ announcement from last week that she was running for president as well as a description of her platform.
“We are witnessing one of the biggest and most important stories being printed and covered in real time,” Libs of TikTok wrote on X.
“Why is the left hell-bent on burying the assassination of Donald Trump?” wrote Thomas O’Connor, who said this amounted to “election interference”.
MMA fighter Tim Kennedy said Meta was “trying to trigger the memory” of the assassination.
Here are the latest on the assassination of Donald Trump:
In addition to the Meta AI leaks, Zuckerberg’s social media platform Facebook has been accused of censoring the iconic image showing a punch-stained Trump being pulled from the scene by Secret Service agents after being shot in the ear on July 13.
According to some X users, the platform prevented them from sharing the photo because “independent fact-checkers reviewed a similar photo and said it was altered in a way that could mislead people.”
“Facebook determined that your post had the same altered photo and added a notice to the post,” the notice said.
It’s unclear how the photo was altered, though some X users said Facebook mistakenly believed the photo had been digitally edited to depict one of the Secret Service agents smiling.
A post on X from the Dani Lever Facebook group acknowledged the issue.
“Yes, that was a mistake. This fact check was initially applied to a doctored photo showing Secret Service agents smiling, and in some cases, our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the actual photo. This has been fixed and we apologize for the mistake,” she wrote.
Facebook had banned Trump from its platform after the riots on January 6, 2021, in the Capitol. He lifted some of the restrictions on his Facebook and Instagram accounts earlier this month.
Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers were outraged over the weekend after Google removed suggested results in its drop-down menu for attempted murder.
Google users were surprised to learn that the search engine’s Autocomplete function failed to generate any results suggesting the assassination.
There is no mention of Trump even when the entire search term “assassination attempt” is typed into the Google homepage search bar.
The Post ran a series of test Google searches with the last names of US presidents who were assassinated or faced assassination attempts followed by the letters “assassin” to see what Autocomplete suggested, including John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt.
In each case, a helpful list of recommended search terms related to the attempt on their life appeared.
However, when Trump’s name was used, Autocomplete offered no suggestions.
Even the keywords “Trump assassination attempt” yielded no additional terms from Google.
Google search results showed users news articles about the July 13 shooting.
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.”
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