Topline
The Republican-led House Oversight Committee launched a probe Wednesday into claims that Google and Meta suppressed information about the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump—a day after Democrats called for an investigation into whether GOP-friendly company X is censoring information about Vice President Kamala Harris.
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is rushed offstage by U.S. Secret … [+]
Key Facts
Meta’s bot told some users the July 13 assassination attempt against Trump was fictional, an error the company said was made because the chatbot was initially configured to avoid answering questions about the shooting to avoid disseminating false information.
Meta also said it mistakenly included a fact-check label on some photos of Trump being escorted off stage by Secret Service after he was shot, because its content moderation system confused the genuine images with doctored photos of Trump being taken off stage.
Google also acknowledged that its search bar’s auto-populate function was pre-programmed, prior to the assassination attempt against Trump, to avoid making predictions about political violence after users noticed that Trump’s name was not among those that auto-populated when “assassination attempt” was typed into the search bar.
Comer, in a letter to the companies, requested documents dating back to Jan. 1, 2023, related to the design, implementation and review of Meta’s chatbot and fact-check function and Google’s search engine by a deadline of Aug. 28.
The probe comes a day after some House Democrats urged the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee to open an investigation into X—owned by Trump ally Elon Musk—following reports that its chatbot, Grok, wrongly told users Harris was ineligible to appear on the 2024 presidential ballot.
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What To Watch For
It’s unlikely the Judiciary Committee, led by Trump ally Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, meets Democrats’ demands to probe X.
Chief Critic
Trump accused both Meta and Google of “another attempt at RIGGING THE ELECTION!!!” in a Truth Social post last month, urging his supporters to “GO AFTER META AND GOOGLE. LET THEM KNOW WE ARE ALL WISE TO THEM, WILL BE MUCH TOUGHER THIS TIME.”
Key Background
Social media companies’ attempts to rein in misinformation have led to accusations from Republicans, for years, that the companies are unfairly working on behalf of Democrats to skew political narratives in the party’s favor, though the claims lack solid evidence. Comer, in his letter to Facebook and Meta, pointed to Facebook and Twitter’s decisions to restrict sharing of the infamous 2020 New York Post story about a laptop allegedly owned by Hunter Biden that included information appearing to link President Joe Biden to his son’s business dealings. The companies admitted to erring in limiting the story’s dissemination, but said they did so out of an abundance of caution that the information could be hacked by foreign adversaries or fake, not for political reasons.
Further Reading
Did Facebook And Google Censor Trump’s Assassination Attempt Photo? Here’s What Really Happened. (Forbes)