Former President Donald Trump is criticizing Facebook and Google, alleging that they are restricting content related to his assassination attempt.
“Facebook has just admitted that it wrongly censored the Trump ‘attempted assassination photo,’ and got caught. Same thing for Google,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday. “They made it virtually impossible to find pictures or anything about this heinous act.”
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, clarified on Monday that a fact check was mistakenly applied to a photo of Trump raising his fist in the air after the assassination attempt.
In a post on X, Meta spokesperson Dani Lever offered more explanation for the mistake.
“This was an error,” Lever wrote. “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.”
Google was also accused of censoring Trump, with billionaire Elon Musk posting about the search engine over the weekend, claiming it put a “search ban” on the Republican nominee.
Google has discussed the issue Musk was posting about, saying it was caused by “anomalies” that resulted in its autocomplete not working as intended “for some searches about the names of several past presidents and the current vice president,” CBS News reported.
“Both are facing BIG BACKLASH OVER CENSORSHIP CLAIMS,” Trump wrote. “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.”
Despite Trump’s accusations, Google says that its issues were farther reaching than for just the former president.
As of Tuesday morning, the search engine’s autocomplete for the president’s name appeared to be working as expected.
“We’re looking into these anomalies and working on improvements, which we hope to roll out soon,” Google said in its statement. “Our autocomplete systems are dynamic, so predictions will change based on common and trending queries.”