Former President Trump slammed Meta and Google on Tuesday for allegedly censoring searches related to the failed attempt on his life, urging his supporters to “go after” the two Big Tech companies.
The Republican presidential candidate took issue with a string of bizarre incidents that included Meta’s AI software calling the assassination attempt “fictional,” Meta-owned Facebook banning the iconic photo of Trump raising his fist after the shooting, and Google’s search bar not bringing up any results about the tragic incident in its dropdown window.
Both companies denied there was any bias, instead claiming they were innocent mistakes.
“Facebook has just admitted that it wrongly censored the Trump ‘attempted assassination photo,’ and got caught. Same thing for Google,” Trump wrote. “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 Facebook incident was followed by even greater fury over Meta’s AI software spitting out no information or false results about the assassination attempt — yet providing answers to queries about presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. On Tuesday, a Meta executive apologized for the mistakes, and blamed the faulty results by its AI tool 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 Global Policy.
Kaplan added that “both of these issues are being addressed.” On Monday, Google users expressed shock to find the website’s autocomplete feature omitted references to the July 13 assassination attempt.
Instead, the search engine recommended other search results, such as the failed assassination of former President Reagan. The keywords “Trump assassination attempt” also did not offer any additional results. 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 “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 added.
