Donald Trump has blasted Google and Meta for allegedly censoring searches related to the assassination attempt he survived at his Pennsylvania rally. In a social media post, the former president urged supporters to “go after” the companies.
“Facebook has just admitted that it wrongly censored the Trump “attempted assassination photo,” and got caught,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “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. 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!” he added.
In strange incidents, Meta’s AI software reportedly called the assassination attempt “fictional,” and Meta-owned Facebook banned the iconic photo of Trump raising his fist after surviving the attack. Further, the Google search bar failed to yield results about the shooting in its dropdown window.
However, both the companies stressed that there was no bias. The issues were just innocent mistakes, they asserted, according to New York Post.
‘We’re working on improvements’
Despite the lack of information on the assassination attempt, Meta’s AI software provided answers to questions about Kamala Harris. A Meta rep later apologised amid the controversy. We know people have been seeing incomplete, inconsistent, or out of date information on this topic,” a Meta rep said in a statement. “We’re implementing a fix to provide more up-to-date responses for inquiries, and it is possible people may continue to see inaccurate responses in the meantime.”
Addressing the Google search bar issue, a company spokesperson said there was no “manual action taken on these predictions,” adding that its systems simply include “protections” against Autocomplete predictions “associated with political violence.” “We’re 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 to. Following this terrible act, people turned to Google to find high quality information — we connected them with helpful results, and will continue to do so,” the spokesperson said.