This might be one of the more egregious recent examples of a deliberate effort by a social media site to put its thumb on the political scale favoring Democrats over Republicans. Facebook is admitting that labeling the iconic photo of a blood-streaked Trump raising his fist in defiance after the attempt on his life as "misinformation" as "an error."
“Yes, this was an error,” Dani Lever of Meta wrote on X. Her post was in response to Charlie Kirk's observation that Facebook was not allowing users to share the photo, the New York Post reported.
“This fact check was initially applied to a doctored photo showing the secret service agents smiling, and in some cases our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo. This has been fixed and we apologize for the mistake.”
Yes, this was an error. This fact check was initially applied to a doctored photo showing the secret service agents smiling, and in some cases our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo. This has been fixed and we apologize for the mistake.
— Dani Lever (@Dani_Lever) July 29, 2024
A Facebook user with the handle "End Wokeness" that showed the Republican presidential candidate defiantly pumping his fist in the air while blood streams down his face had initially been flagged as "misinformation."
It's not the first time Trump has been dissed by Facebook.
Meta has come under fire from Trump supporters after its AI chatbot, Meta AI, referred to the attempted assassination as “fictional” when prompted to provide details about the tragic event.
X users sympathetic to Trump posted screenshots of Meta AI answers that were given in response to prompts about the attempted assassination.
In one instance, the bot got the date of the event wrong. In another, it answered the question correctly, but gave a terse reply that, when juxtaposed with a prompt about Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, made it seem as if the tech giant was biased in favor of Democrats.
“We know people have been seeing incomplete, inconsistent, or out of date information on this topic. We’re in the process of 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,” a Meta spokesperson told The Post.
Related: Judge Dumps Suit by Former 'Disinformation Czar,' Says She Really Was a Government Censor
Meanwhile, Google is in hot water after some users noted the "autocomplete" function in its searches curiously doesn't generate any results for the Trump assassination.
A Google spokesperson told The Post that there was no “manual action taken on these predictions.” The problem is that its systems include “protections” against some 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.
Does anyone else find it curious that almost every time that a social media is caught red-handed with its thumb on the scale favoring Democrats, the response is, "we're working on it"?
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