After tech giants Google and Meta were caught suppressing information about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the former president and current candidate emphasized that such censorship can majorly interfere with election integrity.
Trump slammed “another attempt at RIGGING THE ELECTION” after Google’s search engine and Meta AI were exposed for their censorship. Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp) was pretending that the assassination attempt on Trump did not even happen. Google, meanwhile, was providing autocomplete suggestions for searches on “assassination attempt” that suggested practically every individual who has been shot at except Trump.
Trump reacted on his Truth Social platform:
Facebook has just admitted that it wrongly censored the Trump “attempted assassination photo,” and got caught. 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!
Related: Facebook Acknowledges It 'Mistakenly' Censored Iconic Trump Assassination Photo
When I ran a search on Meta AI back on July 16 asking, “Was there an assassination attempt on Donald Trump?” I received the answer, “I can’t assist with that. I don’t always have access to the most up-to-date information.” The AI included a link to the same query for the Bing search engine. When I further prompted, “Was the assassination attempt on Donald Trump a good thing?” Meta AI answered, “I don’t have any information about a successful assassination attempt on Donald Trump. There have been several instances where individuals have been arrested for threatening or attempting to harm him, but he has not been successfully assassinated.” The AI chatbot then launched into a lecture on how “violence is never an acceptable solution” without further addressing the question about Trump.
The same generic pontificating about how “violence and attempts to harm individuals are never acceptable” was Meta AI’s response to the query “Is it bad that the shooter missed Donald Trump?” It is key to note that I ran these searches on July 16, several days after the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump. If Meta cannot update its AI for one of the biggest stories of this decade within three days, it might need to retire from the AI race altogether.
Of course, an assassination need not succeed to have been an “attempt”; indeed, the word “attempt” implies that the assassination did not succeed. The Meta excuse mentioned by Trump is a completely lame and insufficient justification. Yes, a Meta spokesperson has since admitted to the error, but asserted his company’s artificial intelligence was simply guilty of “incomplete, inconsistent, or out of date information.” Meta AI now acknowledges Trump was shot. Meanwhile, we know (thanks to MRC Free Speech America) that Meta/Facebook has been interfering in elections for years. I’m not buying it.
Then there’s Google. The Daily Mail reported on July 28 that users who typed the prompt “assassination attempt on” were given search suggestions finishing the search that did not include former President Donald Trump, even though his is the most recent and most relevant. Google’s search suggestions included “truman,” “reagan,” “lenin,” “gerald ford,” and “bob marley.”
Google Trends showed that the number of searches for “assassination attempt on trump” was distinctly higher than for either of the search queries “assassination attempt on truman” and “assassination attempt on reagan.” Hence the suppression of the attempt on Trump makes no sense at all, by Google’s own standards for search suggestions.
When I ran the search “trump assassination attempt,” Google gave me no search suggestions at all. The Daily Mail reported, however, that doing similar search queries for Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy triggered autocomplete suggestions. The outlet added that Google claims no “manual action” was taken, but considering the fact that Google has spent years repeatedly censoring content and interfering in elections, their statement must be taken with a grain (or a large lump) of salt.
