Facebook ADMITS It Censored Historic Trump Photo After Shooting

Facebook on Monday admitted to investigators that it temporarily shadow-banned the historic photo of former President Donald Trump proudly pumping a bloody fist in the air following the July 13th attempted assassination on his life.

The decision to censor the iconic image, which was originally set to grace the front of Time Magazine’s August edition, was an “error,” according to a company spokesman asked by the New York Post. According to the conservative social media account End Wokeness, a message from the company threatened to suspend another user after sharing the image which was purported to be “misinformation.” Dani Lever, a spokesman for Facebook’s parent company Meta, called that decision a “mistake.”

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“Yes, this was an error,” Lever wrote in response to a message from Charlie Kirk who had also blasted the social media network for disallowing sharing of the photo. “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.” Lever added that “this has been fixed and we apologize for the mistake.”

UPDATE: This has been resolved. A "false positive." https://t.co/JRfmJiiqWx

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) July 29, 2024

Users were up in arms over the apology, responding sarcastically that it must have been a “coincidence” that Facebook was once again censoring conservatives and MAGA faithful. “Nope, not buying it anymore,” one user on X said. “Funny that the ‘errors’ only ever go in one direction. Just coincidence, I guess,” wrote another. The Post also noted that Meta was just coming out of yet another anti-conservative controversy after its new AI chatbot referred to the Trump shooting as “fictional” when being asked to describe the incident.

Ironically, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg previously said in an interview that watching Trump pump his fist in that photo was one of the most “badass” moves he’s ever seen by a politician. Still, the world’s largest social media company is working to aggressively extricate itself from the political scene, prompting users on Instagram to “opt-in” if they would like to receive political content while making it increasingly difficult for political campaigns to run effective advertisements. A series of Wall Street Journal investigations in 2021 found that the company’s algorithms have for years promoted content that generated angry comments and other forms of engagement, generating activity but worsening the overall experience for users.

Earlier this year a federal judge ruled that the Biden administration unlawfully pressured Facebook and other social media companies to censor alternative points of view about the pandemic, suppressing information on alternative therapies to vaccines or questioning the effectiveness of masks in public. In a scathing rebuke, the judge ruled that the White House had overstepped its boundaries and limited the First Amendment freedoms of conservatives. The decision came in response to lawsuits filed by Republican attorneys general who claimed federal officials overstepped their authority by contacting companies like Twitter and Facebook to shut down accounts and chat rooms dedicated to questioning the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines during the height of the pandemic.

However, in June the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that order, siding with the Biden administration that it followed proper procedures in ordering Facebook to limit the spread of posts it deemed harmful to public safety.

“The plaintiffs rely on allegations of past Government censorship as evidence that future censorship is likely,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion, the Daily Caller reported. “But they fail, by and large, to link their past social-media restrictions to the defendants’ communications with the platforms. Thus, the events of the past do little to help any of the plaintiffs establish standing to seek an injunction to prevent future harms.”

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