Out for Blood: Trump Encourages Supporters To “Go After” Meta and Google
After former US President Donald Trump’s failed assassination attempt on July 13, the Republican presidential candidate accused tech giants Google and Meta of censoring searches regarding the incident. Trump told his supporters on social media to “go after” the two companies.
According to the 78-year-old politician, Meta’s AI referred to the assassination attempt as “fictional” while Facebook removed triumphant photos of Trump as he raised his fist following the attempt on his life. Additionally, he mentioned that Google’s search functionality failed to suggest searches about the incident in its dropdown window.
Users on X added fuel to the fire by claiming that the photo where Trump raised his fist after the assassination attempt was “altered.” The caption reads, “Independent fact-checkers reviewed a similar photo and said it was altered in a way that could mislead people.”
The media personality and businessman expressed his ire and urged his supporters to “go after” the two tech corporations. “Facebook has just admitted that it wrongly censored the Trump ‘attempted assassination photo,’ and got caught,” he began.
Trump continued his message, “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.”
The caps-heavy post ended with, “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!”
Google and Meta React
When Meta and Google were questioned by the New York Post, both companies denied the accusation, claiming the omissions were innocent mistakes.
By Tuesday, a spokesperson from Meta issued an apology, claiming the faulty results were due to AI “hallucinations.”
Meta VP for Global Policy Joel Kaplan explained, “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.”
He added that the company is addressing both issues.
Meanwhile, Google informed the news outlet that there had been no “manual action taken on these predictions,” suggesting that they were the result of “protections” against subjects “associated with political violence.”
Google’s representative elaborated, “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.”
